I cannot emphasis how much I loved this book. The book opened my mind to some of the deepest issues and problems in modern society and completely changed the way that I think about identity and the self. Crawford, known for his first book "Shopclass as Soulcraft" uses the modern inability to give attention as the jumping off point to explore identity formation. Very briefly, Crawford argues that one of the inheritances we have from the Enlightenment (largely thanks to Kant) is that we think of our identities as formed entirely by mental processes. This fallacy leads us down many dark roads. The main philosophical argument can be summed up as the following (only articulated in the middle of the book):

- We are encouraged to free ourselves from all authorities, including the authority of others;
- This leads us to emphasize radical self-responsibility (as a matter of politics and epistemology);
- We can only do this by locating the source of truth from our external world to our inner world - by constructing representations of life;
- To accomplish this, we must demote attention as a value as it takes us outside of the mental realm which is the center of all authority.

Once you understand it, you begin to see the web that binds us to these means of identity formation. The way out is to conceive of identity formation as a relationship between us, our environments, and the people around us. And it involves a dynamic relationship between our own creative powers and the tradition we receive.