Self-Made
- Author Tara Isabella Burton
- Narrator Patricia Santomasso
- Publisher Hodder & Stoughton
- Run Time 9 hours and 48 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre European history: Renaissance, History, History of ideas, Media studies, Popular culture, Social and cultural history, Society and Social Sciences.
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What to expect
Today's defining celebrities have crafted public personae that walk the tightrope between authenticity and artificiality. Ordinary people now follow suit: lovingly tending our 'personal brands' for economic gain and self-expression alike.
Instagram culture is part of a story that goes back centuries. The vision that we not only can but should 'make' our own selves to shape our own destiny is an inextricable part of the formation of the modern world.
As traditional powers of pre-modernity - church and throne - waned, a new myth took their place: that of the 'self-made man', whose unique powers of personality - or canny self-presentation - give him not just the opportunity, but the obligation, to remake reality in the image of what he wants it to be.
From the Renaissance genius to the Regency dandy, the American prophets of capitalism to the aspirational übermensch of European fascism, Hollywood's Golden Age to today's Silicon Valley, Self-Made takes us on a dazzling tour of modern history's most prominent self-makers, uncovering both self-making's liberatory power, and the dangers this idea can unleash.
'This funny, startling, insightful story of the selfie, from Dürer to the Kardashians, is a must read if you want to understand how we reinvent ourselves every time we reveal ourselves' PETER POMERANTSEV
'Self-Made is both revelatory and a warning about the ways that focus on the self distorts our individual lives and the broader society' FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
(P) 2023 PublicAffairs
Critics Review
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A fun, insightful romp . . . we’re all now self-makers, whether we like it or not – and this witty, sceptical book is the thought-provoking story of how we got here
Guardian -
A fast-moving train of a book . . . Burton is a confident conductor
New York Times -
This funny, startling, insightful story of the selfie, from Dürer to the Kardashians, is a must read if you want to understand how we reinvent ourselves every time we reveal ourselves
Peter Pomerantsev, author of This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality -
Self-Made takes the reader on an incredible journey that begins in the Renaissance and ends with the Kardashians, Donald Trump, and Silicon Valley’s extropians, tracing the peculiarly modern phenomenon of people who make themselves the objects of their life’s work. It is both revelatory and a warning about the ways that focus on the self distorts our individual lives and the broader society
Francis Fukuyama, author of The Origins of Political Order -
Tara Isabella Burton’s thoughtful, beautifully written book charts the engrossing history of the self-made man (and woman) from the geniuses of the Renaissance to present-day reality TV stars. Philosophical, ethical and pragmatic by turns, Burton urgently interrogates the culturally dominant myths of individualism and self-realisation, asking what we lose when we gain what we think we really want: when we make ourselves into gods
Carolyne Larrington, author of The Norse Myths: A Guide to Viking and Scandinavian Gods and Heroes -
Ranging from Aristotle to OnlyFans by way of the Marquis de Sade and Frederick Douglass, Tara Isabella Burton delights, infuriates and instructs while offering some of the sharpest and most insightful social commentary being written today. This is a book you will not forget
Walter Russell Mead, author of The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People
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