Author Charles Pierce has a piercing sense of humor, a fine ear for the absurd, and an honest intellect engaged in research. His book, Idiot America, How Stupidity became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, is deservedly a national bestseller. It’s also a curious mix of slow well-argued positioning, historically well-researched references, and scathingly hilarious comments.
An English teacher once told me it was easy to make readers cry but much harder to make them laugh. Pierce’s book does both in equal measure. While it’s probably quite easy to poke fun at “the other side” in any debate, the author fills his arguments with enough facts (yes, real facts rather than well-saddled dinosaur fictions) to slow the laughter down with serious thought.
Idiot America is a well-reasoned analysis of many of the “popular” fictions of American belief, from creationism to global warming to the War on Terror and beyond. The prose is well-seasoned with humor and well-illustrated with specific examples of the effects of “idiocy” on real human beings. The result is a fairly slow read, though I hardly dare criticize that since much of our fictional certainty comes from a desire for everything to be given in simple sound-bites. There’s no simple misdirection here—no magic wand promising a better future; just honest, tragic, comic, powerful lament for the descent of the absurd into the norm, where both are rendered simultaneously powerless and disastrous.
Would I recommend this book? Yes. Read it slowly. Enjoy its biting humor. Absorb its history and cultural references. Don’t let the idiots get you down. And then engage brain. Perhaps if we all do that we might remember who we once were and strive to be who we can be.

Disclosure: I borrowed this book from a friend.