Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love

A passionate call for independent thinking We have lost our amateur spirit and need to rediscover the radical and liberating pleasure of doing things we love. In 'The Amateur', thinker Andy Merrifield shows us how the many spheres of our lives - work, knowledge, home, politics - have fallen into the hands of box tickers, bean counters and pedants. In response, he corrals a team of independent thinkers, wayward poets, dabblers and square pegs who challenge accepted wisdom. Such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Said, Guy Debord, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs show us the way.