<< Previous

Wednesday, March 5th

Pantheon

Price: $26.00

SUSAN JACOBY presents The Age of American Unreason

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome SUSAN JACOBY, who combines historical analysis with contemporary observation to dissect a new American cultural phenomenon in her latest book.

In The Age of American Unreason, Jacoby surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." She notes a general disdain for logic and evidence, which has been fostered by the mass media, 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.

CONTACT:

General Info:
617.661.1515

Media:
617.661.1424 ex.1

Email:

Susan Jacoby is the author of seven previous books, most recently Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, which was named a Notable Book of 2004 by The Washington Post Book World and The Times Literary Supplement. She lives in New York City.