Reviews

The Way We Live Now: from The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies by Susan Jacoby

angelina41's review against another edition

Couldn't finish this one.

justins52books's review against another edition

2.0

Too many anecdotes for me. The concept of, "it was like this when I was young and now that it's not like this, things are worse," irritates me even when I agree with the basic crux of the argument (which I do in the case of this book). This concept is the very reason that, while eligible, I do not belong to the VFW.

sfahrney's review against another edition

4.0

Makes a lot of sense - makes one think!

sondosia's review against another edition

4.0

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" person. I thought this would be a book about the increasing mistrust of science, knowledge, and reality itself (and to some extent it was), but I definitely didn't sign up to get a jeremiad about today's youth and their musical/literary choices.

Further, Jacoby seems to believe that "experts" in very different fields, such as literary criticism and hard science, are equivalent and should all be respected. Scientists, yes, because you can't really just have your own "opinion" on whether or not global temperatures are rising or whether or not vaccines cause autism. But critics of music, art, and literature are honestly mostly full of crap, and I'm surprised that Jacoby equates the fact that people no longer trust these self-important "experts" with the fact that people don't trust climate scientists and doctors. While these may be different branches of the same tree, there's just no equivocating between these two things. One type of distrust is causing massive environmental degradation and needless illness and death; the other is causing people to, uh, form their own opinions on books and music. Big deal.

Anyway, none of that takes away from the quality of Jacoby's thinking and writing. It just bothered me.

kdgulick's review against another edition

informative medium-paced

5.0

dorothys_out's review against another edition

5.0

A must read! Never have a read a book and felt personally attacked whilst also agreeing with everything the author has to say. Maybe this is what a revelation feels like?

nadinekc's review against another edition

Preaching to the choir. I only got as far as the first half of the second chapter, but I didn't feel as if I'd be learning anything new.

chan_fry's review against another edition

4.0

(3.8 of 5)

A well-written and logically constructed book, which sometimes suffers from needlessly complex prose, this book examines the history of anti-intellectualism in the United States and how it has come back into vogue once more. Since I read it just after finishing Al Gore’s similarly focused 2007 book The Assault On Reason, I couldn’t help but compare the two; this one is by far stronger and less-contradictory.

Like Gore, Jacoby asserts that modern technology (primarily the TV) bears much of the blame, though she builds a much stronger argument for it than Gore did. Personally, I think both are somewhat correct on this, yet also hesitant to blame us. There’s no question that TV, the internet, iPods, and so on were going to change the way we absorb information, enjoy pop culture, and communicate generally, but we (the collective “all of us” we) went into this knowingly, being made aware of the dangers and pitfalls, and we chose to be acquiescent. Maybe.

(I have published a longer review on my website.)

whimsicalmeerkat's review against another edition

4.0

This book managed to be at once hopeful and depressing to read. Hopeful because it is proof that someone recognized and is talking about the sorry state of the mind in our country, but depressing because it delineates just how far we've strayed from our origins as a nation founded by well-rounded, intellectual greats who hoped for a country populated and governed by equally wholly educated persons. While it has its place as a jeremiad and its element of "preaching to the choir," I absolutely recommend this book to anyone who understands why it is important that people read, and terrifying that so few people do now when compared to the number of those who are able.

piratequeen's review against another edition

3.0

I read this right after I finished "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life", which in retrospect was a poor decision. I did it because I've been trying to read more intelligently, and sticking to a theme in order to get a clearer picture seemed like a good idea at the time. All it did in this case, however, was overwhelm me with the depressing reality of how bad America is educationally, culturally, and politically. They say confirmation bias is an ever-growing problem, especially with the internet and our ability to find information that agrees with our view with the push of a button, because it feels good to read things that we agree with. Not so for me, not this time. I agreed with Jacoby's scathing indictment of America's irrational and uninformed government, schools, and people, but her confirmation of my views left me feeling depressed and hopeless, especially since her conclusions about our current situation was virtually identical to those of Richard Hofstadter 50 years earlier. When our country's climate of unreason hasn't changed, and has in many cases worsened, over the past half-century (the massive and vicious debate about creationism in science classes that we see today was virtually unheard of 50 years ago), what hope is there that we can correct our course, and become the educated, critical population that our country needs?