The Age of American Unreason

The Age of American Unreason
by Susan Jacoby

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Book Summary Information

Author: Susan Jacoby
Edition: Hardcover
Published: 2008-02-12
ISBN: 0375423745
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Pantheon

Book Reviews of The Age of American Unreason

Book Review: Clarifier
Summary: 5 Stars

Ms Jacoby clears up many of my suspicions on why the southern population is such a barrier to advances this country should have made in the last 100+ years. Again it's the religious thing. This country could be magnificent instead of a declining second rater, due to the biblical literalists.

I wasn't aware of how drastically religions have mentally hobbled this country. I used to think most of our citizens had some smarts. No longer.

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Summary of The Age of American Unreason

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public.

Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion.

At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.

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