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"Bauman is geniunely interested in changing attitudes between generations (about parenting, privacy, shopping, risk and the like), and the evolution of mores in fashion, culture, and education, never resorting to the boo–hurrah dichotomies employed by true professionals of this genre. Sympathy for the young is ever–present: there is much about the ambiguous goods of texting, Facebook and the like, and Bauman already saw modern existence as ′a life of continuous emergency′ even before the financial crisis struck. Overall: magnificently untweetable."
Steven Poole, The Guardian
Steven Poole, The Guardian
Product Description
This liquid modern world of ours, like all liquids, cannot stand still and keep its shape for long. Everything keeps changing – the fashions we follow, the events that intermittently catch our attention, the things we dream of and things we fear. And we, the inhabitants of this world in flux, feel the need to adjust to its tempo by being ‘flexible′ and constantly ready to change. We want to know what is going on and what is likely to happen, but what we get is an avalanche of information that threatens to overwhelm us.
How are we to sift the information that really matters from the heaps of useless and irrelevant rubbish? How are we to derive meaningful messages from senseless noise?
We face the daunting task of trying to distinguish the important from the insubstantial, distil the things that matter from false alarms and flashes in the pan.
Nothing escapes scrutiny so stubbornly as the ordinary things of everyday life, hiding in the light of deceptive and misleading familiarity. To turn them into objects of attention and scrutiny, they must first be torn out from that daily routine: the apparently familiar must be made strange. This is precisely what Zygmunt Bauman seeks to do in these 44 letters: each tells a story drawn from ordinary lives, but tells it in order to reveal an extraordinariness that we might otherwise overlook.
Arresting, revealing, disconcerting, these snapshots of life by the most brilliant analyst of our liquid modern world will appeal to a wide readership.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
44 Letters from the Liquid Modern World comprises, as the name would suggest, a series of 'letters' of roughly four pages each, which illuminate many of Zygmunt Bauman's ideas concerning the present age: a world of constant change, inhabited by largely atomized individuals who are afraid to commit to one another. As such, it is a wonderful introduction to his work for anybody approaching it for the first time. Written for a large audience, the book plays to the strengths of an author as comfortable writing about Eastenders as Max Weber. Over a period of two years, Bauman covered a vast range of contemporary issues, from Twitter to swine flu, virtual sex to Obama, and he illustrates how each tells us something about our age of 'liquidity' in his usual accessible style: he is a master of metaphors, and contemporary life is typically illuminated in this way here too.
That is not to say that this is a book you should simply pick up, read a chapter or two, and put down. A much richer reading can be achieved by reading a number of letters in one sitting, enabling the reader to see the themes and metaphors which cross chapters: that of 'diving' or 'surfing' contemporary culture', or of 'collateral damage' - those left behind in 21st century society.
The standard of the letters, though, is mixed: it is hardly a revelation to note that, thanks to mobile technologies, we are now never alone, but other letters - particularly those concerning the pharmaceutical industry - offer some really interesting questions concerning the creation of 'problems' which we never thought existed before.
For the newcomer to Bauman, then, this book makes for fantastic reading. Those familiar will his work may find that the ideas expressed are not new, but the way in which they are articulated increase their understanding in a fascinating way.
That is not to say that this is a book you should simply pick up, read a chapter or two, and put down. A much richer reading can be achieved by reading a number of letters in one sitting, enabling the reader to see the themes and metaphors which cross chapters: that of 'diving' or 'surfing' contemporary culture', or of 'collateral damage' - those left behind in 21st century society.
The standard of the letters, though, is mixed: it is hardly a revelation to note that, thanks to mobile technologies, we are now never alone, but other letters - particularly those concerning the pharmaceutical industry - offer some really interesting questions concerning the creation of 'problems' which we never thought existed before.
For the newcomer to Bauman, then, this book makes for fantastic reading. Those familiar will his work may find that the ideas expressed are not new, but the way in which they are articulated increase their understanding in a fascinating way.
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