Other Sellers on Amazon
& FREE Delivery
56% positive over lifetime
The Age of American Unreason Paperback – 10 February 2009
-
Get S$5 Off with Mastercard W/WE Cards. Enter code MCAMZ5 at checkout. Discount Provided by Amazon. Terms
Purchase options and add-ons
A cultural history of the last forty years, The Age of American Unreasonfocuses on the convergence of social forces—usually treated as separate entities—that has created a perfect storm of anti-rationalism. These include the upsurge of religious fundamentalism, with more political power today than ever before; the failure of public education to create an informed citizenry; and the triumph of video over print culture. Sparing neither the right nor the left, Jacoby asserts that Americans today have embraced a universe of “junk thought” that makes almost no effort to separate fact from opinion.
- Print length357 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication date10 February 2009
- ISBN-101400096383
- ISBN-13978-1400096381
Product description
About the Author
SUSAN JACOBY is the author of eleven previous books, including Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion. Her articles have appeared frequently in the op-ed pages of The New York Times and in forums that include The American Prospect, Dissent,and The Daily Beast. She lives in New York City. For more information, visit www.susanjacoby.com.
Product details
- Language : English
- Paperback : 357 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1400096383
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400096381
- Customer reviews:
Customer reviews
Top reviews from other countries
Leider ist ihr Schreibstil sehr trocken, teilweise langatmig und schwer verdaulich. Das macht die Lektüre mühsam. Trotzdem habe ich viel Neues gelernt und Altes wurde mir wieder mehr bewusst. Was mich etwas gestört hat, war allerdings eine gewisse Arroganz seitens der Autorin gegenüber "schlichter " Popmusik, z.B. die Beatles, die sie im Vergleich zur "wertvollen" Klassik doch sehr abwertet. Die selbe Arroganz zeigt sie gegenüber der Populärwissenschaft und anderen, der Mittelklasse leicht zugänglichen Kunstformen. Obwohl ich der Autorin nicht in allen Punkten zustimmen kann, ist ihr Buch trotzdem ein notwendiges und informatives Werk.
Her thesis, in short, is that contemporary electronic communication, from TV and the Internet, to mass advertising, has drawn America away from nature, books, and the life of the mind. She perceives, correctly, that Steven Johnson's book of just a few years back, "Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter," threatens her thesis, and she attempts, in her first chapter, to dispatch it quickly. But rather than address the substantive claims and supports that book offers, she maligns it with little more than innuendo, contempt, and derision. But Johnson's book is, whatever else you may think of it, suffused with a good deal of empirical data, and Jacoby chooses to simply ignore it and move on.
I share Jacoby's sadness that the life of the mind is not broadly valued, but I don't share her belief that it was ever valued all that much more than it is today. The nostalgic aspect of her book is thus the weakest part of it because she is doing something inherently unreasonable, accumulating anecdotes that do not add up (at least for me) to a compelling support for her claim. It was, afterall, William F. Buckley who said, long before the Internet and TV preachers presumably made us all stupid, that he preferred that the country be trusted to the first fifty names in the Boston phone book to the faculty of Harvard. Contempt and distrust of intellectuals and the elite, like the poor, have been with us always. Jacoby, who has written a book on Greek tragedy, surely knows Aristophanes' "The Clouds," a funny and disturbing send up of the atheist intellectuals of ancient Greece.
For all my complaints, however, the book is worth having and reading, if, for no other reason, to draw fresh intellectual air from someone who loves the life of the mind. But let's not kid ourselves. The average person in 1950 probably could no more locate Iran on a world map than a person can today.