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A review by sondosia
The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby
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.
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.