Customer Reviews

In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

Slowing down enough in my life to actually read this book was a challenge.
Well worth it...I will be mindful of a slower pace in all areas of my life from this moment forward, enjoying "moments in time"....which is really all we realistically have!

I had expected to like this book, but in the end I found it too shallow and predictable. It's a decent journalist's effort, nicely written, and he finds some good interview subjects, but the same basic points are stated and re-stated with not much new insight brought to the subject. I began to get a little (dare I say it?!) impatient with it all when I began to see early signs that the author was stretching his material. If you've never read any other critique of the commercialized, industrialized speeded-up economy we live in, then you might find this book enlightening, but if you have read others on this subject, especially with an emphasis on food (which is the heart of the Slow movement), I'd say skip this one.

In Praise Of Slow will encourage you to take a step back and have a look at how you live your life. Are you making time to appreciate everything, or is life just whizzing past you? Slow movements all around the world (some even in your own backyard) are poking their heads out, and people are beginning to take notice.

Not every chapter will apply to you fully, but your eyes will be opened to a different pace of life where slow and steady wins the race.

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.

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!

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.