Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering-- Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays--some published here for the first time--reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians and Italian divas. Whether writing on Katharine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani, or Zora Neale Hurston, she brings deft care to ...
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Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering-- Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays--some published here for the first time--reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians and Italian divas. Whether writing on Katharine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani, or Zora Neale Hurston, she brings deft care to the art of criticism with a style both sympathetic and insightful. Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent, and funny--a gift to readers and writers both.
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I checked this book out from the library because I enjoy Zadie Smith's writing, even though I'm not usually a fan of nonfiction. I found her insights about various books, movies, and her family thought-provoking and well thought out. Still, it was one sentence in the last essay about David Foster Wallace that made me decide that I had to own this book:
"It was meant for readers of my generation, born under the star of four interlocking revolutions, undreamed of in James's philosophy: the ubiquity of television, the voraciousness of late capitalism, the triumph of therapeutic discourse, and philosophy's demotion into a branch of linguistics."
With this sentence, she captured and wove together into one cohesive thought many of the issues that I've struggled with for decades. Just brilliant.
