Keith Ammann

A lot of people seem to believe that Stolen Focus is meant to be a self-help book. I don't think that's what it's trying to do. Rather, its goal is to point out all the forces that are arrayed against us in a battle for our attention, and the ways in which they undermine our ability to maintain focus. As he points out at the end, this problem isn't one we can fix ourselves simply through force of will. As with climate change, it's going to take much more than individual effort to solve???it's going to take significant changes in public policy. Because of that, I think the complaints that he “brought politics into it” miss the point. Allowing this rampant hijacking of our attention was a political choice, and it will take political choices to stop it.

I'd give this book a higher rating, except that Hari's bad habit of starting interview quotations in the middle of sentences is aggravatingly sloppy, and he overrelies on cliffhanger-style transitions. A heavier editing hand would have done this book a lot of good.

ETA: I have to dock this book two full stars after reading about how its essential premise is flawed, based on misinterpreted research and cherry-picked data. There's no point in struggling through writing like this if you can't even be confident that it's in the service of helping you grasp a real, provable phenomenon. Disappointed to learn what a terrible reputation this author has made for himself.

I'd like to give this book a rating, but I can't. I judge creative works on the basis of whether the creator did what they were trying to do and whether it was worth doing. After reading this book, I honestly don't know what A.R. Moxon was trying to do when he wrote it. I therefore have no basis for judging whether he did it or whether it was worth doing.

I will say that the lightweight sans serif font he uses in certain sections was very hard on my eyes, although that may have been the page designer's decision, not his.

This book contains a great deal of useful and very important information on how power corrupts, on how it attracts the corruptible, and how and why people are poor judges of integrity in leaders, and I wish I'd liked it better than I did. However, I found the author's voice to be tedious???like the narrator of a TV documentary, constantly having to rope the audience back in with “provocative” questions he's about to answer. IMO, it would have been a much stronger book with the fluff cut out.

I'm giving it an extra quarter-star because the parts with the dolphins were pretty hilarious, but the rest was never more than smirk-worthy. The ending twist was a particular disappointment.

Roughly half of The Headshot is about producing good headshots; the other half is about being Peter Hurley. His hyperactive, grandiose, self-promoting showoff personality is on prominent display throughout. So is more than a touch of defensiveness, as he talks about how some subjects and agents have expressed a dislike for his style but he's an artist and that's just how he does it, man. What he calls “Sherlock Holmesing” bears a troublesome resemblance to what pickup artists call “negging,” and there's a distasteful incident in which he expresses a desire to smash an insecure subject's boyfriend's face into a C-stand. (This book's release date was pushed back twice???seven months altogether. It makes me wonder what shape it was in at press time. Did it contain an even higher Hurley-to-technique ratio than it does now?) He goes off on so many personal digressions that I often needed to refer back to the chapter subheadings to remind myself what information I was supposed to be receiving.

The upshot is that this book is intermittently informative but not well-written. If you take all the tips in this book at face value, all you're going to learn is how to shoot like Peter Hurley, and Peter Hurley is probably better at being Peter Hurley than you are. The challenge is to pick your way through all the puffery to find the actual useful information, of which there's a good amount; practice with it for a while; decide how much of it suits your own visual style and way of working and how much doesn't; and disregard the rest. Only about 30 to 50 percent of the content is genuinely useful.

That being said, having practiced shooting headshots since buying this book, I'm certainly appreciative of some of the details that are buried in Hurley's rambling, which I didn't think about until the issues came up???things like checking hair with each shot, and how to get through to “avoiders,” “diminishers” and “posers.” I do find myself wishing, however, that he'd given more attention to shooting subjects with eyeglasses: he talks about how to avoid glare but neglects to discuss lens distortion.

One other way this book is useful: the sheer number of examples. Hurley never talks about it at all, but by systematically going through every headshot in the book, categorizing each one by mood, and noting the positions of the subject's chin and collarbone, I was able to create a posing guide for myself, which improved my workflow dramatically by keeping me from wasting time on poses that aren't going to work.