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 enlarge | Author: Susan Jacoby
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $12.93
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Avg. Customer Rating:  86 reviews
Sales Rank: 1151
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.6
ISBN: 0375423745
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.91
EAN: 9780375423741
ASIN: 0375423745
Publication Date: February 12, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
 Compelling, but could have been a lot better May 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
When Susan Jacoby was still in college forty years ago, she was moved and inspired by Richard Hofstadter's well-known 1963 work Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Jacoby's book attempts to pick up Hofstadter's theme and take it forward from the 60's into the millennium, and the attempt is laudable but a little weak.
On most points I agree 100%, such as with her assertions that the average U.S. citizen's intellectual base is sadly lacking and shrinking by the day. Somehow, a scarily large majority of Americans are more formally educated, yet less knowledgeable than ever before. All the reasons why that is, however, are not adequately explored here. While she does manage to isolate a few contributors, such as the explosion in television programs that barely appeal to the lowest common denominator, gaming, the dumbing-down of educational standards, and the decline in reading and other intellectual pursuits, I would have liked to see far more detailed research and statistics on these points and a lot less of her long, meandering, and often thinly connected reminisces about the past. Her treatise on `middlebrow' vs. `highbrow' culture is completely out of place here and really belongs in another kind of study altogether. She also takes the all-too-common tack of using her work as a personal political soapbox, something I truly loathe in any writer of any political persuasion.
Where she excels, though, is her exploration of the political landscape and how the gaping chasm between the two major parties has actually caused much of the problem, and how the far-right religious fundamentalists have made their own unique and devastating contribution. One of the best sequences in the book is the discussion regarding education, science and evolution, and the war being waged between "creationists" and scientists. For example, creationists have largely hijacked the word "theory" and somehow spread the completely false idea that the way we tend to use the word in the vernacular, which is more akin to "opinion", is the same way scientists use it - which of course could not be further from the truth since scientific theory is far more than an `opinion'. She also laments the fact that 25% of high-school biology teachers believe that human beings and dinosaurs shared the earth, and more than a third of Americans can't name a single First Amendment right. I also found myself nodding vigorously in agreement when she bewails the severe decline in general reading and the teaching of literature at all academic levels.
In the larger view, beyond individual issues, the spotlighting of what Jacoby calls "willful ignorance", coupled with what I call just plain ignorance born of mental apathy and poor education, is compelling. While in whole this book could have been better, it does have value and wouldn't be out of place in the library of anyone interested in material about intellectualism in America.
Disappointing but still a good book May 13, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I was very excited when this book came out and was really looking forward to reading it. I can't think of a more timely or important topic for a book. However I found the book very disappointing. Far from a scholarly and insightful look at the issue, the book reads more like a stream of consciousness style rant. The author makes some valid points here and there but then goes off on inexplicable rants. For example, she comments, correctly, that digital communication and email don't evoke the same emotions or require the same level of intellectual effort of traditional letters. But instead of delving into this valid point more deeply, she merely waxes nostalgic about the letters she and her fiance exchanged in the 60s. In another example, she bemoans the erosion of political discourse but instead of thoughtfully discussing this interesting point, she provides us with little more than juvenile taunting of George Bush's inability to pronounce the word "nuclear". Now I am a flaming liberal and far from a Bush apologist and I enjoy a good dig at him as much as anyone, but it seemed out of place, neither funny nor thoughtful, in this context.
In summary, the book has a lot of good ideas and offers a basic, if superficial, overview of the problem of anti-intellectualism within a historic context. Maybe I had too high expectations and perhaps someone coming to this book for a lighter overview of the issue will find it enjoyable. However, on the whole, the book was disappointing to me. There's not really much "meat" to the discussion or any sort of meaningful synthesis. It's something of an irony that only in a dumbed down, lowbrow culture could this book be seen as a thoughtful or important contribution to the discussion.
 Jacoby reveals herself May 9, 2008
6 out of 31 found this review helpful
"The Age of American Unreason" tells us far more about its author, Susan Jacoby, than it says about our recent US history, which she describes in her own selected terms. Her put-down characterizations of our society are as largely being middlebrow, anti-intellectual, and fundamentalist. These are her own designations of the primary themes of our US society. Our society has succeeded in many, many ways in spite of her observations. Still from her New York based pseudo-intellectual society, we are largely social and cultural failures. Bah-humbug, to use a literary phrase, the failure in analysis is hers, as is very well documented in her book.
The book is not recommended for anyone under 40, who has not directly experienced the recent historic successes of our society for the most of its citizens. People over 70 may enjoy critiquing her basically ultra-liberal commentary on our society. The book study group which I lead has very much enjoyed doing so.
A worthwhile read May 9, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Susan Jacoby takes us on an interesting and cutting rant on why we've become such a nation of imbeciles. Though not everyone might agree with everything she says I found most of it to be true. In an era in which we seem to be failing at everything or falling behind the rest of the world Jacoby offers a foundational reason for why we are so dumb and what it is costing us.
 Great idea, poor execution May 9, 2008
10 out of 16 found this review helpful
The premise of this book immediately grabbed my attention. The idea that the collective American public is not as educated or informed or able to adequately reason for themselves as they should be (and historically have been to some extent) could make an excellent book. Unfortunately, this isn't it.
The author makes some good points when talking about the "average" citizen's woeful lack of basic knowledge in fields such as mathematics, geography, culture, and history. Illustrating the poor way the media present news (in part due to reporters' inability to understand statistics or basic science), resulting in misleading - whether intentional or not - and plain wrong impressions being touted to the public was well-presented. And she verges on approaching the book's potential when exploring modern America's knowledge of and views on such topics as evolution and religion.
However, as the pages turn, it becomes increasingly obvious that the author's true complaint is NOT with modern America's unReason, but with its unLiberalness. She adopts the current Democrat philosophy that anyone who has voted Republican in the past forty years has done so strictly because they were too stupid to know any better. She bemoans the right-wing's attack on the "elite," then proceeds to demonstrate precisely what those conservatives resent about know-it-alls who have so much knowledge & breeding that their view (in their not-so-humble opinion) is the only conceivable correct one on every issue. Further, she ignores (when convenient)her own observation of the old saw that coincidence does not equal causality, even while criticizing those she disagrees with of doing the same thing.
One of the weakest sections is her attack on new media, rehashing the usual liberal philosophy that the plethora of choices before us these days cannot possibly be a good thing - we must be told (by her & her ilk) what is good for us and what is acceptable to read, view, listen to, or surf. Mostly read - she is completely intolerant of anyone who derives information or entertainment from any source other than books, And not just any books, but "the classics."
This book is very readable, and while many of her proposed solutions to real and imagined problems were quite unacceptable to a Libertarian like me, it was interesting to see just how the modern-day "liberal elite" truly feel about us commoners. Inasmuch as my breeding, education, and politics would leave much to be desired in the eyes of this author, it was nice to get a glimpse into that mindset which I call closed, and she would no doubt label "above my ability to comprehend."
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