Product Description

"Getting real" is the next big thing in Western living - the determined rejection of the fake, the virtual, the spun and the mass-produced, in the search for authenticity. There's a revolution going on and (however unconsciously) we're all already part of it. Welcome to the New Realism. The charms of the global and virtual future we were all brought up to expect, where meals would be eaten in the form of pills and machines would do all our work, have worn rather thin. It's not that we don't want all the advantages of progress - we do - we just want a future that manages to be local and real too. Tracking the struggle for reality from Japanese theme parks to mock-Tudor villas and from Byron to Big Brother, this book explains where our reactions against spin and fakeness come from - and where they are going. The current revival of real food, real business, real culture flies in the face of expert opinion from politicians, economists, advertisers and big business - and they're having to run to keep up as our hype attention-span gets ever shorter. David Boyle's search yokes a series of opposites - computer games and communities, Elizabeth David and Peter Pan, organic chocolate and virtual reality, hip-hop and spin-doctors, a total eclipse of the sun and Neil Armstrong, Milli Vanilli and downsizing - and makes us see them afresh. Asking whether coolness is dead, how real reality is and whether realpolitik can ever change into real politics, he puts authenticity firmly on the map, lifting the lid on all the other symptoms of this powerful new phenomenon - revealing the unexpected force that looks set to change all our lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #238175 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
Praise for The Tyranny of Numbers 'A great antidote to cynicism and sharply witty reminder of what is important in life.' Independent

About the Author
David Boyle is the author of Funny Money and The Tyranny of Numbers. Editor of New Economics since 1988, he has also edited a range of other publications. David Boyle is a Fellow of the RSA and a well-known figure in organisations such as the New Economics Foundation. He has been a Winston Churchill Fellow and is a regular broadcaster on the future of money, cities, economics and now -- reality.

Customer Reviews

genuinely good read
I strongly recommend this if you're dubious about fake food, culture and politics. You'll feel as though you've been on a real whirlwind tour around consumer-mad Britain, France, the USA and Japan, accompanied by an astute and irreverent guide. The author is definely on to something with the New Realists, but doesn't preach. If David Boyle didn't exist, we'd have to invent him. Excellent.

Getting real
You know something authentic is important when multinational corporations spend millions trying to fake it. That's the insight of this book. It shows in case after case how big business is playing catch-up with people's desire for a real connection with the world around them - but never quite 'gets it.'

The reason, it seems, is that the failed markets presided over by our age's corporate leviathans are culturally innoculated by their own business models from the real world. Their executives float above us in glass-walled office suites, business class flights and five star hotels and make decisions that roll out goods and services identically around the world, virtually regardless of local place and context. Meanwhile, the modern backlash, the quest for the real and authentic, is being met by individual artists, entrepeneurs and community activists who've never been inside a boardroom.

What makes the book so enjoyable is that Boyle is a great story teller. And, like the best, he loves his characters and empathises with their world. What also comes through is that the author is not just an observer. His insights come from someone who also actually 'does things' at the local level.

Reading authenticity is like being released into fresh air from a room where you have been suffocated by commercial fakery, lies and corporate desperation - a place where men in suits pursuade you of your own inadequacy, and then promptly sell you an answer to it.

So, feel the breeze, buy the book.

Deadeningly Earnest
With all the humourless self-satisfaction of the eternally right, David Boyle launches into a confused yarn about authenticity, and the tone remains self-satisfied, rather than satisfying throughout this earnest and meandering work.
This is not a dreadful book, in fact it has a number of useful and interesting examples in it. But it is a very poor take on a fascinating and important phenomenon, and there are too many examples that are asserted rather than argued. The success of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings etc. does not herald an escape into fantasy, apparently, but a reassertion of reality. Why? Because he has a quote to hand that says that storytelling is always about reality, that's why.
If you're happy to pick and choose, then you'll find much to use in here. If you want to be involved in an argument that you believe and feel you can add to, I fear you'll find that Boyle's tone and sudden assertions of fact are off-putting and distancing.