I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the arts and artists, because it can do for you what it did for me. It explains why we get the art we get. Deresiewicz’s central question is how to keep body and soul alive while making a living following your creative muse.
Today’s artists are obliged to engage in a seemingly permanent fight for eyes and ears. The available weapons – self-branding, self-promotion, self-marketing, building an audience by being intimate with strangers (by selling your story, your life, and yourself) are not particularly appealing. All are time-consuming, and, believe me, I’ve tried them all.
In this adapt-or-die scenario, every musician is her own record company, every artist her own gallery, every writer her own publishing house. There is no institution to protect her from the market.
This excellent book is a powerful call to arms. Creators can barely survive, and help is needed at the national level. I couldn’t put it down.
Over the last twenty years, art has become more accessible than ever before. A painter can post their latest creation on Instagram and wait as the likes pile up; a budding filmmaker can shoot a clip on their iPhone, then upload it to YouTube for thousands to view. The digital landscape has fundamentally altered what it means to be creative, as well as how consumers interact with artistic production both economically and curatorially.
William Deresiewicz, a leading critic of contemporary culture in America, argues that we are in the midst of an epochal transformation within art. Whereas the nineteenth century…
Why do we think like we
do? I love this book because I had no idea of the extent to which, like it or
not, the Western mind has been shaped by Christianity.
Free will, charity,
social security, the international dating system, morals, gay rights, paganism,
monotheism, faith; attitudes to wealth, privilege, marriage, sin, forgiveness,
justice, and the law; wherever you look, there lies the influence of
Christianity.
We may well be doubtful
now of religion’s claims, but, gorblimey (English cockney corruption of ‘God
blind me’), if Christianity isn’t there in the very DNA of the rational West. The
need for religion may have dissipated over the last few hundred years, but it
has left an indelible footprint.
Tom Holland’s account of how it came to be so
is a masterful, well-supported, and informative re-telling of Christianity’s
enduring influence.
The Sunday Times bestseller, with a new introduction by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
'If great books encourage you to look at the world in an entirely new way, then Dominion is a very great book indeed' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times History Book of the Year 'Terrific: bold, ambitious and passionate' Peter Frankopan
Dominion tells the epic story of how those in the West came to be what they are, and why they think the way they do. Ranging from Moses to Merkel, from Babylon to Beverley Hills, from the emergence of secularism to the abolition of slavery, it explores why, in…
I loved reading this
novel because it describes how people behave under extreme duress.
Set in the
British Royal Navy of Napoleonic times, authenticity drips from every page. The
time-honored ploy is the accidental coming together of a dissimilar pair to
form a heroic but troubled partnership—think Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or
Holmes and Watson.
The book made me not
only glad to be warm and dry, but also it made me wonder how I would have coped
under such harrowing circumstances. It is unputdownable, but more than that, I
learned a lot about myself without knowing it.
This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.
My book describes the twists and turns of a long and fruitful career in the music business. I was at the top of my profession as a drummer for four decades, playing with Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, Earthworks, and many more.
Whether you are a starry-eyed beginner, an inquisitive fan, a seasoned professional on any instrument, or an autobiography nut, I think you’ll be intrigued as I lift the lid on what you thought life in music was like.
Gaps between reality and fantasy are always interesting, but this is written by a realist. I’m often asked what I do. I explain I’m a musician. "Yes, but what do you really do?" retorts the enquirer. Hopefully, my unusual, insightful and often funny music memoir answers that question.
