MAY 2023 - AudioFile
Adam Gopnik's voice has entertaining tonal variety and natural enthusiasm--just what this somewhat esoteric book needs to hold listeners' attention as he unfolds his discoveries about how we learn various occupations from others. For years he's been a worldly critic for THE NEW YORKER, bringing fresh perspectives to art, food, culture, and anything else that captures his attention. In this audiobook, he studies how people in diverse occupations pass on their knowledge to others. He often gains insights by becoming a student himself, learning from such professionals as a boxer, a dancer, a magician, and a driving instructor. He organizes his insights into seven "mysteries of mastery" and describes his experiences and conclusions with lively writing. He says mastery is less about "how to" than it is about absorbing the attitudes, culture, and identity of masters in any field. T.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Inside Higher Ed - Joshua Kim
"Gopnik, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, is at the top of the nonfiction essay game. I suspect that he could write about almost any subject (and he writes about many), and the reader will find value in the pages."
Washington Independent Review of Books - Jennifer Bort Yacovissi
"A delightful, discursive discussion of what constitutes achievement . . . Gopnik makes a specific distinction “between accomplishment and mere achievement, the assigned work.” He sees modern life as a push to rack up achievements, to check a box in order to move to the next box in a stack of boxes. In contrast, accomplishment is a loving, or at least mindful, commitment to doing a thing for its own sake — or for yours."
Tom Vanderbilt
"[F]ascinating . . . because of the fluidity and incision of his prose, his ranging interest and knowledge, his capacity for deploying profound koans with casual verve . . . one of Gopnik’s salutary aims here is to demystify—and democratize—mastery."
The Guardian - Matthew Cantor
"Via memoir, analysis and criticism, [Gopnik] assembles a celebration of the flaws that make us human . . . Gopnik is at his most moving when addressing the limited time we have on Earth; the roughly established number of heartbeats we are given to achieve whatever means most to us. In this context, he writes, mastery may have nothing to do with impressing some great portion of the public; instead, what counts is ourselves and a few people close to us. Mastery, he concludes, is ‘emphatically not transcendent.’ Instead, in Gopnik’s conception it is thoroughly democratic—something we all can achieve, and in many cases already have."
Post and Courier - Bill Thompson
"Like Malcolm Gladwell, Gopnik makes even the seemingly workaday or mundane compelling . . . Gopnik’s book is aptly named, being his own exemplary example of the essayist’s craft."
The Atlantic - Oliver Burkeman
"Gopnik, a longtime New Yorker critic, isn’t the first author to emerge victorious from the American tournament of achievement only to discern its spiritual emptiness. But his contribution to an antidote feels original, and mercifully within reach. We need to refamiliarize ourselves, he thinks, with the profound and enlarging experience of truly mastering things, or at least attempting to do so . . . wise, companionable, and often extremely funny."
Adam Thirlwell
"Charming . . . some of its pleasures are Gopnik’s excursions into professional jargon—he takes his title from magicians’ shoptalk—and techniques . . . a collection of axioms defining what we might really mean by ‘mastery’ begins to crystallize for Gopnik . . . it’s lovely to see these rules emerge from a random assortment of disciplines—for instance, in the way the reader gradually discovers a structure of repeated sequences common to jazz, magic and boxing . . . The book’s final axiom is its most profound, all the more so for also being unexpected . . . The true mystery of mastery, he speculates, may be found not in a technique that must be learned, but, rather, in the infinitely renewable moment of performance."
Portland Book Review - Shannon Carriger
"A tour de force . . . In a similar vein as Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Gopnik’s book approaches the art of mastery of singular skills with the diligence of a researcher, the soul of a philosopher, and the heart of the everyday man."
Tobias Carroll
"Perhaps you’ll recognize Adam Gopnik from his cameo in Tár; perhaps you’ve read one of his many articles or books before now. His latest book, The Real Work, explores what it means to be at the top of one’s field, and finds Gopnik exploring professions from driving instructor to dancer to see what it means to be great at something. It’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at what it takes to become skilled at a certain kind of work."
Booklist - Tony Miksanek
"[J]oyous and insightful . . . Through observation and deduction, Gopnik grasps much about the meaning of mastery . . . [Gopnik’s] unusual analysis of expertise and accomplishment includes his own charming moments and can-do attitude."
Financial Times - Erica Wagner
"Gopnik is a writer with a keen, warm eye and a generous heart. In The Real Work he draws attention to what he calls the ‘asymmetry’ of mastery: ‘we overrate masters and underrate mastery,’ he says . . . Gopnik is such an affable guide, truthful about his own foibles, that the reader is happy to reflect with him . . . Near the end of The Real Work he conquers another terror, a very private one; that he reveals it, and shares his process, his setbacks and triumphs, is extremely moving. The joy of this book is its honesty. ‘The real work’ is a term magicians use to define who’s really got the chops. Gopnik may not be able to handle a deck of cards, but he is a magician, all the same."
New Statesman - Lola Seaton
"Gopnik is consumed by the business of shaping sentences, and in The Real Work his dabbling in new skills, and observing those who’ve mastered them, unsurprisingly offers a way of reflecting on his own vocation . . . Among the uplifting pleasures of Gopnik’s writing is the range and ardour of his enthusiasms. If his only truly fanatical pursuit is making sentences, he seems to intuit that his best ones—his truest—are those that are unselfconsciously committed to their subject, and vitalised by the passionate curiosity that also reins them in."
Christian Science Monitor - Barbara Spindel
"Adam Gopnik’s captivating book The Real Work honors perseverance . . . While Gopnik admires the masters around him, he makes clear that we need not strive for perfection in all that we do . . . Mastery has its place, but so too does joy."
Library Journal
02/17/2023
New Yorker writer Gopnik (Paris to the Moon) combines his own ruminations about expertise with discussions of various skills he has decided to learn. Through his apprentice experiences with magic, boxing, dancing, driving, baking, and drawing, Gopnik explores the ways a person might approach learning a skill. Interspersed and intertwined with these personal essays are thoughts about what might comprise expertise in each of these areas, with particular attention paid to the opinions expressed by each of Gopnik's teachers, who range from a driving instructor to a magician and owner of a magic shop. Gopnik acknowledges that he may not master the areas he explores, but he characterizes himself as slowly moving towards gaining such know-how. VERDICT This lyrical examination of learning various skills and the ways in which expertise can manifest is recommended for collections where compilations of essays are popular.—A. Gray
MAY 2023 - AudioFile
Adam Gopnik's voice has entertaining tonal variety and natural enthusiasm--just what this somewhat esoteric book needs to hold listeners' attention as he unfolds his discoveries about how we learn various occupations from others. For years he's been a worldly critic for THE NEW YORKER, bringing fresh perspectives to art, food, culture, and anything else that captures his attention. In this audiobook, he studies how people in diverse occupations pass on their knowledge to others. He often gains insights by becoming a student himself, learning from such professionals as a boxer, a dancer, a magician, and a driving instructor. He organizes his insights into seven "mysteries of mastery" and describes his experiences and conclusions with lively writing. He says mastery is less about "how to" than it is about absorbing the attitudes, culture, and identity of masters in any field. T.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-10-18
A masterful speculation on the nature and art of mastery.
Gopnik, a longtime critic for the New Yorker and a librettist, tells us the real work is a term used by magicians to refer to the “accumulated craft, savvy, and technical mastery that makes a great magic trick great.” The real work sets lasting, incremental accomplishment apart from transitory achievements, revealing what it means when we accomplish something we thought we could not do. To fully appreciate the real work in others means gaining some sense of how it feels for them to do it, so Gopnik apprenticed himself to masters in various fields—magic, drawing, boxing, dance, etc.—to grasp their singular attainments, strategies, and styles. In doing so, he discovered that mastery is not rare but all around us. It always has its genesis in practice, and it can be embodied in everything from learning to read to hitting a baseball. Within mastery, we also look for the unique human presence that injects it with personality, idiosyncrasy, and difference. As the author notes, we often “overrate masters and underrate mastery.” Gopnik builds his book around Seven Mysteries of Mastery, deciphering these matters with shrewd but self-effacing skill. The principles of magic—“an aesthetic of the clandestine”—also inform his other essays, especially the necessity of “the Other,” an audience, for an artist to find meaning. He demonstrates that regardless of our level of talent and ability, as human beings of parts, we need not be hindered by our limitations but can be goaded by them. The real work is within our capacities. Gopnik’s intelligence gleams on nearly every page, though he occasionally gets a little overly academic for a general audience. Yet, like Malcolm Gladwell, he has a gift for forging connections and making even the seemingly mundane compelling.
In top form, Gopnik makes his subject intellectually and viscerally thrilling.
