A review by chillcox15
Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction by Joshua Cohen

4.0

I'm wavering between a 3.5 and 4 stars for Joshua Cohen's mammoth essay collection, Attention. I loved a lot of the early essays here, but some of them are too navel-gazingly pretentious even for my tastes. Then comes the title essay, a book length (160 pages!) essay tracing the intellectual history of concepts relating to attention. Let's just say that, to me, there's a reason that slab of wordwork was affixed to this book and not its own publication. If it wasn't there, the 400 page version of this book would easily reach the 5 star range, even with Cohen's frequently opaque writings about Israel in here.