John-Paul Flintoff - Books

Books

How To Change The World

Flintoff's book How To Change The World was published in 2012 with five other books in a School of Life series. The other authors in the series are John Armstrong, Alain de Botton, Tom Chatfield, Roman Krznaric and Philippa Perry.

In his book, Flintoff proposes that everybody inevitably has an effect, often more powerful than they think, on the world around them, and that once they are aware of this they can be more deliberate about what that effect might be.

The book then suggests that, having identified a particular cause, we need to find ways to overcome the inevitable obstacles, both internal and external. The appendix contains a list of 198 forms of non-violent action, credited to the American political scientist Gene Sharp.

The book does not propose any specific course of action, but includes examples of change that include leftism, libertarianism, and environmental activism. Flintoff includes examples of his own attempts to make a difference.

Sew Your Own

In 2009 he published a book Through The Eye Of A Needle: The true story of a man who went searching for meaning and ended up making his Y-fronts. It argues that the way we look at clothing influences the way we look at the environment, the economy and life itself.

Specifically, the book provided an account of Flintoff's anxiety about climate change and resource shortages, particularly peak oil and his attempts to reduce his planetary impact generally - but specifically by making his own clothes. He touches on sweat-shops, and asks why the traditionally widespread skills of clothes-making have become so rare - before setting out to make an entire outfit of his own, right down to Y-fronts made of nettle. In the process, he says he stopped worrying so much about "the problem" and started to enjoy "the solution".

The book was republished in 2010 by Profile under a new title, Sew Your Own.

It received many enthusiastic reviews, and Flintoff won a following in the craft community, but a former colleague on The Financial Times, Vanessa Friedman suggested that the book comprised "an effort to boost the writer’s name recognition disguised as a serious reflection on environmental and spiritual issues".

Comp: A Survivor's Tale

In 1998 he published a memoir,Comp: A Survivor's Tale, based on his time at the controversial Holland Park School, a flagship of state education in London. Some of his former classmates have described this as a self-serving account which denies the many academic and professional successes of his peers, and the educational system that supported them. Others disagree, suggesting that his book failed to skewer a fundamentally flawed educational experiment.

Flintoff has since expressed regret for the hurt he caused to classmates and teachers who found aspects of themselves in the book (though their names were changed).