The Age of American Unreason

By: Susan Jacoby

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

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, Jacoby surveys an antirationalist 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 antirationalism.

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.

©2008 Susan Jacoby (P)2008 Tantor

Critic reviews

"Smart, well researched, and frequently cogent." ( The New York Times)
"Electric with fearless interpretation and fueled by passionate concern...brilliant, incendiary, and, one hopes, corrective." ( Booklist)

Terrible Narrator

This book isn't bad, though it's marred by factual errors (John Paul II succeeding Paul VI, for example). But the narrator is awful. Anyone who narrates a book largely about intellectual concepts ought to learn how to pronounce them. Among the atrocities were "Aesthetic Communism" and "Cell Stem Research."

A bit preachy, but accurate

An accurate indictment of our seemingly willing slide toward greater stupidity. Wish it was wrong.

Kind of a scatter shot writing technique

The book was an interesting listen because the lady puts out some interesting ideas, plus it is sort of nostalgic listening to a book that was delivered in the waning days of the G.W. Bush presidency, the end of an era so to speak, but the problem is that it is so scatter shot and non-coherent. If she could have stuck to an issue such as neo-conservative right wing religiosity of the last 25 years and the detriment it has caused to our democracy, wrote about it and then moved on to classical liberalism and the great thinkers and books that Americans used to read, and then moved on to how Americans have shortened attention spans. At any rate the book could have been better organized that it was. There is a lot here and there were some good ideas that were touched on, but the lady never goes beyond the surface of what subject she is talking on and then she attempts to loosely tie the subjects together. Honestly she needs to learn how to write books in the popular non-fiction genre. She needs to learn how to organize her books.

This book is a whiny, unscholarly rant.

I shan't take it upon myself to literally disagree with Susan Jacoby on any substantive issue she brings up, but I have serious problems with her style.

While the more fundamentalistic or conservative Americans might dislike the book because it occasionally has a good point about their particular world views, this is by far the least of the criticism that should be levied against this book.

In short, it teaches you nothing. If Susan Jacoby has some kind of scholarly field, it does not appear to coincide with the topics discussed in the book. I was disappointed to discover that Susan Jacoby doesn't make all that many arguments or bring up much evidence in favour of her positions.

Between taking well-deserved stabs against those who are proud of being ignorant and copying the Wikipedia pages of historical figures, Susan Jacoby regales us with purposeless rants against anything and everything she doesn't personally appreciate. No evidence needed.

If you are buying this book for any reason other than to improve upon the personal wealth of Susan Jacoby, I suggest you turn your attention to an author who actually has a point. Or listen to any of a variety of podcasts that cover similar subjects much more effectively, and usually in a more entertaining fashion.

Uneven

Any additional comments?

This book is uneven in that it often hits the mark but is sometimes wildly off target. For example, I am puzzled by the author's impassioned denunciation of e-books as a symptom of intellectual decay.

The reader was reasonably good but made at least a dozen slips of the tongue that should have been corrected in the production process. For example she said, "FARMERS of the Constitution" instead of "FRAMERS of the Constitution." This type of error is especially notable in an audiobook lamenting a loss of rigor in public discourse.