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 enlarge | Author: Susan Jacoby
Publisher: Gale Cengage
Category: Book
Buy New: $31.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  87 reviews
Sales Rank: 1613743
Format: Large Print
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Lrg
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 660
ISBN: 1597227935
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.9
EAN: 9781597227933
ASIN: 1597227935
Publication Date: August 6, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 A Blow to the Use of Reason July 15, 2008
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
I've not read a book where I agreed with the thesis as much, and then disagreed completely with the means to get there. Other reviews have touched on this, but to add a few comments on the research for this book:
1. The use of two convenient statistics to prove a point that can easily be countered by other data is rampant in this book, and detracts from the book's weight. Example: The author asserts that because Southerners tend to have worse educations, they are more likely to hold religious beliefs that are in the Christian fundamentalist camp, and believe in Creationism. There is no evidence presented that education and religious affiliation have a strong correlation. I would be just as accurate to claim that hush puppies force a choice in religious branch. (There is ample evidence that education is poorly related to fundamentalism in ALL religions btw.)
2. The search for demons to blame for why we are frequently irrational is laced with folly. Humans are irrational by nature, and we fight tooth and nail with our baser instincts daily to rise above it. The book seems to want to rationalize unreason more than define its true roots.
3. I'm not that uncomfortable with the pedestal that the author puts intellectuals on. I thought I was in the ballpark of an intellectual, but if Ms. Jacoby's definition is my watermark, can I be something else please? We can be intellectuals and irrational at the same time.
 CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORS BEWARE July 10, 2008
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
I read Richard Hofstadter's ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE when it came out so I looked forward to reading this book. I found it a pleasant read; a sort of 'short trot with a cultured mind'. But that all changed on page 224 with 3 paragraphs on child abuse. Like most non-survivors Ms Jacoby gets everything exactly backwards. She offers no discussion or analysis of the works she names only judgements which betray no acquaintance with either child abuse or the works mentioned. She seems not to know that the one work she praises was publicly discredited. These 3 paragraphs make everything else in the book suspect & to my mind omitting them from future editions would be an improvement. A disappointing book & as a child abuse survivor a disheartening one.
 History of the United States, Volume II July 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Susan Jacoby has written a masterpiece in interpretation of modern U.S. history. I lived through many of the decades she has so eloquently and succinctly unravelled and had no idea what was actually going on until reading this piece. It is the best, most lucid, most rational explanation of the current intellectual and cultural crisis in the U.S that I have yet seen, and I have seen many. It makes a wonderful companion to her earlier work 'Freethinkers: A history of American Secularism', which I like to think of as History of the United States, Volume I.
 The Contemporary Decline of American Culture As Noted by Susan Jacoby July 3, 2008
15 out of 16 found this review helpful
"The Age of American Unreason" combines author Susan Jacoby's elegant historical analysis with ample references to modern American culture in making an excellent, often persuasive, case in explaining how and why American culture is literally at its nadir now. And yet, her fine book doesn't have the polemical logic and focus found in two other books published this year, Kenneth R. Miller's "Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul", and Robert S. McElvaine's "Grand Theft Jesus". I strongly suspect that this may be due to the vast scope of Jacoby's book, which covers everything from the rise of scientific illiteracy and the advent of pseudoscientific nonsense like Intelligent Design and other flavors of creationism, to the political alliance between Fundamentalist Protestant Christian zealots and the conservative wing of the Republican Party. It may also be due, alas, to Jacoby's penchant for relying upon anecdotal memories of her youthful past in the 1960s, which, when compared and contrasted with her elegant historical analyses of American culture in the mid and late 19th Century, doesn't seem as persuasive.
Jacoby mourns the passing of a "middlebrow" culture which manifested itself in the forms of popular lectures on science attended by hundreds in the late 19th Century, to the publication of Will Durant's "The Story of Civilization", and the airing of classical music broadcasts by major radio and television networks. Instead, it has been replaced by a "lowbrow" culture noted for its corrosive effects on American culture. This includes not only the advent of rap music, but perhaps, more importantly, the de facto "segregation" of American studies into ethnic and gender studies which promote, not discourage, exclusion in American college and university classrooms. A "lowbrow" culture that has also embraced junk thought, ranging from, of course, the popularity of so-called "scientific" creationism, especially Intelligent Design, to those who have been advocating against mandatory immunization of children for measles. A "lowbrow" culture that is more widely disseminated than before, due to the rapid rise of the Internet, which Jacoby, not surprisingly, is quite critical of.
So, the reader may ask, what should be done to stem the rising tide of ignorance? In an all too brief closing chapter, Jacoby argues on behalf of "cultural conservation". Cultural conservation will succeed only if Americans turn away from a "culture of distraction" and embrace instead, concepts and facts that are firmly rooted in reality (For Jacoby one recent notable example of this is Judge John Jones' ruling at the conclusion of the 2005 Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District Trial, in which he noted explicitly how and why his decision critical of both the school district and Intelligent Design creationism was based upon expert testimony from scientists like Brown University cell biologist Kenneth R. Miller and University of California, Berkeley paleobiologist Kevin Padian, among others.). And yet, Jacoby notes, her plea for "cultural conservation" may be too late, simply because the United States has become so firmly entrenched in a "culture of distraction" that is noted more for its obsessive worship of celebrities than for trying to adhere at all to any semblance of rational thought. Jacoby's massive tome is bound to provoke liberals, as well as conservatives, for its dire analysis of the present state of American culture; whether it will be as persuasive as other, earlier works like Richard Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life", remains to be seen.
Almost a complete waste of time June 27, 2008
6 out of 18 found this review helpful
I was eager to compare Jacoby's views with those of Steven Johnson in "Everything Bad is Good For You." Unfortunately, I found her work lacking in simple academic rigor. She commenced to ridicule Johnson's book for the audacity of its title (is she actually judging this book by its cover?)and misrepresent his main thesis- popular culture is not a replacement for traditional learning, but it is becoming more cognitively stimulating instead of less. Moreover, the elements of much modern entertainment are precisely those that are cognitively challenging rather than opiating.
After being subjected to self-righteous indignation over "The DaVinci Code's" fantasy (as if to conjure up a historically suspect murder mystery is somehow both anti intellectual and just plain stupid) and her moral vitriol spilled over admitted speculation, I finally threw in the towel. As a supporter of left-leaning intellectualism, and a teacher, I just couldn't stomach the hypocrisy and paucity of substance. The only value I found was a lesson many on the left could acknowledge regarding a knee-jerk urge to label everyone that doesn't agree as anti-intellectual by dint of their disagreeing with one's self-avowed and vaunted intellectualism.
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