Self-Made

“Ranging from Aristotle to OnlyFans by way of the Marquis de Sade and Frederick Douglass, Tara Isabella Burton delights, infuriates, and instructs while offering some of the sharpest and most insightful social commentary being written today. This is a book you will not forget.”

“Ms. Burton is right and brave to surmise that hollow self-making offers the wrong kind of answers to the modern bourgeois or digital peasant who wants to live a happy or meaningful life.”

“Self-Made takes the reader on an incredible journey that begins in the Renaissance and ends with the Kardashians, Donald Trump, and Silicon Valley’s extropians, tracing the peculiarly modern phenomenon of people who make themselves the objects of their life’s work. It is both revelatory and a warning about the ways that focus on the self distorts our individual lives and the broader society.”

“This funny, startling, insightful story of the selfie, from Dürer to the Kardashians, is a must-read if you want to understand how we reinvent ourselves every time we reveal ourselves.”

“Looking around at the strange terrain of what’s now American politics, religion, culture, and media, almost everyone is asking, ‘What happened?’ and ‘What's next?’ This book tells us the story behind those questions. Those who wonder why almost every aspect of life seems to be, at best, a reality television series and, at worst, a dark science-fiction drama will need this important work. This book will shift the conversation at perhaps just the right time.”

“Burton is that rare cultural critic who delivers insight with sass and wears her deep knowledge of history and philosophy with a lightness and grace. A dazzling cast of characters struts across these pages, but Burton is always fully in control; every case study and example accretes to build her argument, for we are not merely self-stylists but shapeshifters, not just makers, but gods.”

“Burton’s thoughtful, beautifully written book charts the engrossing history of the self-made man (and woman) from the genius’s Renaissance to present-day reality TV stars. Philosophical, ethical, and pragmatic by turns, Burton urgently interrogates the culturally dominant myths of individualism and self-realization, asking what we lose when we gain what we think we really want: when we make ourselves into gods.” 

“In the spirit of Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright Sided, 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.”

“A wide-ranging study of self-creation… [Isabella-Burton] concludes that our search for self-definition is ultimately a search for what it means to be human: vulnerable and inextricably interconnected. A thoughtful, well-grounded cultural history.” 

“With clarity and authority, Burton sheds light on how the self-made indulge in the profitable ‘fantasy of selling yourself’ and provide an escape from reality for their followers. It’s an eye-opener.”

“It’s an important book, and Burton is one the most theologically attuned social critics writing today.”

“[Burton] interrogates how cultural icons invent themselves as aspirational figures and what their tactics reveal about changing social mores. She is able to fit a variety of movements into her analysis: nineteenth-century dandyism, social Darwinism, self-help in all its iterations… entertaining.”

“A fast-moving train of a book…Burton is a confident conductor.” 

“A fun, insightful romp through an identity parade of geniuses, dandies, charlatans, moguls and film stars. It’s a journey that culminates in the billions of us with smartphone cameras and social media accounts… we’re all now self-makers, whether we like it or not – and this witty, skeptical book is the thought-provoking story of how we got here.”

"Burton writes with verve."

“Keenly conscious of both the burdens and blessings of self-invention, Burton refuses to give readers the comfort of either progressive triumphalism or traditionalist despondency. Self-invention is a dangerous game, which can easily go awry. But whether it is appealing or appalling, it is our legacy as moderns, which none of us can entirely escape. It’s hard to say who needs to hear this message more: the starry-eyed, would-be ‘influencers’ of Generation Z, or the disgruntled elders who scorn them.”

“Burton’s timely cultural history shows what is at stake in our attempts to reinvent ourselves…Throughout her gripping account Burton homes in on the tensions at the heart of all self-making acts: between authenticity and artificiality, and between the self that is given and the self that is desired.”