Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
“The Age of American Unreason picks, up where Richard Hofstadter left off. With analytic verve and deep historical knowledge, Susan Jacoby documents the dumbing down of our culture like a maestro. Make no mistake about it, this is an important book.”
—Presidential historian historian Douglas Brinkley
“To a country of underachievers and proud of it, this book delivers a magnificent, occasionally hilarious kick in the pants. Snap out of it, Jacoby says. Getting it right matters. Tough talk and wicked wit in the tradition of Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.”
—Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography
“Jacoby has written a brilliant, sad story of the anti-intellectualism and lack of reasonable thought that has put this country in one of the sorriest states in its history.”
—Helen Thomas, author of Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public
“This is one of the most eye-opening books I’ve read in a long time. Jacoby charts the intellectual and cultural currents that have characterized the United States since its founding and explains just how and why Anericans have recently become so, well, dumb. Anyone who cares about the future of our country will want to read it.”
—Marcia Angell, editor-in-chief emerita, New England Journal of Medicine
“This feerless jeremiad, at once passione, witty, and solidly grounded in facts, arrives at a propitious moment, when many Americans are perceivng that ignorance conjoined to arrogance can be deadly. This book deserves to be widely read, and especially by concerned parents. As Jacoby insists, it is only within families that some immunity to mind-numbing infotainment can be acquired. First, however, there must be a will to resist—and f this stirring book can’r rally it, nothing can.
—Frederick Crews, author of The Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays
REVIEWS OF FREETHINKERS
Freethinkers is a gutsy, passionate, intelligent book...a must read for those interested in the ways our nation’s most cherished traditions of freedom evolved.
—The Boston Globe, July 4, 2004
The great virtue of Susan Jacoby’s book is that it succeeds so well in...showing that secularism, agnosticism, and atheism are as American as cherry pie...In lucid and witty prose, Jacoby has uncovered the hidden history of secular America.
—Christopher Hitchens, Washington Post Book World
This book is fresh air for the lungs of those who defend the separation of church and state. Here, clearly written and without apologetics, is the noble record of the long struggle to retain America’s precious freedom of conscience, her pride for two centuries, now under threat from the political right as never before.
—Arthur Miller
Ardent and insightful, Ms. Jacoby seeks to rescue a proud tradition from the indifference of posterity...“Freethinker” is what rebels against spiritual authority once called themselves, and it ennobles the breed with, if she'll excuse the term, the holiest adjective in American politics...Ms. Jacoby is no polemicist. She appreciates the pull of religion—as community and creed—while criticizing her own side for taking refuge in rational disdain. Beliefs, she knows, cannot promote themselves: “Values are handed down more easily and thoroughly by permanent institutions than by marginalized radicals,” she writes. To change minds, “secular humanists must reclaim the language of passion and emotion from the religiously correct.”
—Michael Kazin, The New York Times, 3/31/04
Jacoby's antidote for...religious triumphalism is a detailed counter-history celebrating the accomplishments of the nation's longstanding secular tradition and recalling the individual courage and contributions of that tradition's leading lights...while the culture war will no doubt rage on over issues such as abortion, gay rights, and government subsidy of parochial schools, it is unlikely ever to vanquish the secularist hope—so vital to our history—that American remains what Jacoby quite poetically describes as a “nation founded not on dreams of justice in heaven but on the best human hopes for a more just earth.”
—Edward Lazarus, The Los Angeles Times, 4/11/04
Jacoby makes no bones about believing that freethinkers are American heroes...Freethinkers reminds us that free thought is not a peculiar vice or a discredited anachronism. It is a profound and continuing strain in the American experiment.
—Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 4/25/04
In her brave book Freethinkers, Susan Jacoby lays out the history of the often lonely battle to protect religion from government, and vice versa.”
—Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, 11/02/04
Freethinkers is not only a good book, it is a necessary one. This dramatic study offers a welcome reminder that the Founding Fathers were intent on keeping church and state fuly separated. Lively, impassione, and impartial, Susan Jacoby’s argument deserves more than respect; it deserves support.
—Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University
Freethinkers persuasively documents the moral and political importance of the secular tradition to a free people. It arrives at an especially opportune time for humanists and the religious alike. There is no more important book on the subject.
—Norman Dorsen, president, American Civil Liberties Union (1976–1991)
Susan Jacoby reminds us of one of our finest American traditions. With this striking and meticulous work, she has rescued the historic force of freethinking from political oblivion. Let us hope that this book points to a more rational future.
—Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape