As someone who often watches movies passively, it was a splash of cold water to watch Puschak deconstruct a good film and then build it up again to something truly meaningful. I’m just as self-conscious now as then, but Emerson gave me the nerve to overrule that annoying impulse.

Instead, I tried to understand what was the underlying themes behind these topic choices that range from Super Man, to Lord of the Rings, to Jerry Seinfeld and the merits of having friend. But I've done this before and it's both unproductive and juvenile, like an intellectual dick length context. In his first essay, he speaks to the profound feeling of reading a book from an author who’s curious or interested in the very same things we are. Intuition often fails us, especially when coupled with ignorance, or when we take our experience to be representative of all experience.Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” ( Dallas Morning News). So it is with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls from me and leaves no scar. Over the years, he has learned that being an artist isn’t about your specific output, it’s about your relationship to the world. What we should really worry about is becoming part of that multitude, of choosing compliance over intuition, of imitating. We learn exactly what our world wants from us, so we can appease it and get back to the stuff we really want to do, like Super Mario Bros.

It’s his insatiable curiosity, his willingness to drill down into every single minute detail of his subject. The repetitious paragraph-style quotes severly break the flow of an otherwise interesting argument in nearly every chapter. Caring about something so deeply felt rebellious, and that’s the place where Emerson gave me permission to care.

All great leaders of history have known this, and were successful because of the risks they dared to take. A brilliant, wide-ranging essay collection that explores meaning and how we make it with the thoughtfulness and open-hearted generosity that have long been hallmarks of Puschak's writing. If there’s a vein of sorrow in “Experience,” that’s because Emerson wrote it shortly after the death of his five-year-old son, Waldo, who succumbed to scarlet fever in 1842. I enjoyed it - I found some of the essays more interesting than others, but overall it was a decent listen and having the author narrate the book himself was a great decision and a major selling point I'd say. From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.

Perfect for fans of Trick Mirror and the writing of John Hodgman and Chuck Klosterman, Escape into Meaning is "a passionate, perceptive" (Hua Hsu, author of Stay True ) compendium of fascinating insights into obsession. In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist. Emerson doesn’t discourage the reading of past masters, but he does warn against taking what we read—even from the most respected, even from him —on faith. The pen (or the word processor) lets the mind compose language into knowledge that’s far more sophisticated than what that little boozer can do on his own. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.I'm also not really convinced Seinfeld's observations were all that universal so much as that the people they weren't universal to didn't really get to say much about it. Otherwise, it will gradually get pulled into the quicksand of my consciousness, forgotten or folded into a mix of ill-considered motivations. Books and the institutions that teach them are indispensable tools, but they serve us best “when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Puschak selflessly shares some of his sharpest insight not only about the culture that shaped him, but also how he sees the world.

Evan Puschak in his first published book, an essay collection, brings something deeply relatable to this art form. This this an insightful, witty and highly engaging book that delivers both a strong content charged with deep, provocative thoughts and a lighthearted and entertaining narrative that keeps you in the flow.

Connecting with other people, but most importantly to yourself through cinema, literature, comedy, etc. I did the least amount of work necessary to cross the checkpoints and not be a disappointment to my family. It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the book, and procured the remaining volumes. Puschak shrewdly uses it as a counterpoint to his other essay The Comforts of Cyberpunk, which is about letting go of these feeling of powerlessness about the state of the world and embracing the comforting idea that you only have to take care of yourself in a world that is wildly out of control. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.