How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions

by Francis Wheen

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786723522
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	07/06/2005
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	448 KB

About the Author

Francis Wheen is deputy editor of Private Eye and the editor of Lord Gnome's Literary Companion, the author of the bestselling How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World and Karl Marx: A Life, and a former columnist in the London Guardian. He has contributed to Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New Yorker, LA Times, and Washington Post, and has appeared on C-SPAN's Booknotes and National Public Radio.

Table of Contents

	Introduction: Dare to Know	1
1	The Voodoo Revolution	9
2	Old Snake-Oil, New Bottles	39
3	It's the End of the World as We Know It	62
4	The Demolition Merchants of Reality	75
5	The Catastrophists	113
6	With God on Our Side	153
7	Us and Them	161
8	The New Romantics	178
9	Forward to the Past	206
10	Voodoo Revisited	238
	Notes	289
	Index	306