How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 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.

Author: Francis Wheen
ISBN-10: 158648348X
ISBN-13: 9781586483487
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Language: English
Published: 07/06/2005
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 8.26h x 5.52w x 0.89d

Review Citation(s):
People Weekly 09/12/2005 pg. 59
Kliatt 01/01/2006 pg. 32