Fantasyland; How America Went Haywire A 500-Year History
Marco Lau (Author photograph) New York: Random House, 2017. Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. xiv, 462, [4] pages. Footnotes. Index. Red dot on bottom edge. Kurt Andersen (born August 22, 1954) is an American writer, the author of novels and nonfiction as well as a writer for television and the theater. He was a co-founder of Spy magazine, as well as co-creator and for its 20-year run host of the weekly Peabody Award-winning public radio program and podcast Studio 360. From 2001 to 2004, Andersen served as a senior creative consultant to Barry Diller's Universal Television, where he co-created the entertainment and arts channel Trio with Michael Jackson, Lauren Zalaznick and Andy Cohen. In 2006, with Jackson and Bonnie Siegler (and Diller's IAC) co-founded the daily email cultural curation service Very Short List. He had co-created Studio 360, a weekly program covering the arts and culture, which he hosted from its launch in 1999 to its last episode in 2020. Originally a co-production of Public Radio International and WNYC, it was broadcast on 240 U.S. public radio stations to a weekly audience of more than 500,000 radio listeners, with an additional podcast audience during the 2010s. In 2005 it won a Peabody Award for an hour-long documentary about Moby Dick, the first of its 17 American Icons hours, each exploring one cultural work–– including The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Monticello, and Disneyland and EPCOT. In 2021 he co-produced, wrote and narrated Nixon At War, a seven-episode podcast about how Richard Nixon's responses to the Vietnam War resulted in his downfall and ultimately the contemporary polarization of U.S. society. In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what's happening in our country today-this post-factual, fake news moment we're all living through-is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuries-from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials-our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies-every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book. Derived from a Kirkus review: When did Americans come to shun reality? “As I pass by fish in barrels,” writes Studio 360 host Andersen at the outset of this entertaining tour of American irreality, “I will often shoot them.” Indeed he does, but then, as writers as various as H. L. Mencken and Christopher Hitchens long ago discovered, American society offers endless targets. Andersen finds a climacteric in Karl Rove’s pronouncement, a dozen years ago, that those people who live in “the reality-based community” need to understand that “that’s not the way the world really works anymore.” It’s not just the Trumpies who are ruining things for everyone; by the author’s account, the nice liberals who refuse to vaccinate their children are as much a part of the problem as those who flock to creation museums and megachurches. All are waystations of Andersen’s “Fantasyland,” an assemblage not just of scattered false beliefs, but whole lifestyles cobbled from them, which lands us in the 1960s and its ethos: “Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.” It’s not, but that’s where we are today, at least by Andersen’s account, though he hastens to add that approving nods to political correctness are not necessarily the same thing as endorsing perniciousness. Throughout, the author names names—Dr. Oz, for one, won’t be happy, and neither will Oprah—and takes no prisoners, offering incitement for the rest of us to do the same. A spirited, often entertaining rant against things as they are. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Protestants, Freedom, Religion, Mormon, Conspiracy Theory, Show Business, Suburbs, Hippies, Intellectuals, Entertainment, Politics, Digital Age, Spiritual, Liberals, Industrialization, Disney World
ISBN: 9781400067213
[Book #88505]
Price: $42.50