Full name: How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions

Author: Francis Wheen Year: 2004 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Non Fiction, Politics, History, Philosophy, Science Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads LibraryThing Amazon ISBNs: 9781586483487

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. Similar books: Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen Idiot America by Charles P. Pierce 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright Stranger Than We Can Imagine by John Higgs The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler A Colony in a Nation by Christopher Hayes The Lost Art of Drawing the Line by Philip K. Howard The Age Of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby The World As It Is by Chris Hedges God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari The Liberty Amendments by Mark R. Levin And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts The World Without Us by Alan Weisman The 5000 Year Leap by W. Cleon Skousen The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking Dopesick by Beth Macy