Francis Wheen

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (eBook, ePUB)

A Short History of Modern Delusions

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

What characterizes our era? Cults, quacks, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo, that's what. In How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, Francis Wheen brilliantly laments the extraordinary rise of superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria. From Middle Eastern fundamentalism to the rise of lotteries, astrology to mysticism, poststructuralism to the Third Way, Wheen shows that there has been a pervasive erosion of Enlightenment values, which have been displaced by nonsense. And no country has a more vivid parade of the bogus and bizarre than the one founded to embody Enlightenment values: the USA. In turn comic, indignant, outraged, and just plain baffled by the idiocy of it all, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World is a masterful depiction of the absurdity of our times and a plea that we might just think a little more and believe a little less.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: PublicAffairs
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Juli 2005
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780786723522
• Artikelnr.: 49076110

Autorenporträt

Francis Wheen is deputy editor of Private Eye and the editor of Lord Gnome's Literary Companion, the author of the bestselling How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World and Karl Marx: A Life, and a former columnist in the London Guardian. He has contributed to Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New Yorker, LA Times, and Washington Post, and has appeared on C-SPAN's Booknotes and National Public Radio.

Rezensionen

'A brilliant, eccentric book.' Observer Book of the Year

'Wheen has a Swiftian relish for exposing the cant that attends the 'new rationality'...bullshit's enema number one.' Tim Adams, Observer

'Hugely enjoyable...delightful reading.'
Ferdinand Mount, Sunday Times

'Lightly and often hilariously told as it is, this book does make it clear that respect for truth and reason is retreating and mumbo-jumbo has a new confidence everywhere...This amusing, intelligent and elegantly argued book is as good a demonstration of the values it defends as could be imagined.'
Philip Hensher, Spectator

'This book is a manifesto for rescuing the greatest philosophical movement of the past millennium. You have a choice: either read it or, pre-emptively shred your brain in anticipation of the coming darkness.' Independent on Sunday