Idiot Proof: A Short History Of Modern Delusions

Wheen, Francis

ISBN 10: 1586482475 / ISBN 13: 9781586482473

Published by PublicAffairs, 2004

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Synopsis:

A savagely witty account of the last quarter century, when despite a great leap forward in technology there has been a huge, regressive collapse in our ability to think straight-so that everything has begun to stop making sense . In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next twenty-five years. In America and Britain, an era of weary consensus was displaced by the arrival of a political marriage of fiery idealists: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher transformed politics with a combination of breezy charm and assertive "Victorian values. " In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that had last existed almost 1,300 years ago. Between them they succeeded in bringing the twentieth century to a premature close. By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History. What colonized the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason? Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of idiocy, the proof of which was to be found in every state, every work-place, and every library. In Idiot Proof, columnist Francis Wheen brilliantly evokes the key personalities o

About the Author:

Francis Wheen is deputy editor of Private Eye, the editor of Lord Gnome's Literary Companion, the author of Karl Marx: A Life and a columnist in the London Guardian. He has been a contributor to Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. He has appeared on Booknotes on C-SPAN and on National Public Radio.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Idiot Proof: A Short History Of Modern ...
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Publication Date: 2004
Binding: hardcover
Condition: Very Good