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Amazon.co.uk Review
David Boyle may not cite Peter Greenaway's film, but he would surely concur with its title. The premise of his irreverent, witty and passionate treatise is that we've lost sight of the non-quantitative character of life, suffocated by the number-crunchers and their churned-out reams of statistics. At a swift canter, he summarises the major historical human figures in the counting game--Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Edwin Chadwick, Charles Booth, John Maynard Keynes, David Pearce--mostly in terms of their eccentric personalities, which he makes as ironical and twinkly as their pursuits were methodical. Bentham yearned to calculate human happiness yet ended up, stuffed, in a university lobby, while Booth, who collected heroic amounts of information about the London poor, never quite worked out what to do with it. Beyond the cosy gossiping, Boyle has the more serious intention of countering the solemn, pseudo-scientific jargon that he believes is inducing a "pervasive blindness" in our perception of the world, where a commercial value is put on everything, physical or abstract. This undignified shoehorning is causality gone mad, he contends. At the time of Clinton's impeachment, figures were produced to show that 84 percent of those in favour of his trial were consumers of Campbell's Soup, while Burger King customers were largely pro-Clinton.
What does this prove? Whatever you want, as long as you're not taking it seriously. What does need to be taken seriously, Boyle contends, is the growing lack of imagination and, by extension, wisdom, to accept and interpret or reject this sludge of figures. Intended as no more than a polemic, his book exceeds its brief. It entertains as it rails, and is packed with wonderful literary quotations and anecdotes, and regular bizarre measurements (for example, "Gry": a very small archaic English measurement the size of a speck of dirt under a fingernail). Subjective, digressive, unquantifiable and priceless. The one thing to count on is that economists will hate it. --David Vincent --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
‘A great antidote to cynicism, and a sharply witty reminder of what is important in life.’ Independent
‘Wonderfully subversive.’ Guardian.
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Customer Reviews
All those individuals who have ever thought, why am I doing this, or what do they expect, really ought to read this book. In his introduction David Boyle suggests it is a polemic, I would take that further and suggest that he has probably written the book that any despondant or put upon individual with an ounce of humanity in them would wish to have written.
Elegantly and ingeniuosly he charts and notes the nature (often pointless) of man's determination to account for everything and everyone and all their actions, whilst always keeping the reader alert to the perils of this, and how, when we take the time to enjoy the immeasurable pleasures of life, and there are plenty, things seem to work so much better.
I read this book at a particularly pertinent point in time, whilst voicing concerns about some of the measurements being applied in my work, and now I understand so much better why I was having those arguments in the first place.
I would suggest anyone who has concerns about the nature of modern life reads this book at once, you may well find it changes (for the better) your view of how things are and how they could be. I may well buy a copy for my management team!
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