Fantasyland
How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
-
-
4.2 • 162 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of Evil Geniuses comes an electrifying, provocative history of American delusion—“an important book for understanding America in the age of Trump” (Walter Isaacson, author of Elon Musk).
“A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.”—The Guardian
A SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
How did we get here?
In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen demonstrates what’s happening in our country today. This strange, post-truth, “fake news” moment we’re all living through is not something entirely new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character and path. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Believe-what-ever-you-want fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. From the Salem witch trials to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood, from our fetish for guns to our obsession with extraterrestrials, our peculiar love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we’ve never fully acknowledged.
Written with gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity, Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment for understanding the politics and culture of twenty-first-century America, and how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred.
Customer Reviews
Solid story:)
Coherent solid story of America inventing itself, and the current mischief:)
Too early to say
The book would like to attribute American fantasies to one cause, which the author spent some two-thirds of the book to detail. That portion of the book is boring, and requires prior knowledge of a religion to comprehend.
The last chapter has some insightful conclusions but no scientific evidence to prove the point. Instead, the recent rise of social media might just be another contributing cause to fantasies happening both in the US and elsewhere in the world. So I don’t even know what I should make out of the “conclusion” offered by this book.
Fantasyland by Kurt Anderson
A fascinating historical perspective of the beginning of American history in the 1600s with the quest for gold to contemporary time where the Enlightenment not only produced scientific thoughts but varied degrees of imaginary cults scams and alternate realities which have led us to excessive pursuit of shallow amusements rather than meaningful ideas of substance and benefiting all of society rather than just ourselves a soul searching read Pat .lorello