How To Be Idle (Hardcover) ~ Tom Hodgkinson (Author) Cover Art

How To Be Idle (Hardcover)

By: Tom Hodgkinson (Author)

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Review

"[A] treatise on living a life of leisure and should be required reading for the Western world's workaholics--and especially for Americans,

"A great amount of (gasp) work must have gone into researching this paean to the pleasures of doing little....Charming, as all idlers should be."

"The book gives tantalizing anthropological insights into society's views on those lazy habits that the author so enjoys...."

"[A] critique of liberal consumer capitalism."

First line

The idea that idleness is good goes against everything we have ever been taught. Industry, hard work, duty, self-sacrifice, toil: surely these are the virtues that will lead to success in life? Well, no.

Publisher's note

As Oscar Wilde said, doing nothing is hard work. The Protestant work ethic has most of us in its thrall, and the idlers of this world have the odds stacked against them. But here, at last, is a book that can help.

From Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the Idler, comes How To Be Idle, an antidote to the work-obsessed culture which puts so many obstacles between ourselves and our dreams. Hodgkinson presents us with a laid-back argument for a new contract between routine and chaos, an argument for experiencing life to the full and living in the moment. Ranging across a host of issues that may affect the modern idler - sleep, the world of work, pleasure and hedonism, relationships, bohemian living, revolution - he draws on the writings of such well-known apologists for idleness as Dr Johnson, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson and Nietzsche. His message is clear: take control of your life and reclaim your right to be idle.

Annotation

There are few literary pleasures that can top sitting idly in a comfortable chair reading HOW TO BE IDLE. With chapter titles like "Sleeping In," "The Hangover," "The Idle Home," "Sex and Idleness," and "Sleep," Tom Hodgkinson writes eloquently in defense of idleness, which he sees not as a vice but as a much-needed antidote to the addiction to work that, he claims, plagues Western cultures. In his supremely English way, Hodgkinson argues for the joy of doing nothing, and marshals other writers in his noble cause, among them Oscar Wilde and Samuel Johnson. Complete with line drawings of people in various stages of idleness, HOW TO BE IDLE can be a valuable tool for the overworked, overscheduled, and overstressed.

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