The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies

Praise

“There are few subjects more timely than the one tackled by Jacoby. . . . Her book is smart [and] well-researched.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
 
“Forceful. . . . Cogently argued. . . . An intellectual journey of the first order.”
—Chicago Tribune
 
“One hopes Jacoby’s incisive book will find an audience among the unconverted who will take her warnings seriously.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Provocative, well-written and often witty.”
—USA Today
 
“Jacoby’s is a moderate, sensible, well-founded position, shared by many Americans, yet it somehow rarely got voiced amid the raging hyperbole of the culture wars. “
—Salon
 
“Jacoby deploys sharp insight on our present straits”
—Los Angeles Times
 
“Trenchant …One hopes her incisive book, just in time for the 2008 elections, will find an audience among the unconverted who will take her warnings seriously.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“A surprising and uncommonly sophisticated treatment of a familiar topic.”
—New York Observer
 
“The Age of American Unreason picks up where Richard Hofstadter left off. With analytic verve and deep historical knowledge, Susan Jacoby documents the dumbing down of our culture like a maestro. make no mistake about it, this is an important book.”
—Douglas Brinkley, residential historian and author of The Great Deluge
 
“This is one of the most eye-opening books I’ve read in a long time. Jacoby charts the intellectual and cultural currents that have characterized the United States since its founding and explains just how and why Americans have recently become so, well, dumb. Anyone who cares about the future of our country will want to read it.”
—Marcia Angell, editor in chief emerita, New England Journal of Medicine
 
“Jacoby has written a brilliant, sad story of the anti-intellectualism and lack of reasonable thought that has put this country in one of the sorriest states in its history.”
—Helen Thomas, author of Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public
 
“Jacoby’s fearless jeremiad, at once passionate, witty, and solidly grounded in facts, aries at a propitious moment, when many Americans are perceiving that ignorance conjoined to arrogance can be deadly. This book deserves to be widely read, and especially by concerned parents. As Jacoby insists, it is only within families that some immunity to mind-numbing ‘infotainment’ can now be acquired. First, however, there must be a will to resist—and if this stirring book can’t rally it, nothing can.”
—Frederick Crews, author of Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays
 
“To a country of underachievers and proud of it, this book delivers a magnificent, occasionally hilarious kick in the pants. Snap out of it, Jacoby says: Getting it right matters. Tough talk and wicked wit in the tradition of Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.“
—Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography