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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.91
EAN: 9780375423741
ISBN: 0375423745
Label: Pantheon
Manufacturer: Pantheon
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 384
Publication Date: February 12, 2008
Publisher: Pantheon
Release Date: February 12, 2008
Sales Rank: 2126
Studio: Pantheon
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Maybe being a scientist and an intellectual is worthwhile after all
I enjoyed this book tremendously. I liked best Jacoby's critique of today's newspapers for reporting at face value patently false statements by politicians, as if actual facts made no difference at all.
I did disagree with a few of Jacoby's points. She is too cavalier about dismissing the idea that the U.S. is overpopulated. To provide some balance to this, I would encourage reading Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update.
Overall, though, the book is great. Don't miss it.
Rating:  - Good basic premise, but stuck in past....too obviously biased
The basic premise is correct, that we need to study more, read more, think more clearly. When hasn't that been true? I agree with her that people spend too much time on TV, video games and other liesurely activities that don't stimulate the intellect. Many seem to be addicted or perhaps too tired/lazy to do something that takes effort. I liked the book from that standpoint.
But, she seemed stuck in the past, constantly telling the reader how wonderful it was when.... I kept getting the nagging feeling I was listening to a church sermon in which the pastor kept praising the "family values" of the past....Yah, like racism, sexism, discrimination against people because they held different religious beliefs? Sure, the glorious past when people were all so smart and pleasant. The past of fiction.
Then, despite some effort to point the finger equally at conservatives and liberals, she fell into what seemed her natural tendancy to associate smart with liberal and dumb with conservative. That was frequent in the book, particularly toward the end.
She talked about poor academics in the South, but didn't analyze the school systems to see what was driving some of the poorly performing schools. I've lived in the South for several years and found some sectors of Southern society to be very well educated, while others were sorely neglected. Saying that Southern public schools are funded less than other states misses a key issue, namely strong tendancy of whites ... Read More
Rating: - Good start, but doesn't go far enough into the reasons for our malaise
This is a good start. But I was disappointed that Jacoby doesn't dig deeper. A lot of her "answers" just beg the question. I found she was good at diagnosing the problem--as are many pundits and observers these days--but short on understanding their true depth.
She gives us the laundry list of ills inflicting us right now--failed political systems, endemic rudeness, the death of civic responsibility, our vile popular culture--and does not see the thread that links it all. That thread is the complete dominance of unfettered capitalism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, our sole purpose in America has been to make money, at a faster and faster rate. "Values," such that they are, are only taught when they're seen to further expedite the chase of the buck.
No, there's nothing wrong with capitalism, but there is something wrong when capitalism is our only national goal, and it is now, no matter what some apologists may claim. People who think about nothing except how to acquire more material things are not going to be civil-minded, learned, courteous, moral or ethical. There's no reason to be. In fact, those things are just impediments to the pursuit of happine$$.
This is happening everywhere, of course, but nowhere as much as the U.S. Europe is struggling to keep a lid on rampant, unchecked capitalism--their blend of "soft socialism" with regulated capitalism seems to be working better than any other model, so far at least. Countries that most eagerly follow ... Read More
Rating: - Brilliant; makes you wish you'd paid more attention in school
Jacoby uses her deep and nuanced knowledge of American history to lay out where we are falling well short of America's most cherished goals. Some reviews have complained the book is too long. But Jacoby's survey is so broad, and to do it justice strikes me as worth this level of detail. There's a lot of real gold in this book, and I did not find my mind wandering. One of my takeaways: it confirms for us that the vast sums of money we've chosen to pay for the education for our children (private school, I'm afraid) seems well spent. This book is an inexpensive and very modest substitute for the mediocre education most people received in the last 20-30 years, the author of this review included.
Rating:  - Nothing original in it, yet nowhere near as good as Hofstadter's book, to which Jacoby obviously wants her book compared
Her introduction and chapter one simultaneously attempt to tie her book to historian Richard Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) while making a case for the United States' supposedly "new anti-intellectualism." To her, anti-intellectualism is not new, but it has taken new forms. Her approach is a combination of history; commentary on popular culture; specifics of religion, education, politics, and the mass media; and critiques of social science. Thus, the book's topics mostly overlap with Hofstadter's book, which was strictly a history, divided into four sections on anti-intellectualism in U.S. religion, U.S. education, U.S. business, and U.S. politics, respectively. And if Jacoby never directly addresses anti-intellectualism among business executives or corporations, she offers enough about commercial influences on U.S. culture to say business and economics were included. The title of Jacoby's first chapter, "The Way We Live Now: Just Us Folks," even reminds one of Hofststadter's first chapter, "Anti-intellectualism in Our Time."
But the similarities to Hofstadter's book are not extensive, and should not be overstated. Hofstadter's book was and is a masterful history (even if it has been significantly criticized), while much of Rigney's book is on more or less current events, or at least past recent enough to not yet be "history" with a capital H. Hofstadter's first chapter, and his other discussions of then-current events (such as paragraphs on President ... Read More
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