The News
A User's Manual
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Architecture of Happiness, a thought-provoking look at the manic and peculiar position that news has achieved in our lives.
What does the news do to our brains, our souls and our views of one another? We spend an inordinate amount of time checking on it. It molds how we view reality, we're increasingly addicted to it on our luminous gadgets, we check it every morning when we wake up and every evening before we sleep-and yet the news has rarely been the focus of an accessible, serious, saleable book-length study. Until now.
Mixing snippets of current news with philosophical reflections, The News will blend the timeless with the contemporary, and bring the wisdom of thousands of years of culture to bear on our contemporary obsessions and neuroses. The News ranges across news categories-from politics to murders, from economics to celebrities, from the weather to paparazzi shows--in search of answers to the questions: "What do we want from this?" and "Is it doing us any good?" After The News, we'll never look at a celebrity story, the report on a tropical storm, or the sex scandal of a politician in quite the same way again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his latest, de Botton places 25 types of news stories under the microscope in an attempt to gain an understanding of how the news affects our everyday lives. Narrator Bell delivers a solid performance, with delivery as professional and direct as that of the most seasoned news broadcaster. Bell's tone is ideally suited to de Botton's writing: matter of fact and heavily critical of the media. Bell's reading informs as much as it entertains, with listeners fully engaged from beginning to end. Studying the stories that dominate the headlines on any given day including political misdoings, questionable deaths, and celebrity gossip de Botton and Bell take listeners on a journey inside a world they think they know and explain why they've got it all wrong. A Pantheon hardcover.
