11-17-2021, 09:12 PM
This was both very good and very disturbing. It's sort of a history of American religion, ideas, and obsessions. He starts with the Puritans, and their distrust of the religious establishment and belief in individual revelation. Then he moves through all sorts of things, mainly religion, but also Barnum, snake oil salesmen, investment bubbles, Disneyland, 1960s counterculture and more. It's a very interesting history with a lot of strange trivia.
Basically he sees people with a tenuous grip on reality as central to the story of America, and that it's gotten worse with the internet and social media because everything spreads more easily. That's what's disturbing about it.
Recommended as a history of crazy thinking in the U.S.
Basically he sees people with a tenuous grip on reality as central to the story of America, and that it's gotten worse with the internet and social media because everything spreads more easily. That's what's disturbing about it.
Recommended as a history of crazy thinking in the U.S.
the hands that guide me are invisible