Fantasyland
How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
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Fantasyland
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Narrated by:
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Kurt Andersen
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Written by:
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Kurt Andersen
About this listen
A razor-sharp thinker offers a new understanding of our post-truth world and explains the American instinct to believe in make-believe, from the Pilgrims to P. T. Barnum to Disneyland to zealots of every stripe...to Donald Trump.
In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen demonstrates that what's happening in our country today - this strange, post-factual, "fake news" moment we're all living through - is not something entirely new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character and path. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by impresarios and their audiences, by hucksters and their suckers. Believe-whatever-you-want fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA.
Over the course of five centuries - from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy 60s, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials - our peculiar love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails.
From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies - every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. Little by little, and then more quickly in the last several decades, the American invent-your-own-reality legacy of the Enlightenment superseded its more sober, rational, and empirical parts. We gave ourselves over to all manner of crackpot ideas and make-believe lifestyles designed to console or thrill or terrify us. In Fantasyland, Andersen brilliantly connects the dots that define this condition, portrays its scale and scope, and offers a fresh, bracing explanation of how our American journey has deposited us here.
Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand the politics and culture of 21st-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must listen to this book.
©2017 Kurt Andersen (P)2017 Random House AudioWhat the critics say
What listeners say about Fantasyland
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 2020-07-12
as good as everyone says
surprisingly the guy can narrate really well. Have had some bad experiences with author/narrators but this is good
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- CT
- 2017-11-07
A timely and important book
Succinct and entertaining, enlightening and funny, it’s an absolutely essential guide to how we got to our absurd present.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Matthew MacMartin
- 2018-11-02
Exactly what u expect
Burned through this wonderfully deep expose on the history of how and why America is bat shit crazy in so many ways, yet no other modern western nation comes even close. If after reading the description you have a thought you may enjoy this book, you will.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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- A.O
- 2020-12-11
An amazing depiction of America and the "Dream"
This book traces through history many common "tropes" we've come to know as "fact"... and have inserted into our belief systems as "reality". We all have the choice for what we want to believe is "real"... but do we always know that we're making choices on the back of decisions made in history and carried forward by the big players in American history? Fantasyland gives us all the opportunity to decide what is "really" America and also what does that mean to our individual "belief" choices.
Would recommend this book to everyone interested in understanding why "fake news" can mean all things to all people so easily as well. Great job by the Author!
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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- Trevor
- 2018-01-29
Overall interesting, but dragged in places
I found the book to be generally interesting, though I wish the author had spent more time on the earlier, historical parts of the book and less on the more recent parts.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Paul Donnett
- 2021-10-04
One of the most important books I’ve ever read
Taking shots at neither conservatives nor liberals specifically, but at fantasy thinking in both camps that threatens to pull us further apart, Fantasyland is fearless, thought-provoking, essential reading that offers a way forward through truly unusual times. Andersen’s writing is matched by his reading. A pleasure to listen and to ponder.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Desmond C.
- 2018-01-27
So that's how Trump became president !
This is a long but thought-provoking thesis which explains a lot about current American culture.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Shoe Monger
- 2018-06-04
Never finished
Listened to a radio talk show with the author, he seemed funny and amusing. I thought I would purchase his book to review his book but as a Canadian...it's a little to American bureaucracy for me and didn't get through the first chapter.
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1 person found this helpful