
Attention: A Love Story
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Narrated by:
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Casey Schwartz
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By:
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Casey Schwartz
About this listen
“A rich inquiry into what it means to pay (and maintain) attention in a world increasingly permeated with distraction and interference.” (Publisher’s Weekly)
Combining expert storytelling with genuine self-scrutiny, Casey Schwartz details the decade she spend taking Adderall to help her pay attention (or so she thought) and then considers the role of attention in defining our lives as it has been understood by thinkers such as William James, David Foster Wallace, and Simone Weil. From our craving for distraction to our craving for a cure, from Silicon Valley consultants and psychedelic researchers to the findings of trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté, Schwartz takes us on an eye-opening tour of the modern landscape of attention.
Blending memoir, biography, and original reporting, Schwarz examines her attempts to preserve her authentic life and decide what is most important in it. Attention: A Love Story will resonate with listeners who want to determine their own minds, away from the siren call of their screens.
©2020 Casey Schwartz (P)2020 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Casey Schwartz’s new book, out in April, is helping me reevaluate my relationship with screens at a moment when I’ve never been more dependent on them ... Closing the laptop, putting the phone in the other room, and curling up with this book has been the best part of my day."—Vanity Fair
"Attention: A Love Story had me rapt. Casey Schwartz is a formidable reporter, a rigorous researcher and a true artist of prose. She makes complicated information easily understood and elevates seemingly simple observations to a richer plain of meaning. More than that, though (and this is the toughest job in the business) she is an honest broker when it comes to telling her own story. Unflinching yet never confessional, this book took me to uncomfortable places but always in the most capable hands. It’s the finest of its kind I’ve read in ages."—Meghan Daum, author of The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars
“An extraordinary and moving treatment of that most ineffable of topics: our own attention and how we spend it. Schwartz has successfully mixed her own experiences with Tom Wolfe-like journalism to create an utterly engaging read."—Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants
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Story
Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory - and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.
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She does not disappoint
- By ChiChi's Rule on 06-01-22
By: Isabel Allende
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Honey and Venom
- Confessions of an Urban Beekeeper
- By: Andrew Coté
- Narrated by: Andrew Coté
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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From the humble drone to the fittingly named worker to the queen herself - who is more a slave than a monarch - the hive world, Andrew Coté reveals, is full of strivers and slackers, givers and takers, and even some insect promiscuity (startlingly similar to the prickly human variety). Written with Coté’s trademark humor, acumen, and a healthy dose of charm, Honey and Venom illuminates the obscure culture of New York City “beeks” and the biology of the bees themselves for both casual readers and bee enthusiasts.
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Ego gets in the way
- By Gregory Lehman on 10-12-22
By: Andrew Coté
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All the Lives We Ever Lived
- Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf
- By: Katharine Smyth
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death - a calamity that claimed her favorite person - she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse, Smyth guides us toward a new vision of Woolf’s most demanding and rewarding novel.
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Surprised I Finished This
- By Amazon Customer on 03-25-22
By: Katharine Smyth
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Both/And
- A Life in Many Worlds
- By: Huma Abedin
- Narrated by: Huma Abedin
- Length: 21 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The daughter of Indian and Pakistani intellectuals and advocates, Abedin grew up in the United States and Saudi Arabia and traveled widely. Both/And grapples with family, legacy, identity, faith, marriage, motherhood - and work - with wisdom, sophistication, grace, and clarity.
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Amazing book, absolutely recommended!
- By Prerit Pramod on 11-05-21
By: Huma Abedin
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Projections
- A Story of Human Emotions
- By: Karl Deisseroth
- Narrated by: Karl Deisseroth, Natalie Naudus, Karen Chilton
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Karl Deisseroth has spent his life pursuing truths about the human mind, both as a renowned clinical psychiatrist and as a researcher creating and developing the revolutionary field of optogenetics, which uses light to help decipher the brain’s workings. In Projections, he combines his knowledge of the brain’s inner circuitry with a deep empathy for his patients to examine what mental illness reveals about the human mind and the origin of human feelings - how the broken can illuminate the unbroken.
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Authors, USE BETTER NARRATORS!!
- By aaron on 08-28-21
By: Karl Deisseroth
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An Onion in My Pocket
- My Life with Vegetables
- By: Deborah Madison
- Narrated by: Deborah Madison
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Madison’s “insightful memoir” (The Wall Street Journal) is “a true delight to read as she uncovers her love for all real foods, peeling off layer by layer like an onion, recounting her own personal, culinary, and gardening experiences” (Lidia Bastianich). Thanks to her beloved cookbooks and groundbreaking work as the chef at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, Deborah Madison, though not a vegetarian herself, has long been revered as this country's leading authority on vegetables.
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A little hard to listen to
- By Linda D. Tillman on 04-26-21
By: Deborah Madison
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The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames
- A Memoir
- By: Justine Cowan
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Justine had always been told that her mother came from royal blood. The proof could be found in her mother’s elegance, in the upper-crust London accent she had never shed - and in a cryptic letter hinting at her claim to a country estate. But beneath the polished veneer lay a fearsome, unpredictable temper that drove Justine from home the moment she was old enough to escape. Years later, when her mother sent her an envelope filled with secrets from a past that had never been spoken about, Justine buried it in the back of an old filing cabinet.
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Enlightening
- By May L. on 06-29-22
By: Justine Cowan
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Unsolaced
- Along the Way to All That Is
- By: Gretel Ehrlich
- Narrated by: Gretel Ehrlich
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of the enduring classic The Solace of Open Spaces, here is a wondrous meditation on how water, light, wind, mountain, bird, and horse have shaped her life and her understanding of a world besieged by a climate crisis. Amid species extinctions and disintegrating ice sheets, this stunning collection of memories, observations, and narratives is acute and lyrical, Whitmanesque in breadth, and as elegant as a Japanese teahouse.
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A journey worth taking
- By Jay on 10-30-23
By: Gretel Ehrlich
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Islands of Abandonment
- Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape
- By: Cal Flyn
- Narrated by: Cal Flyn
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Some of the only truly feral cattle in the world wander a long-abandoned island off the northernmost tip of Scotland. A variety of wildlife not seen in many lifetimes has rebounded on the irradiated grounds of Chernobyl. A lush forest supports thousands of species that are extinct or endangered everywhere else on earth in the Korean peninsula's narrow DMZ.
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Stunningly necessary
- By Mattia on 09-02-21
By: Cal Flyn
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A Beginner's Guide to America
- For the Immigrant and the Curious
- By: Roya Hakakian
- Narrated by: Roya Hakakian
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Into the maelstrom of unprecedented contemporary debates about immigrants in the United States, this perfectly timed book gives us a portrait of what the new immigrant experience in America is really like. Written as a "guide" for the newly arrived, and providing "practical information and advice", Roya Hakakian, an immigrant herself, reveals what those who settle here love about the country, what they miss about their homes, the cruelty of some Americans, and the unceasing generosity of others.
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Un believable book
- By Saleem on 10-09-22
By: Roya Hakakian
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Possessed by Memory
- The Inward Light of Criticism
- By: Harold Bloom
- Narrated by: Stephen Mendel
- Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In arguably his most personal and lasting work, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than 80 texts by canonical authors - texts he has had by heart since childhood.
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What an endowment!
- By Norman on 04-03-21
By: Harold Bloom
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The Travelers
- A Novel
- By: Regina Porter
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin, Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet James Samuel Vincent, an affluent Manhattan attorney who shirks his modest Irish-American background but hews to his father’s meandering ways. James muddles through a topsy-turvy relationship with his son, Rufus, which is further complicated when Rufus marries Claudia Christie. Claudia’s mother - Agnes Miller Christie - is a beautiful African-American woman who survives a chance encounter on a Georgia road that propels her into a new life in the Bronx. Soon after, her husband, Eddie Christie, is called to duty on an air craft carrier in Vietnam.
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Each character is quite a character.
- By Anonymous User on 01-01-22
By: Regina Porter
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My Time Will Come
- A Memoir of Crime, Punishment, Hope, and Redemption
- By: Ian Manuel, Bryan Stevenson - foreword
- Narrated by: Ian Manuel
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1991, Ian Manuel, then 14, was sentenced to life without parole for a non-homicide crime. In a botched mugging attempt with some older boys, he shot Debbie Baigrie, a young white mother of two, in the face. But as Bryan Stevenson has insisted, none of us should be judged only by the worst thing we have ever done. Capturing the fullness of his humanity, here is Manuel’s powerful testimony of growing up homeless in Central Park Village in Tampa, Florida - a neighborhood riddled with poverty, gang violence, and drug abuse - and of his efforts to rise above his circumstances.
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How Long Will We Let This Go On!
- By Kindle Customer on 05-06-21
By: Ian Manuel, and others
Honest and informative
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A captivating story of attention
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I was riveted from the first stories of Schwartz being offered Adderall (her love story) and then continuing to abuse it (sometimes taking it 6 or more times a day) to the point that she was having hospital visits and health repercussions. Her stories about coming off Adderall after being on it for 12 years were very powerful. I started recommending it to everyone that had a connection to ADD or ADHD or Adderall. I thought it held so much promise.
But then it really fizzled. The rest of the book, beyond her personal story is a loose set of stories that I struggled to find connections with her original topic. She writes chapter after chapter about "influential thinkers" including William James, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, David Foster Wallace, Michael Pollock, Simone Wei. She goes to psychedelic conferences and an ayahuasca retreat in South America. For a book "about attention" the book meanders too much. There are too many stories that held only loose connections to attention. Many of the "influential thinkers" she focused on committed suicide. She talks about love as both a distraction from attention and then later as the ultimate "attention". I wish she'd expounded on that a bit more.
She writes with disdain about the evil companies like "Google" that work to win our attention. I'm no more impressed with them as villains than I am with companies whose goal it is to make money. There was some research in the first 3rd about attention, as well as case studies about the efficacy of medications to help with ADD/ ADHD (spoiler alert--the subjects all think that they are much better and clearer, but they cannot perform tasks with more efficiency or speed. Nor do the people around them notice a perceptible difference.)
And lastly, Casey should have gotten a professional narrator. Although her voice has some nice qualities, she takes a downturn at the end of each phrase which felt dragging to me. (less)
I wanted to love this story
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