Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians

Description

'Self-Made is a story that helps to explain our world: a world where we believe that we have the power not just to tell our own stories, but to decide what those stories should be.' In the twenty-first century, our defining celebrities have crafted public personae that walk the tightrope between authenticity and artificiality. Ordinary people have followed suit: lovingly tending our 'personal brands'. But today's self-creators are hardly new. Rather, the ruling idea that we not only can - but should - 'make' our own selves, curate our own image and shape our own destiny, is an inextricable part of the post-Enlightenment world: where the power of aristocracy and religion gave way to the triumph of the individual and the myth of the self-made man. From the Renaissance genius to the Regency dandy, the American prophets of capitalism to the European obsession with the superman, the Golden Age of Hollywood to Silicon Valley, Self-Made takes us on a dizzying tour of modern history's most prominent self-makers, demonstrating the idea's liberatory power to set us free from oppressive environments as well as - all too often - its dark side.

Tara Isabella Burton is the author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and the novels The World Cannot Give and Social Creature, which was a book of the year for the New York Times, Vulture, Guardian and more, and is currently in development as a film for Lionsgate. She was the staff religion reporter for Vox.com and now regularly writes on religion, meaning-making, digital self-creation and the internet for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Aeon, Economist's 1843 City Journal, and more. She is currently a Contributing Editor at American Purpose and a columnist at Religion News Service. She has a DPhil from the University of Oxford.

In the spirit of Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland and Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright Sided, Tara Isabella Burton delivers a fascinating intellectual and cultural history of our never-ending quest to reinvent ourselves. She masterfully balances high and low culture, ranging from Renaissance sculptors and Parisian Dandies, to American hucksters and Instagram selfies. Self-Made clears through the fog of our current moment and lets us see the methods behind our collective madness. An essential read for our era of Late-Stage Everything -- Jamie Wheal, author of Recapture the Rapture