How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World

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How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World

Author : Francis Wheen
Publisher : PublicAffairs
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2005-07-06
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780786723522

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How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen Pdf

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.

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World

Author : Francis Wheen
Publisher : Hachette UK
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2005-07-06
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780786723522

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How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen Pdf

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.

Idiot Proof

Author : Francis Wheen
Publisher : PublicAffairs
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2004-06-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1586482475

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Idiot Proof by Francis Wheen Pdf

In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next twenty-five years. In America and Britain, an era of weary consensus was displaced by the arrival of a political marriage of fiery idealists: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher transformed politics with a combination of breezy charm and assertive "Victorian values." In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that had last existed almost 1,300 years ago. Between them they succeeded in bringing the twentieth century to a premature close. By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History. What colonized the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason? Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of idiocy, the proof of which was to be found in every state, every work-place, and every library. In Idiot Proof , columnist Francis Wheen brilliantly evokes the key personalities of the post-political era—including Princess Diana and Deepak Chopra, Osama bin Laden and Nancy Reagan's astrologer—while lamenting the extraordinary rise in superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria over the past quarter of a century. In turn comic, indignant, outraged and just plain baffled by the idiocy of it all, Idiot Proof is a masterful depiction of the daftness of our times and a plea that we might just think a little more and believe a little less.

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen (Summary)

Author : QuickRead,Lea Schullery
Publisher : QuickRead.com
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2024-07-01
Category : Study Aids
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen (Summary) by QuickRead,Lea Schullery Pdf

Do you want more free book summaries like this? Download our app for free at https://www.QuickRead.com/App and get access to hundreds of free book and audiobook summaries. Learn about the short history of modern delusions. In today’s era, we have experienced an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo as we see a rise in cults, gurus, irrational panics, and moral confusion. According to Francis Wheen, this mumbo-jumbo has conquered the world and created a society full of superstition, relativism, and emotional hysteria. We see this in Middle Eastern fundamentalism, the rise of lotteries, astrology and mysticism, poststructuralism and the Third Way. In the Western societies of today, people have become disillusioned with mainstream politics and inundated with “self-improvement” books which have now become an $11 billion industry. The country that has become the most displaced by nonsense is the one founded to embody Enlightenment values: the USA. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World aims to reveal how far the absurdity of our times has come and examines how many aspects of our lives are influenced by superstition and irrationality versus reason. As you read, you’ll learn about the rise of neoliberalism and how its policies created today’s income inequality and why self-help books rose in popularity in response to these policies. You’ll even learn about post-structuralism and progressive politics and discover why you should be skeptical of the language and rhetoric they use.

The End of the World is Flat

Author : Simon Edge
Publisher : Eye Books (US&CA)
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2021-07-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781785632532

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The End of the World is Flat by Simon Edge Pdf

A satirical comedy featuring Christopher Columbus, a tech billionaire, and a global delusion. Mel Winterbourne is the founder of a small, single-issue charity in the obscure field of mapmaking. Its success in achieving modest aims attracts the attention of handsome tech billionaire Joey Talavera, who evicts Mel and hijacks her charity for his own ends: to convince the world that the earth is flat. Although his chances of doing so seem slim, Flat Earthery is an idea whose time has come. With the historical reputation of Christopher Columbus in free-fall, old-style 'globularism' becomes heretical for a new generation of angry, anti-Establishment free-thinkers. Teachers, politicians, and celebrities face ruin if they refuse to sign up to the new orthodoxy. For Mel, something must be done. Teaming up with a pariah tabloid journalist and a faded writer of gross-out movie comedies, she sets out to challenge Talavera and his deranged beliefs. Will history and the billionaire's own family origins be their unexpected ally? Using his trademark mix of history and satire to poke fun at modern foibles, Simon Edge is at his razor-sharp best in a caper that may be much more relevant than you think.

Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia

Author : Francis Wheen
Publisher : HarperCollins UK
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2012-05-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9780007441204

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Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia by Francis Wheen Pdf

Strange Days Indeed tells the story of how the paranoia exemplified by Nixon and Wilson became the defining characteristic of western politics and culture in the 1970s.

The Threat to Reason

Author : Dan Hind
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2020-05-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781789603996

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The Threat to Reason by Dan Hind Pdf

Today, media commentators, intellectuals and politicians declare that western science and rationality are threatened by irrational enemies. Evangelicals, postmodernists, and Islamists are on the march, they say. The Rome that science built is under siege. But there's a problem with these stirring attempts to defend the truth. They aren't true. In this urgent new book, Dan Hind confronts the great machinery of deception in which we live, and which now threatens to destroy our civilization. In particular, he takes to task a group of prominent intellectuals who have exaggerated the threat posed by the so-called forces of unreason-religion, postmodernism and other "mumbo-jumbo." The commentators, says Hind, distract us from much more pressing threats to an open democratic society based on freedom of speech and inquiry. This book shows that the real threats to reason aren't wacky or foreign or stupid; they reside in our state and corporate bureaucracies - and, one way or another, they probably pay your salary. In recovering the idea of Enlightenment, Hind explores its vital importance and reveals how it can help us to achieve a truly democratic politics, in which we have a genuine say in the decisions that are taken on our behalf.

Mumbo Jumbo

Author : Ishmael Reed
Publisher : Open Road Media
Page : 358 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2013-01-29
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781453287972

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Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed Pdf

DIVDIVIshmael Reed’s inspired fable of the ragtime era, in which a social movement threatens to suppress the spread of black culture—hailed by Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred greatest books of the Western canon/divDIV In 1920s America, a plague is spreading fast. From New Orleans to Chicago to New York, the “Jes Grew” epidemic makes people desperate to dance, overturning social norms in the process. Anyone is vulnerable and when they catch it, they’ll bump and grind into a frenzy. Working to combat the Jes Grew infection are the puritanical Atonists, a group bent on cultivating a “Talking Android,” an African American who will infiltrate the unruly black communities and help crush the outbreak. But PaPa LaBas, a houngan voodoo priest, is determined to keep his ancient culture—including a key spiritual text—alive. /divDIV /divDIVSpanning a dizzying host of genres, from cinema to academia to mythology, Mumbo Jumbo is a lively ride through a key decade of American history. In addition to ragtime, blues, and jazz, Reed’s allegory draws on the Harlem Renaissance, the Back to Africa movement, and America’s occupation of Haiti. His style throughout is as avant-garde and vibrant as the music at its center./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Ishmael Reed including rare images of the author./div/div

Charlatan

Author : Pope Brock
Publisher : Crown
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2008-02-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780307409652

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Charlatan by Pope Brock Pdf

The inspiration for the 2016 Sundance Film Festival documentary, NUTS!. “An extraordinary saga of the most dangerous quack of all time...entrancing” –USA Today In 1917, John R. Brinkley–America’s most brazen con man–introduced an outlandish surgical method for restoring fading male virility. It was all nonsense, but thousands of eager customers quickly made “Dr.” Brinkley one of America’s richest men–and a national celebrity. The great quack buster Morris Fishbein vowed to put the country’ s “most daring and dangerous” charlatan out of business, yet each effort seemed only to spur Brinkley to new heights of ingenuity, and the worlds of advertising, broadcasting, and politics soon proved to be equally fertile grounds for his potent brand of flimflam. Culminating in a decisive courtroom confrontation, Charlatan is a marvelous portrait of a boundlessly audacious rogue on the loose in an America ripe for the bamboozling.

A Particular Kind of Black Man

Author : Tope Folarin
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2020-08-11
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781501171833

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A Particular Kind of Black Man by Tope Folarin Pdf

**One of Time’s 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer** An NPR Best Book of 2019 An “electrifying” (Publishers Weekly) debut novel from Rhodes Scholar and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing about a Nigerian family living in Utah and their uneasy assimilation to American life. Living in small-town Utah has always been an uncomfortable fit for Tunde Akinola’s family, especially for his Nigeria-born parents. Though Tunde speaks English with a Midwestern accent, he can’t escape the children who rub his skin and ask why the black won’t come off. As he struggles to fit in, he finds little solace from his parents who are grappling with their own issues. Tunde’s father, ever the optimist, works tirelessly chasing his American dream while his wife, lonely in Utah without family and friends, sinks deeper into schizophrenia. Then one otherwise-ordinary morning, Tunde’s mother wakes him with a hug, bundles him and his baby brother into the car, and takes them away from the only home they’ve ever known. But running away doesn’t bring her, or her children, any relief; once Tunde’s father tracks them down, she flees to Nigeria, and Tunde never feels at home again. He spends the rest of his childhood and young adulthood searching for connection—to the wary stepmother and stepbrothers he gains when his father remarries; to the Utah residents who mock his father’s accent; to evangelical religion; to his Texas middle school’s crowd of African-Americans; to the fraternity brothers of his historically black college. In so doing, he discovers something that sends him on a journey away from everything he has known. Sweeping, stirring, and perspective-shifting, A Particular Kind of Black Man is “wild, vulnerable, lived…A study of the particulate self, the self as a constellation of moving parts” (The New York Times Book Review).

Karl Marx

Author : Francis Wheen
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 470 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 039304923X

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Karl Marx by Francis Wheen Pdf

Looks at the life of the father of Communism focusing primarily on the human side of the man rather than his works.

The Two Percent Solution

Author : Matthew Miller
Publisher : PublicAffairs
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2005-02-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1586482890

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The Two Percent Solution by Matthew Miller Pdf

Suppose someone told you that for just two cents on the national dollar we could have a country where everyone had health insurance, full-time workers earned a living wage, poor children had great teachers in fixed-up schools, and politicians no longer had to grovel to wealthy donors. And suppose that when we were done, government would still be smaller than it was when Ronald Reagan was president. If you're like most people, you'd probably think that for two cents on the dollar this sounds like an intriguing deal. But 2 percent of America's GDP is more than 200 billion a year--way beyond what politicians in Washington think is possible. Between our proper intuition that 2 percent is a small amount, and the Washington consensus that a 2 percent shift in priorities is beyond imagining, lies the opportunity to transform American politics. In this agenda-setting book, Matthew Miller challenges our country (and those who would lead it) to change the way we think about our public responsibilities before the baby boomers' retirement siphons all the money out of the system. The Two Percent Solution is a call to arms that no serious candidate, Republican or Democrat, can afford to ignore.

The Fix

Author : Damian Thompson
Publisher : HarperCollins UK
Page : 156 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2012-05-24
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780007436118

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The Fix by Damian Thompson Pdf

Addictions to iphones, painkillers, cupcakes, alcohol and sex are taking over our lives.

The Wretched of the Earth

Author : Frantz Fanon
Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2007-12-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780802198853

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The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon Pdf

The sixtieth anniversary edition of Frantz Fanon’s landmark text, now with a new introduction by Cornel West First published in 1961, and reissued in this sixtieth anniversary edition with a powerful new introduction by Cornel West, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a masterfuland timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle, and a continuing influence on movements from Black Lives Matter to decolonization. A landmark text for revolutionaries and activists, The Wretched of the Earth is an eternal touchstone for civil rights, anti-colonialism, psychiatric studies, and Black consciousness movements around the world. Alongside Cornel West’s introduction, the book features critical essays by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha. This sixtieth anniversary edition of Fanon’s most famous text stands proudly alongside such pillars of anti-colonialism and anti-racism as Edward Said’s Orientalism and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

The Case For Democracy

Author : Natan Sharansky,Ron Dermer
Publisher : PublicAffairs
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2009-02-23
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780786737062

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The Case For Democracy by Natan Sharansky,Ron Dermer Pdf

Natan Sharansky believes that the truest expression of democracy is the ability to stand in the middle of a town square and express one's views without fear of imprisonment. He should know. A dissident in the USSR, Sharansky was jailed for nine years for challenging Soviet policies. During that time he reinforced his moral conviction that democracy is essential to both protecting human rights and maintaining global peace and security. Sharansky was catapulted onto the Israeli political stage in 1996. In the last eight years, he has served as a minister in four different Israeli cabinets, including a stint as Deputy Prime Minister, playing a key role in government decision making from the peace negotiations at Wye to the war against Palestinian terror. In his views, he has been as consistent as he has been stubborn: Tyranny, whether in the Soviet Union or the Middle East, must always be made to bow before democracy. Drawing on a lifetime of experience of democracy and its absence, Sharansky believes that only democracy can safeguard the well-being of societies. For Sharansky, when it comes to democracy, politics is not a matter of left and right, but right and wrong. This is a passionately argued book from a man who carries supreme moral authority to make the case he does here: that the spread of democracy everywhere is not only possible, but also essential to the survival of our civilization. His argument is sure to stir controversy on all sides; this is arguably the great issue of our times.