The Age Of American Unreason
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The Age Of American Unreason
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Author : Susan Jacoby
language : en
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date : 2008-02-12
The Age Of American Unreason written by Susan Jacoby and has been published by Vintage this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2008-02-12 with Political Science categories.
A cultural history of the last forty years, The Age of American Unreason 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; and the triumph of video over print culture. Sparing neither the right nor the left, Jacoby asserts that Americans today have embraced a universe of “junk thought” that makes almost no effort to separate fact from opinion.
The Age Of American Unreason
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Author : Susan Jacoby
language : en
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date : 2009-02-01
The Age Of American Unreason written by Susan Jacoby and has been published by Vintage this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2009-02-01 with Philosophy categories.
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.
The Age Of American Unreason
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Author : Susan Jacoby
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2009-05
The Age Of American Unreason written by Susan Jacoby and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2009-05 with Mass media categories.
"In this important and hugely entertaining book, historian and critic Susan Jacoby presents a scathing indictment of contemporary American culture. Much of her diagnosis is acutely - and increasingly - relevant in Britain, but she also explains many aspects of American society that baffle outside observers. Why, uniquely among Western democracies, do Darwin's theories remain controversial in the US? And what is driving the current resurgence of Christian fundamentalism? The Age of American Unreason is an inspiring defence of rational thought - and a vigorous, impassioned warning about the perils of mass ignorance."--Back cover.
The Age Of American Unreason
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Author : Susan Jacoby
language : en
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date : 2008-02-12
The Age Of American Unreason written by Susan Jacoby and has been published by Vintage this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2008-02-12 with Political Science categories.
A cultural history of the last forty years, The Age of American Unreason 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; and the triumph of video over print culture. Sparing neither the right nor the left, Jacoby asserts that Americans today have embraced a universe of “junk thought” that makes almost no effort to separate fact from opinion.
Freethinkers
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Author : Susan Jacoby
language : en
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Release Date : 2005-01-07
Freethinkers written by Susan Jacoby and has been published by Metropolitan Books this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2005-01-07 with Religion categories.
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.
Why Baseball Matters
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Author : Susan Jacoby
language : en
Publisher: Yale University Press
Release Date : 2018-03-20
Why Baseball Matters written by Susan Jacoby and has been published by Yale University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018-03-20 with Sports & Recreation categories.
Baseball, first dubbed the “national pastime” in print in 1856, is the country’s most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the twenty-first century, the game is losing young fans, among African Americans and women as well as white men. Furthermore, baseball’s greatest charm—a clockless suspension of time—is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction. These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position—in reality and myth—in American culture. The concise but wide-ranging analysis moves from the Civil War—when many soldiers played ball in northern and southern prisoner-of-war camps—to interviews with top baseball officials and young men who prefer playing online “fantasy baseball” to attending real games. Revisiting her youthful days of watching televised baseball in her grandfather’s bar, the author links her love of the game with the informal education she received in everything from baseball’s history of racial segregation to pitch location. Jacoby argues forcefully that the major challenge to baseball today is a shortened attention span at odds with a long game in which great hitters fail two out of three times. Without sanitizing this basic problem, Why Baseball Matters remind us that the game has retained its grip on our hearts precisely because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.
Strange Gods
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Author : Susan Jacoby
language : en
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date : 2016-02-16
Strange Gods written by Susan Jacoby and has been published by Vintage this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016-02-16 with History categories.
In a groundbreaking historical work that addresses religious conversion in the West from an uncompromisingly secular perspective, Susan Jacoby challenges the conventional narrative of conversion as a purely spiritual journey. From the transformation on the road to Damascus of the Jew Saul into the Christian evangelist Paul to a twenty-first-century “religious marketplace” in which half of Americans have changed faiths at least once, nothing has been more important in the struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one’s choice or to reject belief in God altogether. Focusing on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—each claiming possession of absolute truth—Jacoby examines conversions within a social and economic framework that includes theocratic coercion (unto torture and death) and the more friendly persuasion of political advantage, economic opportunism, and interreligious marriage. Moving through time, continents, and cultures—the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin’s dour theocracy, Southern plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters’ religion—the narrative is punctuated by portraits of individual converts embodying the sacred and profane. The cast includes Augustine of Hippo; John Donne; the German Jew Edith Stein, whose conversion to Catholicism did not save her from Auschwitz; boxing champion Muhammad Ali; and former President George W. Bush. The story also encompasses conversions to rigid secular ideologies, notably Stalinist Communism, with their own truth claims. Finally, Jacoby offers a powerful case for religious choice as a product of the secular Enlightenment. In a forthright and unsettling conclusion linking the present with the most violent parts of the West’s religious past, she reminds us that in the absence of Enlightenment values, radical Islamists are persecuting Christians, many other Muslims, and atheists in ways that recall the worst of the Middle Ages. (With 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations.)
The Death Of Expertise
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Author : Tom Nichols
language : en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date : 2017-02-01
The Death Of Expertise written by Tom Nichols and has been published by Oxford University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017-02-01 with Political Science categories.
Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.
Alger Hiss And The Battle For History
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Author : Susan Jacoby
language : en
Publisher: Yale University Press
Release Date : 2009-03-24
Alger Hiss And The Battle For History written by Susan Jacoby and has been published by Yale University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2009-03-24 with History categories.
Books on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars have labored to uncover the facts behind Chambers's shocking accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the summer of 1948, that Alger Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage. In this work, the author turns her attention to the Hiss case, including his trial and imprisonment for perjury, as a mirror of shifting American political views and passions.
Anti Intellectualism In American Life
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Author : Richard Hofstadter
language : en
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date : 1966-02-12
Anti Intellectualism In American Life written by Richard Hofstadter and has been published by Vintage this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1966-02-12 with Social Science categories.
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