Rob Walker

From ‘unitasking’ to the ‘mindful shower,’ The Art of Noticing is filled with clever, eminently deployable strategies for getting more from the world around you. It’s a paean to alertness, a sensory upgrade, a delightful field guide to being alive.

The book suggests the solution to digital overload involves conscious engagement rather than self-denial; you can keep your smartphone, so long as you remember to look around every so often, too.

These simple, low-stakes activities can open up the world.

The Art of Noticing is a book about reading, verbal and non-verbal reading, which is how we increasingly read now, and how we have always read. Walker encourages us to make a non-literal reading of our world, which can mean non-judgmental and more enlightened.

Rob Walker’s writing has always been wonderful because of his unique eye for noticing what other people miss. With this new book, he’s basically teaching you all his secrets for seeing.

If you want a more interesting and creative life, the first thing to do is to start paying better attention to it. In The Art of Noticing, Rob Walker provides an essential guide to becoming an explorer of your everyday world. I found a ton to steal here and so will you.

In the tradition of John Berger, Susan Sontag, and George Nelson, Rob Walker offers a guide not to looking but to seeing—and why the difference is crucial. At once passionate and charming, he makes the case that noticing what’s there is the first step in creating what’s new.

A fresh and fascinating exploration of the places where material culture and identity intersect.

A compelling blend of cultural anthropology and business journalism.

Few observers have plumbed the subterranean poetry of marketing as thoroughly as Walker.

Superbly readable . . . a thoughtful and unhurried investigation into consumerism . . . marked by meticulous research and careful conclusions.

Witty . . . Walker unravels what he calls the Desire Code, that tension between wanting to fit in and wanting to stand out, wanting to be unique and yet somehow attached to something greater than ourselves.

Provocative . . . richly reported.

Fascinating.

Terrific.

...Walker's refusal to pronounce is generally as endearing, honest, funny and moving as the stories themselves - a clearer lens, perhaps, than any earnest literary compilation by eminent New Orleanians (proceeds to Katrina victims) that's surely about to appear. (Walker has pledged all his proceeds to relief efforts, too.)...Anyway, you won't need a memorial volume, because these stories now function as 21 silent little jazz funerals: exuberant, celebratory and tragic.

In Letters from New Orleans, Walker contemplates, almost wistfully, various notions of denial and self-invention and loss -- those masks that symbolize the city aren't lost on him. And his pointed, witty insights about the city won't be lost on readers.

This is not a travel book per se, but rather an outsider's account of America's strangest town. But since it is about New Orleans, it can't help but be a captivating tale.

The quality that makes Walker's 'modest series of stories about a place that means a lot to [him]' rewarding reading is his immersion in the local.