The Opposition…

The Age of American Unreason

Susan Jacoby

Discussion: 2008-Apr-May-Jun

Why we're reading this: April 22, 2008
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2008-Apr-May-Jun

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* June 2008
By Tiffany , WristStrong · 1 post · 9 views

last updated Jan 07, 2011 12:32PM

* May 2008
By Tiffany , WristStrong · 1 post · 6 views

last updated Dec 31, 2010 12:16AM

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What Members Thought

Mar 01, 2013 Miri rated it really liked it

Shelves: sociology-culture, history, politics

I was SO close to giving this five stars. I learned a lot and laughed out loud at many points while reading it. However, Jacoby's knee-jerk and entirely unskeptical condemnation of everything from rock music to young-adult novels to short(er) magazine articles to cell phones to blogs to TV shows eventually started to bug me. She provided no evidence for why valuing things like classical music and fancy words over modern music and less-fancy words automatically makes you a more "reasonable" perso ...more

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Apr 27, 2008 Tiffany rated it really liked it

Shelves: politics, tds_tcr, to_get__bm_rqsts, wtfiswrongwithus

This book sounds interesting in theory, but I'm not sure about the way Jacoby is promoting it. On her appearance on The Colbert Report, she implied that young Americans are ignorant, as evidenced by the fact that, in this highly religious country, most of them cannot name the 4 gospels. Furthermore, they're against the idea of evolution because they've never read the Creation Story. I've read the Bible, including the story of Creation, but that doesn't mean I believe it/agree with it. One can re This book sounds interesting in theory, but I'm not sure about the way Jacoby is promoting it. On her appearance on The Colbert Report, she implied that young Americans are ignorant, as evidenced by the fact that, in this highly religious country, most of them cannot name the 4 gospels. Furthermore, they're against the idea of evolution because they've never read the Creation Story. I've read the Bible, including the story of Creation, but that doesn't mean I believe it/agree with it. One can read a story and still disagree with it. And even though I've read the Bible, I can't name the 4 gospels. Just because I live in a highly religious country doesn't mean I HAVE to agree with the religion, nor does it mean I have every aspect of that religion memorized.

Still, though, I'd like to give the book a chance and see if Jacoby makes any VALID points.

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Indeed, she makes valid points. The book is an interesting analysis of America's growing stupidity and intellectual laziness, and why/how we let it happen. I enjoyed the book: it was a good look at when/why the country started to think that "smart" was a four-letter word and that intellectualism was a dirty thing. It made me think of how nice it would be if we could all be smarter and use sound intellectual judgement (or use our brains at all; or even have brains at all), and weren't losing ground in the world.

I do wonder, though, how Republicans/right-wingers feel about this book. Not that the book is a "Democrats are good, Republicans are bad" type of book, but when she does say that one party is "worse" or more mistaken than the other, it's usually Republicans being "worse" than Democrats (although, to be fair, she does point out Democrats'/left-wingers' issues and inferiorities often enough).

One thing I always wonder about things like this is how I would do in their studies and tests. These types of analyses always include stats about "X percent of Americans don't know ", and of course Jacoby's book has statistics about Americans' knowledge of American history, world history, geography, current affairs, foreign affairs, etc. I consider myself a moderately intelligent person, but I also know that a test can be incredibly obvious, hard, or confusing, based on how it's worded. How were the questions in these studies worded? Would *I* have known the answers to the questions about the Constitution? Would my answers about the First Amendment have been satisfactory? Or would my answers have put me in the group of "Americans who don't know anything about their country"?

Still, even if her book doesn't hit the mark 100% of the time (and there were quite a few times when I was skeptical about what she was saying), it does have good points and does a good job of tracing the history of the dumbing down of Americans. ...more

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Jun 04, 2011 Ezra rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: author-female, info-mgnt, own, politics-usa, read-in-2015

Back in 2007, I went to Thanksgiving with Mom to the home of a Philosophy professor. The professor's father discoursed on why United States presidents should only be intellectuals. His arguments made sense. Someone able to understand the options, determine risk, and plan for contingencies will likely do a better job than someone who cannot. (Most PotUS surround themselves with those capable of doing this, but at the time, the PotUS had political sycophants rather than intellectuals.)

The most spe ...more

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Jul 27, 2008 Natalie rated it liked it

Great info, but ended up being VERY repetitive and preachy. I'm liberal and was annoyed by the end! Wish I could have retained more of the information, but this was about 100 pages too long and I kept zoning out... ...more

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