Download or read book The Real Work On the Mystery of Mastery written by Adam Gopnik and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[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.

Download or read book Paris to the Moon written by Adam Gopnik and published by Random House. This book was released on 2001-12-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafés, breathtaking façades around every corner--in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans. In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of the City of Light. Gopnik is a longtime New Yorker writer, and the magazine has sent its writers to Paris for decades--but his was above all a personal pilgrimage to the place that had for so long been the undisputed capital of everything cultural and beautiful. It was also the opportunity to raise a child who would know what it was to romp in the Luxembourg Gardens, to enjoy a croque monsieur in a Left Bank café--a child (and perhaps a father, too) who would have a grasp of that Parisian sense of style we Americans find so elusive. So, in the grand tradition of the American abroad, Gopnik walked the paths of the Tuileries, enjoyed philosophical discussions at his local bistro, wrote as violet twilight fell on the arrondissements. Of course, as readers of Gopnik's beloved and award-winning "Paris Journals" in The New Yorker know, there was also the matter of raising a child and carrying on with day-to-day, not-so-fabled life. Evenings with French intellectuals preceded middle-of-the-night baby feedings; afternoons were filled with trips to the Musée d'Orsay and pinball games; weekday leftovers were eaten while three-star chefs debated a "culinary crisis." As Gopnik describes in this funny and tender book, the dual processes of navigating a foreign city and becoming a parent are not completely dissimilar journeys--both hold new routines, new languages, a new set of rules by which everyday life is lived. With singular wit and insight, Gopnik weaves the magical with the mundane in a wholly delightful, often hilarious look at what it was to be an American family man in Paris at the end of the twentieth century. "We went to Paris for a sentimental reeducation-I did anyway-even though the sentiments we were instructed in were not the ones we were expecting to learn, which I believe is why they call it an education."

Download or read book A Hazard of New Fortunes written by William Dean Howells and published by Standard Ebooks. This book was released on 2023-03-28T06:39:24Z with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Basil March jumps at the chance to leave his boring job to become the founding editor of a new magazine. But this also means that he must leave comfortable Boston for the confusion and chaos of 1890s New York. As March and his wife try to find a decent place to live, he also struggles to find contributors and readers. The Marches are quickly drawn into the tangled lives of their fellow New Yorkers: a bitter German socialist who lost his hand fighting for the Union in the Civil War, a colonel nostalgic for slavery, Bohemian artists, increasingly desperate workers on strike, a slick publicist, a starchy society family, and a wealthy farmer-turned-speculator who hurts those he loves most. Born in Ohio, William Dean Howells was a highly successful magazine editor before he became a full-time writer. He believed that this midlife novel, which draws on his own family’s experiences moving from Boston to New York, was his “most vital work.” Mark Twain, whom Howells helped early in his career, called A Hazard of New Fortunes “the exactest & truest portrayal of New York and New York life ever written … a great book.” This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Download or read book A Thousand Small Sanities written by Adam Gopnik and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stirring defense of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time from an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author. Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought. A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history -- and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation.

Download or read book At the Strangers Gate written by Adam Gopnik and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From The New York Times best-selling author of Paris to the Moon and beloved New Yorker writer, a memoir that captures the romance of New York City in the 1980s. When Adam Gopnik and his soon-to-be-wife, Martha, first arrived in 1980, New York City was a pilgrimage site for the young, the arty, and the ambitious. But it was also becoming a place where both life’s consolations and its necessities were increasingly going to the highest bidder. At the Strangers’ Gate is a vivid portrait of this time, told through the story of one couple’s journey—from their excited arrival as aspiring artists to their eventual growth into a New York family. Through a series of comic mini-anthropologies that capture the fashion, publishing, and art worlds of the era, Adam Gopnik transports us from his tiny basement room on the Upper East Side to a SoHo loft, from his time as a graduate student-cum-library-clerk to the galleries of MoMA. Filled with tender and humorous reminiscences—including affectionate reflections on Richard Avedon, Robert Hughes, and Jeff Koons, among many others—At the Strangers’ Gate is an ode to New York striving.

Download or read book Angels and Ages written by Adam Gopnik and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-01-27 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this captivating double life, Adam Gopnik searches for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution. Born by cosmic coincidence on the same day in 1809 and separated by an ocean, Lincoln and Darwin coauthored our sense of history and our understanding of man’s place in the world. Here Gopnik reveals these two men as they really were: family men and social climbers, ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers, grieving parents and brilliant scholars. Above all we see them as thinkers and writers, making and witnessing the great changes in thought that mark truly modern times.

Download or read book Mastery written by Robert Greene and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power and The Laws of Human Nature, a vital work revealing that the secret to mastery is already within you. Each one of us has within us the potential to be a Master. Learn the secrets of the field you have chosen, submit to a rigorous apprenticeship, absorb the hidden knowledge possessed by those with years of experience, surge past competitors to surpass them in brilliance, and explode established patterns from within. Study the behaviors of Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Leonardo da Vinci and the nine contemporary Masters interviewed for this book. The bestseller author of The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, and The 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene has spent a lifetime studying the laws of power. Now, he shares the secret path to greatness. With this seminal text as a guide, readers will learn how to unlock the passion within and become masters.

Download or read book Will in the World How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Anniversary Edition written by Stephen Greenblatt and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-05-03 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

Download or read book The Master Mystery written by Arthur Benjamin Reeve and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2015-07-02 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This early work novelized by Arthur Benjamin Reeve and John W. Grey was originally published in 1919 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. In classic adventure style, 'The Master Mystery' introduces the reader to Detective Quentin Locke who investigates a cartel protected by a robot called the Automaton, the members of which use a gaseous weapon called Madagascar madness. Arthur Benjamin Reeve was born on 15th October 1880 in New York, USA. Reeve received his University education at Princeton and upon graduating enrolled at the New York Law School. However, his career was not destined to be in the field of Law. Between 1910 and 1918 he produced 82 short stories for Cosmopolitan. During this period he also began authoring screenplays. By the end of this decade his film career was at its peak with his name appearing on seven films, most of them serials and three of them starring Harry Houdini. In 1932 he moved to Trenton to be near his alma mater. He died on 9th August 1936.

Download or read book The Mastery of Self written by Don Miguel Ruiz, Jr. and published by Red Wheel/Weiser. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient Toltecs believed that life as we perceive it is a dream. We each live in our own personal dream, and all of our dreams come together to make the Dream of the Planet. Problems arise when we forget that the dream is just a dream and fall victim to believing that we have no control over it. "The Mastery of Self" takes the Toltec philosophy of the Dream of the Planet and the personal dream and explains how a person can: Wake upLiberate themselves from illusory beliefs and storiesLive with authenticity Once released, we can live as our true, authentic, loving self, not only in solitude and meditation, but in any place--at the grocery store, stuck in traffic, etc.--and in any situation or scenario that confronts us. The Ruiz family has an enormous following, and this new book from don Miguel, Jr. will be greeted with enthusiasm by fans around the world. This new book from don Miguel, Jr. will be greeted with enthusiasm by fans around the world.

Download or read book Master of Circumstance written by James Morgan and published by Yorkshire Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-11 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving beyond victimhood and into mastery, is the life-changing premise of Master of Circumstance, a timeless rendition on overcoming victimhood and the insidious snares of negative thinking that debilitate millions of people everyday. This book, written by first-time author James Morgan, was born out of his real-life experiences of growing up poor in a steel town in the Midwest. Never having met his father and raised by a struggling single-mother, James became a byproduct of his environment. In this book, he shares the psychological techniques, mindset shifts, and practical tools he used to get his life on track and out of the victim mindset. He shares in a way that anyone can use to take back control and ownership of their life, no matter how disempowering their current or past circumstances may seem. In his authorial debut, James walks the reader through a poignant narrative on how to shatter the illusions of the victim mindset once and for all, and step into their true power as a master of their circumstances. As the name implies, this book is highly transformational and is the result of decades of James's personal trial and error before he found his true calling in life: becoming a family-focused licensed therapist and counselor. Today, James helps families grow stronger by harnessing the power of accountability while finding relief from blame, guilt, and the traumas of their past. His mission is to help people around the world achieve inner mastery over their lives.

Download or read book The Table Comes First written by Adam Gopnik and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transplanted Canadian, New Yorker writer and author of Paris to the Moon, Gopnik is publishing this major new work of narrative non-fiction alongside his 2011 Massey Lecture. An illuminating, beguiling tour of the morals and manners of our present food manias, in search of eating's deeper truths, asking "Where do we go from here?" Never before have so many North Americans cared so much about food. But much of our attention to it tends towards grim calculation (what protein is best? how much?); social preening ("I can always score the last reservation at xxxxx"); or graphic machismo ("watch me eat this now"). Gopnik shows we are not the first food fetishists but we are losing sight of a timeless truth, "the table comes first": what goes on around the table matters as much to life as what we put on the table: families come together (or break apart) over the table, conversations across the simplest or grandest board can change the world, pain and romance unfold around it--all this is more essential to our lives than the provenance of any zucchini or the road it travelled to reach us. Whatever dilemmas we may face as omnivores, how not what we eat ultimately defines our society. Gathering people and places drawn from a quarter century's reporting in North America and France, The Table Comes First marks the beginning a new conversation about the way we eat now.

Download or read book The Mayor of MacDougal Street 2013 Edition written by Dave Van Ronk and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint. Originally published in paperback: 2006.

Download or read book Mastery written by George Leonard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1992-02-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on Zen philosophy and his expertise in the martial art of aikido, bestselling author George Leonard shows how the process of mastery can help us attain a higher level of excellence and a deeper sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in our daily lives. Whether you're seeking to improve your career or your intimate relationships, increase self-esteem or create harmony within yourself, this inspiring prescriptive guide will help you master anything you choose and achieve success in all areas of your life. In Mastery, you'll discover: • The 5 Essential Keys to Mastery • Tools for Mastery • How to Master Your Athletic Potential • The 3 Personality Types That Are Obstacles to Mastery • How to Avoid Pitfalls Along the Path • and more...

Download or read book The Magic of Conflict written by Thomas F. Crum and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This set of simple techniques, including meditation, breathing exercises, openness, and play--Aiki--leads gently to a reordered state of mind. From overcoming apathy to understanding how conflict doesn't have to mean contest, Aiki turns mind-body integration principles into powerful tools.

Download or read book From Mastery to Mystery written by Bryan E. Bannon and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Mastery to Mystery is an original and provocative contribution to the burgeoningfield of ecophenomenology. Informed by current debates in environmental philosophy, Bannon critiques the conception of nature as u200a“substance” that he finds tacitly assumed by the major environmental theorists. Instead, this book reconsiders the basic goals of an environmental ethic by questioning the most basic presupposition that most environmentalists accept: that nature is in need of preservation. Beginning with Bruno Latour’s idea that continuing to speak of nature in the way we popularly conceive of it is ethically and politically disastrous, this book describes a way in which the concept of nature can retain its importance in our discussion of the contemporary state of the environment. Based upon insights from the phenomenological tradition, specifically the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the concept of nature developed in the book preserves the best antihumanistic intuitions of environmentalists without relying on either a reductionistic understanding of nature and the sciences or dualistic metaphysical constructions.

Download or read book Albert Camus written by Olivier Todd and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-09-07 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on personal correspondence, notebooks, and public records never before tapped, as well as interviews with Camus's family, friends, fellow workers, writers, mentors, and lovers, here is the enormously engaging, vibrant, and richly researched biography of the Nobel Prize winning author. Todd shows us a Camus who struggled all his life with irreconcilable conflicts—between his loyalty to family and his passionate nature, between the call to political action and the integrity to his art, between his support of the native Algerians and his identification with the forgotten people, the poor whites. A very private man, Camus could be charming and prickly, sincere and theatrical, genuinely humble, yet full of great ambition. Todd paints a vivid picture of the time and place that shaped Camus—his impoverished childhood in the Algerian city of Belcourt, the sea and the sun and the hot sands that he so loved (he would always feel an exile elsewhere), and the educational system that nurtured him. We see the forces that lured him into communism, and his attraction to the theater and to journalism as outlets for his creativity. The Paris that Camus was inevitably drawn to is one that Todd knows intimately, and he brings alive the war years, the underground activities that Camus was caught up in during the Occupation and the bitter postwar period, as well as the intrigues of the French literati who embraced Camus after his first novel, L'Etranger, was published. Todd is also keenly attuned to the French intellectual climate, and as he takes Camus's measure as a successful novelist, journalist, playwright and director, literary editor, philosopher, he also reveals the temperament in the writer that increasingly isolated him and crippled his reputation in the years before his death and for a long time after. He shows us the solitary man behind the mask—debilitated by continuing bouts of tuberculosis, constantly drawn to irresistible women, and deeply troubled by his political conflicts with the reigning French intellectuals, particularly by the vitriol of his former friend Sartre over the Algerian conflict. Filled with sharp observations and sparkling with telling details, here is a wonderfully human portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning writer, who died at the age of forty-six and who remains one of the most influential literary figures of our time.