How long does it take to read The Age of American Unreason?
Susan Jacoby, Cassandra Campbell
The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby, Cassandra Campbell takes about 6 hours 33 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 33 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2008. 357 pages, about 98,175 words.
14 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 55 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 33 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 5 minutes |
The page count is the median across 8 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public.Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion.At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.From the Hardcover edition.
Subjects: Popular culture, Social aspects of Mass media, Civilization, Social conditions, Reason, American National characteristics
