A review by cutiejoy
The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby

4.0

This was such a long book; it took me around three weeks to get through it. It made me depressed about anti-intellectualism in America, but it made me personally want to work through that for myself and try to become more well rounded and cultural. People don't know how to be bored anymore. So many are literally incapable of entertaining themselves; no wonder hobbies not revolving around technology are dying. Also, some of the stats around reading were shocking. This book is old, so they're a little outdated, but it says that in 2002, the National Endowment for the Arts released a survey indicating that fewer than 1/2 of adult Americans had read any work of fiction or poetry in the preceding year, and only 57 percent had read a nonfiction book.