A fast-moving train of a book that visits a series of individuals in western history who have changed in ways major and minor the way people represent and think of themselves ... Reading Self-Made can feel a little like wandering through a favorite museum with a new docent speaking into your padded headset: lots of 'hmm!' moments but few surprises ... But one can feel, and share, her delight poking into some of the past’s more cobwebbed corners ... Burton packs a lot of material into a small space to support an ambitious idea, and it would be interesting to see what she would do with more focus. Self-Made seems designed for a distracted generation: more of a tour than a tour de force.
Ms. Burton is right and brave to surmise that hollow self-making offers the wrong kind of answers to the modern bourgeois or digital peasant who wants to live a happy or meaningful life. If the n-word, narcissism, appears only fleetingly in Self-Made, it is because it is now everywhere.
A wide-ranging cultural genealogy of the concept of the 'self-made man' ... Burton writes with verve about a range of novelists, artists, politicians, and socialites who had a talent for self-expression ... Burton’s book reads largely as a cautionary tale about complacently accepting the myth of being self-made. Burton has nothing to say, for instance, about drag culture or gender-affirming surgery.
