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Books: Reading

Susan Jacoby: The Age of American Unreason

When

Thursday Apr 24, 2008 (7pm)

Where

New_exterior_show_page

The Booksmith (Venue Partner)

1644 Haight St

415.863.8688

Price

Free

Links

The Booksmith says…

Writer and scholar Susan Jacoby is sure to raise some hackles with The Age of American Unreason — an unsparing jeremiad that attacks the dumbing-down of the American public. Jacoby's area of study is US intellectual history, though she worries that the field is becoming a moot point in the face of our country's pervasive "infotainment" complex. As politics get folded into entertainment, she argues, so too does morality become indistinguishable from consumerism. Though hardly the first to bemoan the pitfalls of mass culture, Jacoby's portrait of American anti-intellectualism is especially germane in the middle of an election year.