Thoreau's Axe

""A fascinating meditation on 'the ""infinite bustle"" of modern life.'""---Robert M. Thorson, Wall Street Journal ""A fascinating new book.""---Craig Fehrman, Boston Globe ""With a colloquial tone, Smith makes a solid case that the contemporary take on distraction. . . is an old one that came about in the 19th century. . . . The result is a rousing academic study on the meanings of mindfulness."" * Publishers Weekly * ""[An] elegant anthology of American anxieties over attention.""---Michael Ledger-Lomas, The Spectator ""Smith’s historicization of what he calls ‘disciplines of attention’ offers a useful check on reactionary nostalgia. Taking the measure of the distractions of the digital present requires caution.""---Len Gutkin, Chronicle Review ""[A] fascinating book. . . . Smith’s analyses are incisive and well researched. . . . Collectively they form an intriguing study of the moral framework around distraction and attention during this period."" * Choice Reviews * ""Thoreau’s Axe [is] a work structured like a book of devotion, offering twenty-eight ‘readings’ that traverse two centuries of discourse on attention, and how various figures, from poets to preachers to reformers, have attempted to inculcate it. . . . [Smith] has the deep and natural orientation of a historian, in his approach to archives and strange and curious corners of nineteenth-century American thought.""---Rachel Kushner, Harper's ""Anxieties over attention and distraction are nothing new but also, and more to the point, [Smith] raises an enduring cultural contradiction: like Thoreau, many of us feel distracted by shifts and accelerations in collective life—by new media, to be sure, but also by capitalism and its myriad crises—and yet, to combat these collective distractions, we turn inward and desperately try to become more disciplined, attentive individuals. . . . Smith is not the first to name this tension, though his ‘genealogy of distraction and the disciplines of attention’ might be the first to unearth its deep cultural roots.""---Chelsea Fitzgerald, Los Angeles Review of Books ""Much of Thoreau’s Axe cuts deeply into American culture, revealing how discipline and punishment, often wielded from above, have defined for us the proper objects of attention: God, country, race, and the capitalist grind. But the blade of Smith’s analysis is subtle, and what I find most remarkable about Thoreau’s Axe is Smith’s comfort with ambiguity, the apparent ease with which he makes space for contradiction, the degree to which his method depends on it.""---Daegan Miller, Yale Review ""Smith’s examples of attention being demanded rather than sought forces the reader to consider more carefully the goal of cultivating attention, and who benefits from such attention.""---Shira Telushkin, Plough Quarterly ""Original and impactful. . . . Smith shows the price we pay for remaining distracted, the challenge of cultivating responsible and impactful disciplines of attention amidst capitalistic structures, and the corresponding need to always remember to look beyond the self.""---Morgan Shipley, Review19 ""Thoughtful and well-written.""---Alan Dent, The Penniless Press ""Smith’s book has the merit of showing a meaningful continuity not only between our time and Thoreau’s, but also between Thoreau and like-minded thinkers of his century.""---Costica Bradatan, Times Literary Supplement