The author of How to Be Idle, Tom Hodgkinson, now shares his delightfully irreverent musings on what true independence means and what it takes to be free. The Freedom Manifesto draws on French existentialists, British punks, beat poets, hippies and yippies, medieval thinkers, and anarchists to provide a new, simple, joyful blueprint for modern living. From growing your own vegetables to canceling your credit cards to reading Jean-Paul Sartre, here are excellent suggestions for nourishing mind, body, and spirit—witty, provocative, sometimes outrageous, yet eminently sage advice for breaking with convention and living an uncluttered, unfettered, and therefore happier, life.
Right-click-and-save this link to listen to Tom Hodgkinson talking about The Freedom Manifesto on the Dr Alvin Jones show, North Carolina and the world and click here to get the book from US Amazon.
The Idler office is now closed for Christmas. We’ll be back on the 9th of January to deal with all your orders. Thanks so much to everyone who has ordered subscriptions and t-shirts and books from us this year—those orders really help to keep the magazine afloat.
Have a very merry time.
Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Free is published today in the States, under the title The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste (yes, they do like these long titles, don’t they).
Following a glowing review in Slate, the book is climbing up the charts and we hope to rekindle the great American tradition of freedom, reclaim it from the neocons, and give it back to the Whitmans, the Kerouacs and the Keseys of this world. Down with Facebook! Up with hoeing the cabbages!
"The answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live."