SEEKING REPRESENTATION
The Rainmaker’s Laboratory
AMY LEAVITT
ABOUT THE BOOK
In a world obsessed with algorithms and AI, the figure of the face-to-face salesperson illuminates deeper truths about humanity. Capturing the unruliness of philosophical inquiry, The Rainmaker’s Laboratory offers a radical rethinking of business practices as human practices. It traces a rich journey through a hard-nosed, soft-hearted saleswoman’s struggles to splice together profit and poetry, money and beauty. In theatrical scenes of daily commerce, it engages Shakespeare, Beckett, and Wittgenstein alongside Afro-Indigenous traditions to investigate themes of fear, failure, ambivalence, risk, rhythm, value, truth, gifts, always returning to the power of language. Bridging artistry and entrepreneurship, this work invites the reader to consider their own flourishing amid a world of selling and being sold—in a time that demands something human from us.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABOUT AMY LEAVITT
Amy Leavitt is an award-winning financial advisor and voice teacher, with five decades of experience in corporate boardrooms and conference rooms, theater rehearsal rooms and classrooms. She was the founding principal of one of the premier financial consulting boutiques in the US, and has been widely recognized as a pioneer in her field. In the second half of her financial career, she took up the study of voice, training in-depth with Patsy Rodenburg, OBE, Emeritus Director of Voice at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Here is a link to her article in Voice and Speech Review. She holds a BA from Dartmouth College in Philosophy and Language, and is an alumna of The Writers’ Institute at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
“I have been surprised to find that working with the human voice places me in the same laboratory of puzzlement, conducting the same investigations, as my rainmaking work—affirming Oliver and Young’s words: ‘Tain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It).”
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