One of Canada's hippest, smartest cultural critics takes on the West's defining value. We live in a world increasingly dominated by the fake, the prepackaged, the artificial: fast food, scripted reality TV shows, Facebook "friends," and fraudulent memoirs. But people everywhere are demanding the exact opposite, heralding "authenticity" as the cure for isolated individualism and shallow consumerism. Restaurants promote the authenticity of their cuisine, while condo developers promote authentic loft living and book reviewers regularly praise the authenticity of a new writer's voice. International bestselling author Andrew Potter brilliantly unpacks our modern obsession with authenticity. In this perceptive and thought-provoking blend of pop culture, history, and philosophy, he finds that far from serving as a refuge from modern living, the search for authenticity often creates the very problems it's meant to solve.
It was not until Hughes himself emerged from seclusion to denounce Irving that the book was exposed as fraud.
This book looks at authors who posed as people they were not, in order to claim a different ethnic, class, or other identity.
Two newsboys in 1830s New York sell copies of the New York Sun reporting that a powerful telescope has found exotic animals and structures on the moon. Based on a true story.
Although all of the counterfeits and conspiracies featured in this book have been scientifically debunked, some are still widely perceived as truth.
In this wide-ranging and perceptive work of cultural criticism, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter shatter the most important myth that dominates much of radical political, economic, and cultural thinking.
In On Decline, Potter surveys the current problems and likely future of Western civilization (spoiler: it’s not great). Economic stagnation and the slowing of scientific innovation. Falling birth rates and environmental degradation.
... Perfect Image of the Perfect; Life, the Cause of the living; Holy Fount; Sanctity, the Supplier, or Leader, of Sanctif1ca- tion; in whom is manifested God the Father, who is above all and in all, and God the Son, who is through all.
I put on my shoes. Down the highway, over the Harbour Bridge, past Woollomooloo and into Kings Cross. Wah! Very sleazy café. One man sitting at a table. He was bald, completely. Piercing dark eyes. Chin, brow, nose, all huge.
This is frontier forthrightness gone dreamy: reality bites, after all, and faith-based initiatives trump reality-based ones, and becoming disillusioned is a downer.
In the words of Moore (2002: 210), “It is ascribed, not inscribed.” In contrast to these theories, I position myself with Frith (1996) who suggests values in music such as authenticity are not socially agreed upon constructs but ...