Book Review of "The Age of American Unreason" by Susan Jacoby

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The Age of American Unreason. [Soft cover]

by Susan Jacoby

384 pages, $26.00

ISBN-13: 978-1616877170

Nonfiction

Review by Steven King, MBA, MEd

Susan Jacoby starts with good intentions since her desire is to survey why America is branded as anti-intellectual. A cursory investigation of many segments of our culture indicates that a quest for reason is far from the minds of most people. America's ranking concerning education in the world would seem to indicate that introspective reasoning was truly a thing of the past.

Jacoby's mission is admirable even if her thesis is not.

When a secular atheist attempts to write a book about the unreasonableness of anything, it begs the question almost immediately: What is the source of reason? People ascribing to various faith beliefs will answer that question very differently than she did. Should one purporting to write from a totally secular stance be given greater latitude than one who would attempt the same premise but from religious grounds?

Instead of agreeing to disagree, which always seems to be a stretch for anyone purporting to be secular, Jacoby wastes no time earmarking religious fundamentalism as one of the main causes of anti-rationalism in America. In just the first 20 or so pages, she indicates that those who believe in a coming Messiah only have beliefs that are "...dangerous fallacies." Yet, in the same paragraph, she contends for the Constitutional rights that allow the religiously misguided to have their particular faith - a kind of intellectual snobbery, since in Jacoby's opinion, atheism is the only intelligent stance on faith.

The rest of the book weaves a strange amalgamation of blame. Jacoby gleefully wanders through a minefield to determine what is to blame for America's lack of reason. The reader will get the impression that she is pro-communism, pro-evolution, anti-technology, but pro-reading. Where she can, she'll conflate, a word she's particularly fond of, her current topic with an anti-religious sentiment.

The book is not completely without merit. Her chapter about infotainment hits the proverbial nail on the head about "why" America lacks reason. Collectively, we desire instant gratification without the cerebral task of working to understand something. Perhaps if our culture encouraged reading with the same enthusiasm it does of the latest technological release more rational thought would break forth.

Jacoby would have produced a masterpiece if she had not used her book to bash religiosity. Individuals do, and will continue to have, religious difference. A more poignant thesis might have been to have focused on "how" to encourage Americans to read.

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood - Book Review

Award-winning author James Glieck, who wrote "Chaos" and "Genius," has the depressingly encouraging answer to this waterfall of information that overtakes us by the hours as gigaflops and teraflops literally pour fourth from the disk farms of the world and onto the Internet burying us ever more deeply in even more information - the Genie is out of the bottle and it won't go away.

Was it ever thus or did information just magically appear one day and need some sort of handling, rearranging, reinterpreting or reinventing? The answer is simple: information has been with us since the beginning, at first passed from shaman to son, who learned not only the "tribe's" story, but any new experiences that were picked up along the way that were bound to the story for the next generation. This went on for thousands of years and it was easy because things seldom strayed from the "truths" known. With the invention of illumination, the West was able to store its information as it was written - never changing as the keeper of information was happy with it remaining as it was. The invention of moveable type - actually a product of Chinese innovation 4,000 years ago - followed quickly surrounded us with more information and opinion. There was not more "keeper of the flame," as it were.

That invention alone let the Genie out of the bottle, never to return, although the flood of information turned from a trickle into a torrent nearly overnight (in historical terms) as the printing press churned out information that was once restricted to an elite. Soon, as they saying goes, the "elite was us" as information became more and more a director of our lives.

Soon information for its own sake was the norm as the information of the ages was worked on by the new masters to define everything from apples falling on our head (magnetism) to the ending of the "flat earth" theory to the ending of the earth-centric view of things. While Glieck doesn't specifically mention studies the contributions of Galileo, Copernicus, Humanism and others, they are there tacitly in the background as we run into the age of the machine and the literal deluge of information that it brought.

Yet, while never mentioning the "scribes" or tinkerers of the information age, directly, he does mention the greats who were successful in beginning to organize some of this information such as Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first "computer," a large textile machine that changed manufacturing with punched brass cards that told the machine how to reconfigure itself.

There's the Lady Ada Byron, by some accounts the first computer programmer, for whom Ada is named and its spreads rapidly from there as our historical narrative turns to the thinkers of the Information Age, Turing, Hawking and others as the Information Age begins to cascade toward the first real computer ENIAC by RCA in 1948 (where coveys of white-smocked technicians raced up and down aisles that housed rack-after-rack of heat-sensitive triode tubes to replace tubes that constantly failed so that computations could continue - at the time, the world's estimate for computers was eight or 10 maximum).

Now, a new meaning could be ascribed the old saw: "Apres moi le deluge" as the floodgates of the information age open, constantly surrounding us with information and changing information and new additions to information to the Internet and Web and the world of "Social Computing" with its "Facebook," nameless "Tweeting," Instant Messaging, Texting and more and more.

At one time it literally took eons for information to change to now when eons worth of information changes in seconds, constantly surrounding us with a reality that has changed the way we think and act. We are as much prisoners of this onrush of information as its participants and creators. Glieck's seminal work points this out.

Roberto Sedycias works as an IT consultant for ecommUS-Books

Book Review of "The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America" by Dr Drew Pinsky

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The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism is Seducing America [Hardcover]

by Dr. Drew Pinsky and S. Mark Young

288 pages, $26.99

ISBN-13: 978-1616794309

Nonfiction

Andy Warhol certainly earned more than his "15 minutes of fame" as a filmmaker who helped pioneer and popularize pop art. Warhol venerated Hollywood by saying, "I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic." Certainly all would agree that it takes a special caliber of person to rise to stardom in today's media frenzied world. It might take someone who is pretty much in love with himself.

A few decades later life confirms that everyone is in love with celebrity - especially celebrities. In fact, celebrities demonstrate extremely strong narcissistic personality traits - which can be classified as a type of personality disorder known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). It is probably safe to assume that a strong desire for celebrity lurks within each of us. Is that a problem? Does the reality of various celebrity scandals which run rampant over the news wire set up increasing levels of narcissistic tendencies in those who are lured by such behavior?

Dr. Drew Pinsky, a board certified psychiatrist who has a lot of experience speaking with celebrities on VH1's Celebrity Rehab thinks so. He works with Mark Young to produce a detailed analysis to illustrate how celebrity narcissism is actually luring America into a vicious trap.

Since technology has given anyone with a video camera the ability to have instant fame through venues such as YouTube, being obsessed with celebrity can lead to dangerous mimicry of the worst celebrity behavior. Celebrities seem larger than life and can be especially unsympathetic to anyone hurt by their strange behavior. Copying celebrity behavior can lead to problems for everyone in society.

Who is most prone to ape such behavior? Teenagers...since they have the greatest exposure to and encouragement to acquire technological goodies. When teenagers see body-image obsession, sexual acting-out, drug use, and diva behavior they can be programmed to inadvertently impersonate bad celebrity behavior.

Pinsky's examination skillfully delves into a few well-known celebrity lifestyles to illustrate how vapidly this disorder is manifested. Rather than providing the negative aspects of this personality disorder exclusively, the author ends with expert instruction to illustrate how parents can raise their children to prevent narcissistic tendencies.

As a special bonus, the author includes the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) so the reader can see how narcissistic he truly is...

If you enjoy the intersection of science and celebrity - this book is for you!

Review by Steven King, MBA, MEd