Ngày đăng : 05/09/2008

The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity (Sources: Booklist and Kirkus Reviews)


Todd, Richard (author).

Aug. 2008. 256p. Riverhead, hardcover, $24.95 (9781594488511).

In a world of manufactured news and reality TV, Todd’s pursuit of authenticity may be the twenty-first-century equivalent of the search for the Holy Grail. The author tackles a range of topics, from art (Should perfect copies of the Mona Lisa be rendered in the interest of making the masterpiece more accessible?) to travel (Why is Las Vegas’ nonreality nonthreatening, but Disney World gives him the creeps?). A veteran book and magazine editor and frequent contributor to Harper’s and the New York Times Magazine, Todd peppers his prose with references to intellectual movers and shakers, from Friedrich Nietzsche and Frederick Law Olmstead (creator of Central Park) to historian Daniel Boorstin and political and cultural commentator David Brooks. As a result, his work sometimes reads like an academic text. But many of his takes on pop culture, like his musings on our fascination with the famous, are pithy and wise. As unauthentic as an encounter with a celebrity may be, writes Todd, this “retail-able memory . . . enlarges our sense of self.”

— Allison Block

(Source: Booklist)

In his first book, magazine journalist Todd (Creative Writing/Goucher Coll.) investigates what it means to be "real" in a world that feels increasingly fabricated, polished and marketed. Duped into buying an antique New England box that turns out to be an (excellent) fake, the author anchors his essays in the disappointment he felt and his bemused interest in that disappointment. The topic of "authenticity" and why we cherish it is impossibly broad, but Todd acknowledges this fact. In brief, meditative chapters, he is by turns thoughtful, self-mocking, irascible and insightful, all the while steering the reader not toward an answer, but through a series of questions nested like Russian dolls. Why are we offended by painted reproductions of famous paintings but not by posters of them? Why do tourists buy guidebooks promising an authentic-i.e., non-tourist-experience? Where does this pervasive sense of unreality come from, and why do we care about it? Why do we consume so much so feverishly and yet denigrate that which we consume as "only things?" The meandering queries are given form by scenes from the author's life. He draws on his past as a middle-class child in one of the wealthiest suburbs in America, on his failed attempt to create a working farm, on his restoration (or is it reproduction?) of a late-18th-century Cape house, on a trip to Disney World and Epcot, and even on what appears to be a constant, furious, private dialogue with the evening news. An elegant, affectionate and sometimes cranky depiction of a very confused state of affairs.

(Source: Kirkus Reviews)



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