44 letters from the liquid modern world

Our liquid modern world is not - like all liquids - able to stay still and hold its shape for long. Everything, or almost everything, is constantly changing in it. And we, the inhabitants of this ever-changing world, feel the need to adapt to this world by being "flexible" and permanently prepared to change as well. We want to know what is going on and what is likely to happen, but we are overwhelmed by an influx of information that threatens to completely overwhelm us. < br> Nothing resists close scrutiny so fiercely as the ordinary things of everyday life that hide in the light of a deceptive and misleading familiarity. In order to examine them closely, they must first be taken out of this daily routine: what is apparently known must become unknown. And that is exactly what Zygmunt Bauman attempted to do in these 44 letters: Each of the letters tells a story taken from everyday life, but in such a way as to show the extraordinary aspects that we would otherwise tend to overlook. < br> Engaging, revelatory, disturbing - such are the letters of Zygmunt Bauman, the analyst of our modern fluid world, which he wrote between 2008 and 2009 for the readers of an Italian magazine. < br> Zygmunt Bauman (1925?2017) is one of the most important and best-known social scientists of our time. He is the author of a number of seminal books on modernity, the Holocaust and the postmodern way of life.