The Authenticity Hoax
how we get lost finding ourselves
Andrew Potter
‘Read [Potter’s] work and you’ll see: this is an artful, gymnastic mind and he takes on some of our biggest contemporary foibles in a book that manages to be both sweeping and intricate at the same time … Potter weaves elements of history, philosophy and pop culture together in a book that will leave an impression even if it doesn’t necessarily show us the path. Is Andrew Potter one of the great thinkers of our age? He may well be: this is great stuff.’
January Magazine
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, condo developers promote authentic loft living, and book reviewers regularly praise the authenticity of a new writer’s voice.
International best-selling 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.
Reviews
‘If Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like can be considered a precise, if wryly affectionate, observation of bourgeois bohemian taste, then The Authenticity Hoax: How We Got Lost Finding Ourselves is a provocative philosophical analysis of the motivation for and meaning of these lifestyle choices. You may not agree but it might make you think.’
Simon Caterson, Sydney Morning Herald
‘The author writes with authority about the ways in which today’s men and women seek authenticity, or meaning, in their lives … A provocative meditation on the way we live now.’
Kirkus Reviews
» All reviews for this title‘A totally real, genuine, authentic book about why you shouldn’t believe any of those words. And it’s genuinely good.’
Gregg Easterbrook, author of Sonic Boom
