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The Age Of American Unreason In A Culture Of Lies
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Book Synopsis The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies by : Susan Jacoby
Download or read book The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-01-16 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER The prescient and now-classic analysis of the forces of anti-intellectualism in contemporary American life--updated for the era of Trump, Twitter, Breitbart and fake news controversies. The searing cultural history of the last half-century, The Age of American Unreason In A Culture of Lies focuses 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; the triumph of internet over print culture; and America's toxic addition to infotainment. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation and sparing neither the right nor the left, Susan Jacoby asserts that Americans today have embraced "junk thought" that makes almost no effort to separate fact from opinion. At today's critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the crisis 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.
Book Synopsis The Age of American Unreason by : Susan Jacoby
Download or read book The Age of American Unreason written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-02-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A scathing indictment of American modern-day culture examines the current disdain for logic and evidence fostered by the mass media, religious fundamentalism, poor public education, a lack of fair-minded intellectuals, and a lazy, credulous public, condemning our addiction to infotainment, from TV to the Web, and assessing its repercussions for the country as a whole. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.
Book Synopsis The Way We Live Now by : Susan Jacoby
Download or read book The Way We Live Now written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this selection from her searing cultural history of the last half century, Susan Jacoby chronicles the menacing surge of anti-rationalism in contemporary American life and the degradation of public speech in presidential rhetoric, radio broadcast, television, and internet media where homogenized language and thought reinforce each other in circular fashion. At today's critical political juncture, in which boastful ignorance has infected public discourse at the highest levels of government and throughout ordinary social media, this impassioned, tough-minded work challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flight from intellectualism, facts, and truth have cost us as individuals and as a nation. A Vintage Shorts Selection. An ebook short.
Book Synopsis Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by : Richard Hofstadter
Download or read book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life written by Richard Hofstadter and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-01-04 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is a book which throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society. "As Mr. Hofstadter unfolds the fascinating story, it is no crude battle of eggheads and fatheads. It is a rich, complex, shifting picture of the life of the mind in a society dominated by the ideal of practical success." —Robert Peel in the Christian Science Monitor
Download or read book Never Say Die written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wake-up call to Americans who have long been deluded by the dangerous twenty-first hucksters of longevity. “If old age isn’t for sissies, neither is Susan Jacoby’s tough-minded and important book ... which demolishes popular myths that we can ‘cure’ the ‘disease’ of aging.”—The Washington Post Combining historical, social, and economic analysis with personal experiences of love and loss, Jacoby reveals the hazards of the magical thinking that prevents us from facing the genuine battles of growing old. Never Say Die speaks to Americans, whatever their age, who draw courage and hope from facing reality instead of embracing platitudes and delusions, and who want to grow old with dignity and purpose. It is a life-affirming and powerful message that has never been more relevant.
Download or read book Where We Stand written by Dan Carter and published by NewSouth Books. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book contains essays from twelve leading Southern historians, activists, civil rights attorneys, law professors, and theologians. They discuss militarism, religion, the environment, voting rights, the Patriot Act, the economy, prisons and crime, and other subjects significant to the South and the Nation in the ongoing debate about the future of the United States. The writers come from, or have been active in the affairs of, each of the former Confederate states."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Right/Wrong written by Juan Enriquez and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and entertaining guide to ethics in a technological age. Most people have a strong sense of right and wrong, and they aren't shy about expressing their opinions. But when we take a polarizing stand on something we regard as an eternal truth, we often forget that ethics evolve over time. Many shifts in the right versus wrong pendulum are driven by advances in technology. Our great-grandparents might be shocked by in vitro fertilization; our great-grandchildren might be shocked by the messiness of pregnancy, childbirth, and unedited genes. In Right/Wrong, Juan Enriquez reflects on what happens to our ethics as technology makes the once unimaginable a commonplace occurrence.
Download or read book Strange Gods written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a groundbreaking historical work that focuses on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with an uncompromising secular perspective, Susan Jacoby illuminates the social and economic forces that have shaped individual faith and the voluntary conversion impulse that has changed the course of Western history—for better and for worse. Covering the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin’s dour theocracy, American plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters’ religion—along with individual converts including Augustine of Hippo, John Donne, Edith Stein, Muhammad Ali, George W. Bush and Mike Pence—Strange Gods makes a powerful case that nothing has been more important in struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one’s choice or to reject belief in God altogether.
Book Synopsis The Embrace of Unreason by : Frederick Brown
Download or read book The Embrace of Unreason written by Frederick Brown and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning the turbulent decades between the World Wars, The Embrace of Unreason casts new light on the darkest years in modern French history. It is a fascinating reconsideration of the political, social, and religious movements that led to France’s move away from the humanistic traditions and rationalistic ideals of the Enlightenment and towards submission to authority—and the dramatic rise of Fascism and anti-Semitism. Drawing on newspaper articles, journals, and literary works of the time, acclaimed biographer and cultural historian Frederick Brown explores the forces unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair and how clashing ideologies and new artistic movements led France to an era of violence and nationalistic fervor.
Download or read book Freethinkers written by Susan Jacoby and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2005-01-07 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative history of the vital role of secularist thinkers and activists in the United States, from a writer of "fierce intelligence and nimble, unfettered imagination" (The New York Times) At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers offers a powerful defense of the secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned, elegant prose, celebrated author Susan Jacoby paints a striking portrait of more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Moving from nineteenth-century abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, Freethinkers illuminates the neglected accomplishments of secularists who, allied with liberal and tolerant religious believers, have stood at the forefront of the battle for reforms opposed by reactionary forces in the past and today. Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Clarence Darrow—as well as once-famous secularists such as Robert Green Ingersoll, "the Great Agnostic"—Freethinkers restores to history generations of dedicated humanists. It is they, Jacoby shows, who have led the struggle to uphold the combination of secular government and religious liberty that is the glory of the American system.
Book Synopsis "Church and Age Unite!" by : R. Scott Appleby
Download or read book "Church and Age Unite!" written by R. Scott Appleby and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sullivan published his Letters to His Holiness Pope Pius X, repudiating Roman authority.
Book Synopsis The Death of Expertise by : Tom Nichols
Download or read book The Death of Expertise written by Tom Nichols and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the early 1990s, a small group of "AIDS denialists," including a University of California professor named Peter Duesberg, argued against virtually the entire medical establishment's consensus that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Science thrives on such counterintuitive challenges, but there was no evidence for Duesberg's beliefs, which turned out to be baseless. Once researchers found HIV, doctors and public health officials were able to save countless lives through measures aimed at preventing its transmission"--
Book Synopsis Greeks & Romans Bearing Gifts by : Carl J. Richard
Download or read book Greeks & Romans Bearing Gifts written by Carl J. Richard and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2009-10-16 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively and engaging book is the only popular work to explore the profound impact of Ancient Greece and Rome on the Founding Fathers. The classical education they imbibed as young students inspired them to undertake the American Revolution and influenced their approach to a host of constitutional and practical issues crucial to the shaping of the new American republic. Recounting the stirring stories the founders encountered in their favorite histories of Greece and Rome, renowned scholar Carl J. Richard explores what they learned from these vivid tales and how they applied these lessons to their own heroic quest to win American independence and establish a durable republic. Richard explains how the founders learned the importance of individual rights from the absence of those rights in Sparta, the superiority of republican government to monarchy from the Greek victory over the Persians, the perils of democracy from the instability of Athens, the need for a strong central government from the fall of Greece to Macedon and Rome, the importance of virtue to the success of a republic from early Rome, the need for eternal vigilance against ambitious individuals from the fall of the Roman republic, and the preciousness of liberty from its destruction by the Roman emperors. Crucial to the decisions that shaped the United States, these lessons remain invaluable today for every citizen concerned with America's future course.
Download or read book Half-Jew written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since childhood, Susan Jacoby, the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of American Unreason, was sure that her father was keeping a secret. At age twenty, just before beginning her writing career as a reporter for the Washington Post, she learned the truth: Robert Jacoby, a Catholic convert with a Catholic wife, was also a Jew. In Half-Jew, Jacoby grapples with the hidden identity cloaked by the persona of a successful accountant and member of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in East Lansing, Michigan—and with the secrets and lies that had marked her family’s history for three generations on two continents. Beginning in 1849 when her great-grandfather arrived in America as a political refugee, Jacoby traces her lineage through the lives of her great-uncle Harold, the distinguished astronomer whose map of the constellations is etched on the ceiling of Grand Central Terminal; her uncle, the bridge champion Oswald Jacoby, her aunt Edith, also a Catholic convert and eventually a reformer within the church; and, of course her father himself. At the core of story is the psychic damage that accrues across generations when people conceal their true ethnic and religious origins. Featuring a new afterword, Half-Jew is a meticulously researched, emotionally poignant examination of the dark legacy of European and American anti-Semitism as well as a tender-hearted account of a daughter coming to understand her father, herself, and her family’s true legacy.
Book Synopsis The Fall of the House of Walworth by : Geoffrey O'Brien
Download or read book The Fall of the House of Walworth written by Geoffrey O'Brien and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2010-07-20 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of The Devil in the White City comes a spell-binding tale of madness and murder in a nineteenth century American dynasty On June 3, 1873, a portly, fashionably dressed, middle-aged man calls the Sturtevant House and asks to see the tenant on the second floor. The bellman goes up and presents the visitor's card to the guest in room 267, returns promptly, and escorts the visitor upstairs. Before the bellman even reaches the lobby, four shots are fired in rapid succession. Eighteen-year-old Frank Walworth descends the staircase and approaches the hotel clerk. He calmly inquires the location of the nearest police precinct and adds, "I have killed my father in my room, and I am going to surrender myself to the police." So begins the fall of the Walworths, a Saratoga family that rose to prominence as part of the splendor of New York's aristocracy. In a single generation that appearance of stability and firm moral direction would be altered beyond recognition, replaced by the greed, corruption, and madness that had been festering in the family for decades.
Book Synopsis The Politics of Petulance by : Alan Wolfe
Download or read book The Politics of Petulance written by Alan Wolfe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did we get into this mess? Every morning, many Americans ask this as, with a cringe, they pick up their phones and look to see what terrible thing President Trump has just said or done. Regardless of what he’s complaining about or whom he’s attacking, a second question comes hard on the heels of the first: How on earth do we get out of this? Alan Wolfe has an answer. In The Politics of Petulance he argues that the core of our problem isn’t Trump himself—it’s that we are mired in an age of political immaturity. That immaturity is not grounded in any one ideology, nor is it a function of age or education. It’s in an abdication of valuing the character of would-be leaders; it’s in a failure to acknowledge, even welcome the complexity of government and society; and it’s in a loss of the ability to be skeptical without being suspicious. In 2016, many Americans were offered tantalizingly simple answers to complicated problems, and, like children being offered a lunch of Pop Rocks and Coke, they reflexively—and mindlessly—accepted. The good news, such as it is, is that we’ve been here before. Wolfe reminds us that we know how to grow up and face down Trump and other demagogues. Wolfe reinvigorates the tradition of public engagement exemplified by midcentury intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling—and he draws lessons from their battles with McCarthyism and conspiratorial paranoia. Wolfe mounts a powerful case that we can learn from them to forge a new path for political intervention today. Wolfe has been thinking and writing about American life and politics for decades. He sees this moment as one of real risk. But he’s not throwing up his hands; he’s bracing us. We’ve faced demagogues before. We can find the intellectual maturity to fight back. Yes we can.
Book Synopsis The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left by : L. Benjamin Rolsky
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left written by L. Benjamin Rolsky and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades now, Americans have believed that their country is deeply divided by “culture wars” waged between religious conservatives and secular liberals. In most instances, Protestant conservatives have been cast as the instigators of such warfare, while religious liberals have been largely ignored. In this book, L. Benjamin Rolsky examines the ways in which American liberalism has helped shape cultural conflict since the 1970s through the story of how television writer and producer Norman Lear galvanized the religious left into action. The creator of comedies such as All in the Family and Maude, Lear was spurred to found the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way in response to the rise of the religious right. Rolsky offers engaged readings of Lear’s iconic sitcoms and published writings, considering them as an expression of what he calls the spiritual politics of the religious left. He shows how prime-time television became a focus of political dispute and demonstrates how Lear’s emergence as an interfaith activist catalyzed ecumenical Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who were determined to push back against conservatism’s ascent. Rolsky concludes that Lear’s political involvement exemplified religious liberals’ commitment to engaging politics on explicitly moral grounds in defense of what they saw as the public interest. An interdisciplinary analysis of the definitive cultural clashes of our fractious times, The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left foregrounds the foundational roles played by popular culture, television, and media in America’s religious history.
