Are You Serious?
How to Be True and Get Real in the Age of Silly
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
LeeSiegel, author of Falling Upwards, Not RemotelyControlled, and Against the Machine delivers a provocative critique ofmodern lightness and frivolity, and a timely guide to being serious in an unserious age. In the vein of The Culture of Narcissism, Shop Class as Soulcraft, and How Proust Can Change Your Life,Siegel offers a revelatory look at how a serious bearing is vital toaccomplishing any worthwhile goal in an era increasingly defined by a sardonicapproach to life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"We spend our days searching for a way to be serious," writes critic Siegel (Falling Upwards) in this shallow investigation of seriousness from its essential elements ("Attention, Purpose, and Continuity") and Renaissance roots to how it has been overtaken by our culture of surging silliness, frivolity, and the celebrity industry complex. It's a compelling argument, but it suffers from Siegel's own puzzling criteria and questionable quibbles (who would agree with him, for example, that John Updike has "become either a target of ridicule or been forgotten by literary culture altogether"?) and awkward prose . Siegel covers a wide gamut of contemporary culture and politics Gary Hart and George Steiner, Oprah and Irving Kristol, modern portraiture and the Tea Partyers and he is sincere, but his knee-jerk criticisms ("Pixar is to contemporary seriousness what, in the late nineteenth century, Dickens was to literary seriousness") distract and disappoint.
