Books like The Age of American Unreason — picked by fans

The co-creator of SPY magazine, Kurt Andersen was my hero in high school. He’s been an NPR radio host, a novelist, a magazine editor, and a co-author with Alec Baldwin on their Trump book. But this book feels like all the thinking he’s done in those places put in one place. It’s a textbook of American history from the Puritans until today, through the lens of our special predilection for conspiracy, con artists, and fabulists, both on the left and the right, and how it all culminates in the 1960s. So smart, so funny, so jealous.

Finished in 1907, this famed book is worth rereading today for awareness that its pervasive pessimism proved totally wrong. Adams declared that western democracy was doomed, that freedom had no chance if forced into war versus dictatorship, that the pace change was overwhelming, that the U.S. educational system could not possibly teach science. A century later, democracy prevailed in both world wars, free nations out-produce dictatorships 10 to 1, and America has won more Nobel prizes in the sciences than the next five nations combined. Pessimism has long been with us – and almost always been wrong.

It’s hard to understand why people often don’t like well-educated leaders. When leaders in public or high-profile roles use research, evidence, and facts to guide their work, people often criticize them for acting like “know it alls.”

But great school leaders are well-read and should be interested in evidence and facts. In Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Hofstadter argues that anti-intellectualism—hostility toward intellectualism, academic theories, and science—is a core American value that applies to politics, religion, and not just education.

Given that the current US politics deemphasizes the importance of reading, studying, and facts, this book helps us understand why many parents and communities don’t value the people who lead schools. This book will help readers understand the current conditions of our country.

Nichols doesn’t just critique anti-intellectualism—he lays bare the cultural shift that made it acceptable to dismiss expertise altogether. What resonated with me is his central claim: that the erosion of trust in specialists is not merely ignorance, but a form of civic arrogance, reinforced by misinformation and a collapsing public discourse.

I don’t agree with all of his diagnoses—particularly when it comes to the role of the academy—but I share his concern that the rejection of expertise isn’t just bad for science or public health. It’s corrosive to democracy itself. This book made me reflect on how we, as citizens, must rebuild the norms of epistemic humility and shared knowledge that democratic life depends on.

Smith, professor of communications at the University of Arkansas, examines the stories that Southerners have told about themselves—the “myths” of the South. The Old South/Lost Cause/New South myths “controlled Southern culture and Southern rhetoric for one hundred fifty years,” he argues, but by the mid-twentieth century, the strain between myth and reality finally became too great and “a period of mythic confusion,” ensued. By the 1970s, however, Southern artists, scholars, journalists, politicians, and preachers—both Black and white—had forged a new myth, based on the themes of distinctiveness, racial civility, and community. When Smith wrote, he was confident that there will always be some myth of the South, that it won’t become a mere quadrant of the U.S. with a "dysfunctional amythic culture." We shall see.

I loved this book because it takes three creative industries–television production, record companies, and magazine journalism–and interviews workers about what makes them feel bad about working in the industry and what makes them feel good. ‘Good creative work’ makes us feel motivated, fulfilled, and self-realized. Bad work makes us experience things like powerlessness and self-estrangement.

This is really important, given the growing importance of wellness and mental health in the workplace. Although it was published in 2011 for a largely academic audience, it still has profound things to say about creating a workplace that is positive and not psychologically corrosive. 

Early in my career I was responsible for running the UK brand tracking and customer experience studies of a global brand. I was constantly battling to reconcile what the research told me with what the real data from the business showed was actually going on. This book, written by someone who was a senior editor at the Gallup market research company for years, helped me appreciate some of the reasons that survey results are inaccurate. It also reveals how opinion polls can be used to distort elections and manipulate people – scary stuff.

The author of this book, John B. Thompson, is one of my favorites.

I love his 1995 masterpiece Media and Modernity which offers a general social theory of the media. In 1997, Thompson published a chapter on the social theory of scandal, and finally in 2000, he published the book I am now recommending here.

What I love about Political Scandal is that the book is both incisive and disturbing, and that the author succeeds in showing us how scandal unlocks essential secrets about power and politics today. This book is a very useful source for the students in media, political, and critical discourse analysis.    

Written forty years ago at the dawn of the personal computer age and well before the internet and the rise of social media, Postman’s book is a gripping read, a 20th-century warning for 21st-century readers about the dark consequences of the replacement of print media by visual forms of entertainment masquerading as information, a transformation that has had a devastating impact upon the ability of a citizenry to make informed decisions. 

In his relatively brief account, Postman described the way in which visual media overshadowed print in the 20th century. In that process, the “information” transmitted on a flickering screen became shaped by the need for brevity and, above all, the values of entertainment designed to “sell” products that cater to the emotional needs of the paying audience. While the printed words could be read and re-read for a more complex understanding of deeper meanings, electronic images were fleeting and,… show more.

For me, every book by Clifford (Cliff) Christians is always a celebration. I met Cliff in 1996 and we kept in touch ever since then. Christians has contributed to the field of media ethics more than any other scholar I know. In this book, Christians explores the fundamentals of ethics and justice in moral theory. In addition to “the usual suspects,” i.e., Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, and Max Weber, Christians explores modern liberal philosophy, feminist philosophy, African philosophy, Latin American liberation theology, Confucianism, and Islam. He does this in his usual dazzling and most comprehensive style, exhibiting wide knowledge of the literature and brilliant analysis that adds layers upon layers of sharp insights. As in his previous books, Christians invokes an ethics of care and humanity in order to alleviate poverty, homelessness, and unemployment, issues that trouble Western and non-Western societies, albeit in different… show more.