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The Amateur book cover
The Amateur
The Pleasures of Doing What You Love
2017
First Published
3.39
Average Rating
240
Number of Pages

A passionate call for independent thinking We have lost our amateur spirit and need to rediscover the radical and liberating pleasure of doing things we love. In The Amateur, thinker Andy Merrifield shows us how the many spheres of our lives—work, knowledge, home, politics—have fallen into the hands of box tickers, bean counters and pedants. In response, he corrals a team of independent thinkers, wayward poets, dabblers and square pegs who challenge accepted wisdom. Such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Said, Guy Debord, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs show us the way. As we will see, the amateur takes risks, thinks the unthinkable, seeks independence—and changes the world. The Amateur is a passionate manifesto for the liberated life, one that questions authority and reclaims the iconoclast as a radical hero of our times.

Avg Rating
3.39
Number of Ratings
212
5 STARS
15%
4 STARS
33%
3 STARS
31%
2 STARS
17%
1 STARS
3%
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