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Overview
How did we get here?
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.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“This is a blockbuster of a book. Take a deep breath and dive in.”—Tom Brokaw
“[An] absorbing, must-read polemic . . . a provocative new study of America’s cultural history.”—Newsday
“Compelling and totally unnerving.”—The Village Voice
“A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.”—The Guardian
“This is an important book—the indispensable book—for understanding America in the age of Trump.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781400067213 |
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Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 09/05/2017 |
Pages: | 480 |
Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Now Entering Fantasyland
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Fantasyland"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Kurt Andersen.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1 Now Entering Fantasyland 3
Part I The Conjuring of America: 1517-1789
2 I Believe, Therefore I Am Right: The Protestants 15
3 All That Glitters: The Gold-Seekers 18
4 Building Our Own Private Heaven on Earth: The Puritans 24
5 The God-Given Freedom to Believe in God 32
6 Imaginary Friends and Enemies: The Early Satanic Panics 37
7 The First Me Century: Religion Gets American 43
8 Meanwhile, in the Eighteenth-Century Reality-Based Community 50
Part II United States of Amazing: The 1800s
9 The First Great Delirium 57
10 The All-American Fan Fiction of Joseph Smith, Prophet 68
11 Quack Nation: Magical but Modern 74
12 Fantastic Business: The Gold Rush Inflection Point 82
13 In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Conspiracy Theory Habit 88
14 The War Between States of Mind 92
15 Ten Million Little Houses on the Prairie 98
16 Fantasy Industrialized 104
Part III A Long Arc Bending Toward Reason: 1900-1960
17 Progress and Backlash 117
18 The Biggest Backlash: Brand-New Old-Time Religion 122
19 The Business of America Is Show Business 135
20 Big Rock Candy Mountains: Utopia in the Suburbs and the Sun 142
21 The 1950s Seemed So Normal 150
Part IV Big Bang: The 1960s and '70s
Introduction 173
22 Big Bang: The Hippies 176
23 Big Bang: The Intellectuals 189
24 Big Bang: The Christians 198
25 Big Bang: Politics and Government and Conspiracies 209
26 Big Bang: Living in a Land of Entertainment 221
Part V Fantasyland Scales: From the 1980s Through the Turn of the Century
Introduction 237
27 Making Make-Believe More Realistic and Real Life More Make-Believe 239
28 Forever Young: Kids "R" Us Syndrome 247
29 The Reagan Era and the Start of the Digital Age 252
30 American Religion from the Turn of the Millennium 265
31 Our Wilder Christianities: Belief and Practice 272
32 America Versus the Godless Civilized World: Why Are We So Exceptional? 286
33 Magical but Not Necessarily Christian, Spiritual but Not Religious 293
34 Blue-Chip Witch Doctors: The Reenchantment of Medicine 300
35 How the Mainstream Enabled Fantasyland: Squishies, Cynics, and Believers 306
36 Anything Goes-Unless It Picks My Pocket or Breaks My Leg 317
Part VI The Problem with Fantasyland: From the 1980s to the Present and Beyond
37 The Inmates Running the Asylum Decide Monsters Are Everywhere 325
38 Reality Is a Conspiracy: The X-Filing of America 342
39 Mad as Hell, the New Voice of the People 356
40 When the GOP Went Off the Rails 362
41 Liberals Denying Science 376
42 Gun Crazy 381
43 Final Fantasy-Industrial Complex 390
44 Our Inner Children? They're Going to Disney World! 401
45 The Economic Dreamtime 409
46 As Fantasyland Goes, So Goes the Nation 413
Acknowledgments 441
Index 443