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The Real Work : On the Mystery of Mastery Hardcover Adam Gopnik
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Condition:
“Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition ”... Read moreAbout condition
Good
A book that has been read, but is in good condition. Minimal damage to the book cover eg. scuff marks, but no holes or tears. If this is a hard cover, the dust jacket may be missing. Binding has minimal wear. The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal. No highlighting of text, no writing in the margins, and no missing pages. See the seller’s listing for full details and description of any imperfections.
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eBay item number:226659002014
Item specifics
- Condition
- Good
- Seller notes
- Special Attributes
- EX-LIBRARY
- Publication Name
- Liveright Publishing Corporation
- ISBN
- 9781324090755
About this product
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Liveright Publishing Corporation
ISBN-10
1324090758
ISBN-13
9781324090755
eBay Product ID (ePID)
20057255694
Product Key Features
Book Title
Real Work : on the Mystery of Mastery
Number of Pages
256 Pages
Language
English
Topic
Creative Ability, General, Literary, Learning Styles, Essays
Publication Year
2023
Genre
Education, Biography & Autobiography, Psychology, Literary Collections
Format
Hardcover
Dimensions
Item Height
0.9 in
Item Weight
17.6 Oz
Item Length
9.3 in
Item Width
6.3 in
Additional Product Features
Intended Audience
Trade
Reviews
Gopnik, a longtime New Yorker critic, isn't the first author to emerge victorious from the American tournament of achievement only to discern its spiritual emptiness. But his contribution to an antidote feels original, and mercifully within reach. We need to refamiliarize ourselves, he thinks, with the profound and enlarging experience of truly mastering things, or at least attempting to do so . . . wise, companionable, and often extremely funny., A masterful speculation on the nature and art of mastery... Gopnik's intelligence gleams on nearly every page... like Malcolm Gladwell, he has a gift for forging connections and making even the seemingly mundane compelling. In top form, Gopnik makes his subject intellectually and viscerally thrilling., A masterful speculation on the nature and art of mastery. Gopnik, a longtime critic for the New Yorker and a librettist, tells us 'the real work' is a term used by magicians to refer to the 'accumulated craft, savvy, and technical mastery that makes a great magic trick great....' To fully appreciate the real work in others means gaining some sense of how it feels for them to do it, so Gopnik apprenticed himself to masters in various fields--magic, drawing, boxing, dance, etc.--to grasp their singular attainments, strategies, and styles.... Gopnik builds his book around Seven Mysteries of Mastery, deciphering these matters with shrewd but self-effacing skill... [his] intelligence gleams on nearly every page.... Like Malcolm Gladwell, he has a gift for forging connections and making even the seemingly mundane compelling. In top form, Gopnik makes his subject intellectually and viscerally thrilling., "A delightful, discursive discussion of what constitutes achievement . . . Gopnik makes a specific distinction "between accomplishment and mere achievement, the assigned work." He sees modern life as a push to rack up achievements, to check a box in order to move to the next box in a stack of boxes. In contrast, accomplishment is a loving, or at least mindful, commitment to doing a thing for its own sake -- or for yours.", Charming . . . some of its pleasures are Gopnik's excursions into professional jargon--he takes his title from magicians' shoptalk--and techniques . . . a collection of axioms defining what we might really mean by 'mastery' begins to crystallize for Gopnik . . . it's lovely to see these rules emerge from a random assortment of disciplines--for instance, in the way the reader gradually discovers a structure of repeated sequences common to jazz, magic and boxing . . . The book's final axiom is its most profound, all the more so for also being unexpected . . . The true mystery of mastery, he speculates, may be found not in a technique that must be learned, but, rather, in the infinitely renewable moment of performance., Perhaps you'll recognize Adam Gopnik from his cameo in Tár; perhaps you've read one of his many articles or books before now. His latest book, The Real Work, explores what it means to be at the top of one's field, and finds Gopnik exploring professions from driving instructor to dancer to see what it means to be great at something. It's a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at what it takes to become skilled at a certain kind of work., Gopnik, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, is at the top of the nonfiction essay game. I suspect that he could write about almost any subject (and he writes about many), and the reader will find value in the pages., [F]ascinating . . . because of the fluidity and incision of his prose, his ranging interest and knowledge, his capacity for deploying profound koans with casual verve . . . one of Gopnik's salutary aims here is to demystify--and democratize--mastery., A masterful speculation on the nature and art of mastery. Gopnik, a longtime critic for the New Yorker and a librettist, tells us 'the real work' is a term used by magicians to refer to the 'accumulated craft, savvy, and technical mastery that makes a great magic trick great....' To fully appreciate the real work in others means gaining some sense of how it feels for them to do it, so Gopnik apprenticed himself to masters in various fields--magic, drawing, boxing, dance, etc.--to grasp their singular attainments, strategies, and styles.... Gopnik builds his book around Seven Mysteries of Mastery, deciphering these matters with shrewd but self-effacing skill... [his] intelligence gleams on nearly every page.... Like Malcolm Gladwell, he has a gift for forging connections and making even the seemingly mundane compelling. In top form, Gopnik makes his subject intellectually and viscerally thrilling.--Kirkus Reviews, starred review, [J]oyous and insightful . . . Through observation and deduction, Gopnik grasps much about the meaning of mastery . . . [Gopnik's] unusual analysis of expertise and accomplishment includes his own charming moments and can-do attitude., Adam Gopnik's captivating book The Real Work honors perseverance . . . While Gopnik admires the masters around him, he makes clear that we need not strive for perfection in all that we do . . . Mastery has its place, but so too does joy., Gopnik is a writer with a keen, warm eye and a generous heart. In The Real Work he draws attention to what he calls the 'asymmetry' of mastery: 'we overrate masters and underrate mastery,' he says . . . Gopnik is such an affable guide, truthful about his own foibles, that the reader is happy to reflect with him . . . Near the end of The Real Work he conquers another terror, a very private one; that he reveals it, and shares his process, his setbacks and triumphs, is extremely moving. The joy of this book is its honesty. 'The real work' is a term magicians use to define who's really got the chops. Gopnik may not be able to handle a deck of cards, but he is a magician, all the same., Like Malcolm Gladwell, Gopnik makes even the seemingly workaday or mundane compelling . . . Gopnik's book is aptly named, being his own exemplary example of the essayist's craft., A tour de force . . . In a similar vein as Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Gopnik's book approaches the art of mastery of singular skills with the diligence of a researcher, the soul of a philosopher, and the heart of the everyday man., Gopnik is consumed by the business of shaping sentences, and in The Real Work his dabbling in new skills, and observing those who've mastered them, unsurprisingly offers a way of reflecting on his own vocation . . . Among the uplifting pleasures of Gopnik's writing is the range and ardour of his enthusiasms. If his only truly fanatical pursuit is making sentences, he seems to intuit that his best ones--his truest--are those that are unselfconsciously committed to their subject, and vitalised by the passionate curiosity that also reins them in., Via memoir, analysis and criticism, [Gopnik] assembles a celebration of the flaws that make us human . . . Gopnik is at his most moving when addressing the limited time we have on Earth; the roughly established number of heartbeats we are given to achieve whatever means most to us. In this context, he writes, mastery may have nothing to do with impressing some great portion of the public; instead, what counts is ourselves and a few people close to us. Mastery, he concludes, is 'emphatically not transcendent.' Instead, in Gopnik's conception it is thoroughly democratic--something we all can achieve, and in many cases already have.
Dewey Edition
23
TitleLeading
The
Dewey Decimal
153.15
Synopsis
"[W]ise, companionable, and often extremely funny." --Oliver Burkeman, The Atlantic Best-selling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik investigates a foundational human question: How do we learn--and master--a new skill?, For decades now, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a more fundamental matter, one he had often meditated on in The New Yorker : How do masters learn their miraculous skill, whether it was drawing a museum-ready nude or baking a perfect sourdough loaf? How could anyone become so good at anything? There seemed to be a fundamental mystery to mastery. Was it possible to unravel it? In The Real Work --the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick--Gopnik becomes a dedicated student of several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing instructor, a driving instructor, and others. Rejecting self-help bromides and bullet points, he nevertheless shows that the top people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods. For one, their mastery is always a process of breaking down and building up--of identifying and perfecting the small constituent parts of a skill and the combining them for an overall effect greater than the sum of those parts. For another, mastery almost always involves intentional imperfection--as in music, where vibrato, a way of not quite landing on the right note, carries maximum expressiveness. Gopnik's simplest and most invigorating lesson, however, is that we are surrounded by mastery. Far from rare, mastery is commonplace, if we only know where to look: from the parent who can whip up a professional strudel to the social worker who--in one of the most personally revealing passages Gopnik has ever written--helps him master his own demons. Spirited and profound, The Real Work will help you understand how mastery can happen in your own life--and, significantly, why each of us relentlessly seeks to better ourselves in the first place., Best-selling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik embarks on a wildly creative inquiry into perhaps the oldest question: How do we learn a new skill?, "[W]ise, companionable, and often extremely funny." --Oliver Burkeman, The Atlantic Best-selling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik investigates a foundational human question: How do we learn--and master--a new skill? For decades now, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a more fundamental matter, one he had often meditated on in The New Yorker : How do masters learn their miraculous skill, whether it was drawing a museum-ready nude or baking a perfect sourdough loaf? How could anyone become so good at anything? There seemed to be a fundamental mystery to mastery. Was it possible to unravel it? In The Real Work --the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick--Gopnik becomes a dedicated student of several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing instructor, a driving instructor, and others. Rejecting self-help bromides and bullet points, he nevertheless shows that the top people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods. For one, their mastery is always a process of breaking down and building up--of identifying and perfecting the small constituent parts of a skill and the combining them for an overall effect greater than the sum of those parts. For another, mastery almost always involves intentional imperfection--as in music, where vibrato, a way of not quite landing on the right note, carries maximum expressiveness. Gopnik's simplest and most invigorating lesson, however, is that we are surrounded by mastery. Far from rare, mastery is commonplace, if we only know where to look: from the parent who can whip up a professional strudel to the social worker who--in one of the most personally revealing passages Gopnik has ever written--helps him master his own demons. Spirited and profound, The Real Work will help you understand how mastery can happen in your own life--and, significantly, why each of us relentlessly seeks to better ourselves in the first place., For decades, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a fundamental matter: How did the people he was writing about learn their outlandish skill, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a sourdough loaf? In The Real Work--his title the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick--Gopnik apprentices himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving instructor (from the DMV), among others, trying his late-middle-age hand at things he assumed were beyond him. He finds that mastering a skill is a process of methodically breaking down and building up, piece by piece--and that true mastery, in any field, requires mastering other people's minds. Exuberant and profound, The Real Work is ultimately about why we relentlessly seek to better ourselves in the first place.
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- o***o (120)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseThe book I ordered was an excellent value and in brand new condition. It was shipped promptly and arrived before the estimated delivery date. Well packaged and in excellent condition just as advertised. Seller also included a series of interesting newspaper clippings that were relevant to the subject of the book. Awesome seller. Great communication. Will definitely do business with them again!The Killer Angels Hardcover Michael Shaara (#226608491994)
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