The Age of American Unreason | 
| Author: Susan Jacoby
Creator: Cassandra Campbell
Publisher: Tantor Media
Category: Book
List Price: $79.99
Buy New: $46.17
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Avg. Customer Rating:  92 reviews
Sales Rank: 3398861
Format: Audiobook, Cd
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Library ed.
Number Of Items: 12
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 6.3 x 1
ISBN: 1400137322
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.91
EAN: 9781400137329
ASIN: 1400137322
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
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Product Description
Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon---the addiction to infotainment, from television to the Internet, which has resulted in a lazy and credulous public.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 87 more reviews...
 Ironically Anti-Intellectual September 5, 2008
Considering that the basic premise of the book is that a large portion of the USA is actively anti-intellectual, I'm unsure whether it's an intentional irony or a subconscious hypocrisy that makes this the most anti-rational, anti-scientific piece of what I hesitate to call literature that I've ever had the displeasure of picking up. The only thing that kept me reading to the end was that it was _so_ poorly researched and documented that I was sure it was a joke of some kind, and that at some point there would be a chapter saying "surprise! I've just tricked you into exactly the same rejection of logic and empiricism that I've been ostensibly complaining about!"
More specifically, the book makes numerous claims which are simply not true at all, often about things for which a large body of research exists which the author could have easily accessed via any number of commonly-available resources. As early as the second chapter, for instance, she's making multitudinous attacks on visual media in general via bare assertion, and makes no reference to any actual scientific studies, probably because most of the thousands upon thousands of experiments done regarding the effect of television and games on the mind prove precisely the opposite of the claim she's pushing.
This is the hallmark of the book: assertion, assertion, assertion with nothing to back any of it up. In the cases where my personal knowledge actually covered the subject and I could judge the veracity of said assertions, they almost invariably demonstrated an amazingly complete disconnect from reality and the scientific and rational communities. It's telling that no scientific studies are among the rather sparse footnotes and references, which are reserved for other op-ed pieces, usually quoted out of context.
This book is useless to anyone trained in the principles of research and logical argument, and actively dangerous to the mind of anyone untrained enough to take it as a serious piece of research. Intellectually dishonest and a picture-perfect representative of the actual forces involved in the phenomena the author is attempting to describe. Don't bother with this claptrap, if you want a clever and well-thought out critique of anti-intellectualism, go read The Wizard of Oz. It's better referenced and more relevant to modern society.
 Maybe being a scientist and an intellectual is worthwhile after all August 23, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
 Good basic premise, but stuck in past....too obviously biased August 22, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
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 in the South to send their kids to private schools. The blacks are left in the underfunded, voluntarily segregated public schools. Not such a problem in towns where many whites stayed in the public schools, but the county schools were all black and had very poor performances. I don't pretend to understand or like the social/political dynamics of schools down there (my kids hated Southern schools because of the reverse discrimination and jumped for joy when we moved out), but I do know that white parents didn't want to send their kids to these underperforming county schools where their kids were treated to reverse discrimination.
My point is that a lot of the educational dollars are avoiding the public school system as whites avoid the underperforming schools. This caused a spiral effect where parents, both black and white, sent their kids elsewhere to avoid schools with poor academics. I believe the author could have addressed this issue better and might have found more intelligence in the South than she gave it credit for.
(As an aside, I worked with an African American woman who sent her kids to a county school where the percentage of blacks was about 98%. The daughter requested this because she wanted to "get back to her roots" after attending predominantly white schools elsewhere in the states. After one year, the daughter wanted out because in her words, "These blacks aren't my people. I don't think like they do. They don't care about education. All they care about is acting tough and insulting people who want to study.")
Back on topic, Jacoby couldn't get past her love of Al Gore either. Lord have mercy. She claims to be an intellectual, but can't see past her blind liberalism to see just how many non-partisan climatologists say Al Gore has been promoting the biggest scam in history by blaming humans for what is actually nothing more than natural, long-term climate cycles!! Susan, if you read more, you'd see that there is no consensus!! Perhaps the Internet could help you find some of that information. :-)
And the Internet is such a terrible thing! Yah sure. Except that thanks to the Internet I can instantaneously get various intellectual viewpoints and studies on both sides of most issues, whereas before the nasty technology came along....I had to spend hours searching for books in the library and they probably didn't have anything relevant to my topic of interest.
Then, how about book reviews she went on and on about? I can now read solid book reviews on the Internet by many, many smart readers, whereas under her preferred method I would have been stuck reading the one lame book review in the New York Times or whatever biased newspaper I was limited to in my hometown.
Susan, I'm with you on the need for more of us to study, but please change your condescending attitude against conservatives. In case you didn't notice, there are about as many smart/ignorant Democrats as there are smart/ignorant Republicans.
She also seemed confused about whether she liked communism or not. She'd praised a number of intellectuals of the hippie era who were involved in the Communist party and I never understood whethere she thought that was a good or bad thing.
And Bush is just a moron to her. Granted, he isn't my favorite guy and he has a very country style, but that doesn't make him stupid. To equate dumb with country as she seemed to be doing is just evidence of elitism. But on Bush, yep Suan, he's so stupid he just stumbled into the White House. And during the debate with those intellectual giants, Al Gore and Mr Swift Boat Kerry, he won only because they were, what, smarter than he? Uh, right. Her theme of conservatives being morons was just so intellectually vacuous that I just started laughing.
Bottom line: Good premise that people should read more. She should do just that without the prejudice against conservatives. She's stuck in the past, unable to see the good in many modern things. Blinded by her liberal bias. OK book overall. Made me want to read more, but that idea without the bias would have been a pamphlet.
Good start, but doesn't go far enough into the reasons for our malaise August 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 the U.S. down the road to free market mania--Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and now China and India--are starting to have the same social ills of the United States.
Rather than chapter after chapter reciting ills we already know about and citing his columnist peers and their skin-deep "analyses," I would have like to have been a deeper social-economic analysis, as well as discussions from historians and yes, philosophers. For a deeper look at our nation's ills I guess we have to turn to the likes of Thomas Frank, whose unblinking look at our national soul can be depressing, but accurate.
It's hard not to give five stars to a book when I am in such sympathy and empathy with the author. And Ms. Jacoby is a very engaging writer, and clearly intelligent and dedicated to the pursuit of intellectual activities. So why she couldn't have taken the next step and seen more into the reasons for the problems inherent in our system (hint: read de Tocqueville) surprises me. This book is worth your time, but with a little more depth it could have been so much more.
Brilliant; makes you wish you'd paid more attention in school August 21, 2008
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.
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