Customer Reviews

In Praise of Slow

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Carl Honore's "In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed" does pretty much what it says on the tin, discussing how to introduce consideration of the speed in which we do things to most aspects of life. It's an enjoyable read, and while I don't feel I need most of its message -I'm fairly well up on taking things as slowly as they deserve- I got some new ideas. I've played with some of the suggestions, and it's certainly been interesting - my urge to multi-task, for example, which asserts itself constantly irrespective of how inadequate I may be at it, can be quelled enough for me to enjoy just doing one thing. This requires much concentration, but it's nice to find out that I -can- do it if necessary. One of my favourite quotes from the book is Einstein's not Honore's: "Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant."

In Praise of Slow is a book to be savoured and enjoyed at your leisure. If you, like me, tend to do everything much too fast, you will find a welcome antidote within these pages. Before reading it, I had no idea what the Slow Movement was, or what it stood for, and was pleasantly surprised to find an alternative to the modern culture of instant everything. Carl Honoré's style is relaxed and chatty. As a convert from the cult of speed, he builds a good case for taking the right amount of time to do the things that matter.

We chose this book for our book club and it proved to be a great choice. It's very well written, researched and argued. The author sums up the dominant problem of the modern world, that there is too much speed in everything we do, and gives lots of cool examples from around the world of how "slow" is helping people live, work, whatever better. I recognized myself in some of the examples of pointless hurry and laughed out loud a few times. It's just an awesome read and everyone in this insane too-fast culture of ours should pick up a copy. All the members of our group enjoyed the book and we had our best debate in a long time. I already know what some of my faster friends are getting for Christmas.

There were positive reviews of this book in the Globe & Mail and the Toronto Star, but I was still pleasantly surprised at how excellent it is. To sum it up: this is this year's No Logo.

Like Naomi Klein, Carl Honore pulls together a number of apparently disparate but ultimately related themes: Slow Food, Slow Cities, Slow Sex, Slow Leisure etc. and not surprisingly, it is a book which merits a slow read: Honore has important and even quite deep reflections on almost each page of the book! You could read a few pages a day, and add significantly to your quality of life by following his sage advice, which is both rationally presented and which intuitively rings true.

If quality of life is important to you, and you liked No Logo, Fast Food Nation, and Fire and Ice, you will likely appreciate this wonderful book. A gem, one of the best non-fiction books of 2004.

A good book thoroughly researched. And God knows how much we need to realize that today speed has become a cult. But this book appears to give as an alternative a cult of slow. Slow life becomes synonym of slow food vs. the despised fast-food, old European cities with cute baker shops vs. supermarkets, leisure time filled with yoga and knitting vs. television watching... Slowing down should be a personal and private choice, not a new trend to display!

If you read newspapers, you know the filler stories where they pick up on a current trend and write nice fluffy stories about how it's affecting people's lives. This book is 320 pages of those kinds of stories. I have considerable sympathy with the goals of the slow movement, but this book offers little in the way of the philosophical underpinnings of the movement or suggestions of ways of slowing your life down.

It's a collection of interesting stories and examples, but like eating chocolates, while it's enjoyable, it doesn't have much nutrition.

This is fashionable psychology = a bit repetitive and over stated . He could have said it all in a paragraph and we do not need endless descriptions of his boring family life.

This is an entertaining read, with Honoré trying to persuade his readers that there's still time - indeed, benefit - in slowing down our hectic lives. It's thought provoking, but more in the "Hmmm ..." vein than the "Aha!" style.

This is not a book with a solid foundation of research to support it. But it has enough stories, examples, anecdotes and historical references to make it easy to read.

I bought this book because it was an internatinal bestseller and because reviewers claimed it was the next No Logo, a booked that I really enjoyd. In Praise of Slow, however, doesn't live up to the hype.

Honore tries to hype of a movement that really doesn't exist. He gives several examples of the "new movement" of Slow, but he gives many, many more of how the world is living too fast paced.

The author borrows so much from the writing style of Naomi Klein that one begins to realise he has no original style of his own.

Finally, and most importantly, I had hoped the book would talk about the emotional and spiritual effects of slowness. However, Honore flatly rejects "spiritualism" in the first chapter as touchy feely nonsense. So there is really no step-by-step instruction on how to live slowly.