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Amusing Ourselves to Death
- Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
- Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach
- Length: 4 hrs and 49 mins
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Publisher's summary
In this eloquent and persuasive book, Neil Postman examines the deep and broad effects of television culture on the manner in which we conduct our public affairs, and how "entertainment values" have corrupted the very way we think.
As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given less and less expression in the form of the printed word, they are rapidly being reshaped to suit the requirements of television. And because television is a visual medium, whose images are most pleasurably apprehended when they are fast-moving and dynamic, discourse on television has little tolerance for argument, hypothesis, or explanation. Postman argues that public discourse, the advancing of arguments in logical order for the public good, once a hallmark of American culture, is being converted from exposition and explanation to entertainment.
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In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn’t we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia?
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Every Human (seriously, everyone) Read This!
- By aaron on 04-27-22
By: Douglas Murray
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The Art of Nonfiction
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Rand takes listeners step by step through the writing process, providing insightful observations and invaluable techniques along the way. She discusses the psychological aspects of writing and the roles played by the conscious and subconscious mind. She talks about articles and books, explaining how to select a subject and theme, how to identify your audience, and how to write the first draft.
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Great Content, but the narrator is annoying
- By Ms on 01-26-09
By: Ayn Rand
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What Are We Doing Here?
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexis de Tocqueville, inform our political consciousness or discussing how beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.
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Unpersuasive and a bit repetitive
- By Adam Shields on 03-07-18
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American Sketches
- Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Cotter Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist. The people he writes about have an awesome intelligence, in most cases, but that is not the secret of their success.
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Not Really Sketches
- By DAVID on 11-04-11
By: Walter Isaacson
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The Dream of Enlightenment
- The Rise of Modern Philosophy
- By: Anthony Gottlieb
- Narrated by: Anthony Gottlieb
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Dream of Enlightenment, Anthony Gottlieb expertly navigates a second great explosion of thought, taking us to northern Europe in the wake of its wars of religion and the rise of Galilean science. In a relatively short period - from the early 1640s to the eve of the French Revolution - Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume all made their mark. The Dream of Enlightenment tells their story and that of the birth of modern philosophy.
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Enlightenment meets Neuroscience
- By Rodger on 12-05-19
By: Anthony Gottlieb
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The Dream of Reason, New Edition
- A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance
- By: Anthony Gottlieb
- Narrated by: Anthony Gottlieb
- Length: 19 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Already a classic, this landmark study of early Western thought now appears in a new edition with expanded coverage of the Middle Ages. Author Anthony Gottlieb looks afresh at the writings of the great thinkers, questions much of conventional wisdom, and explains his findings with unbridled brilliance and clarity. From the pre-Socratic philosophers through the celebrated days of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, up to Renaissance visionaries like Erasmus and Bacon, philosophy emerges here as a phenomenon unconfined by any one discipline.
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Bias spoils the work.
- By MC on 08-21-20
By: Anthony Gottlieb
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Jewish Comedy
- A Serious History
- By: Jeremy Dauber
- Narrated by: Jeremy Dauber
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In a major work of scholarship both erudite and very funny, Jeremy Dauber traces the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from Biblical times to the age of Twitter. Organizing his book thematically into what he calls the seven strands of Jewish comedy - including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar - Dauber explores the ways Jewish comedy has dealt with persecution, assimilation, and diaspora through the ages. He explains the rise and fall of popular comic archetypes such as the Jewish mother, the JAP, and the schlemiel and schlimazel.
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Not funny
- By supermantwo on 08-31-20
By: Jeremy Dauber
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Atheism for Dummies
- By: Dale McGowan PhD
- Narrated by: Paul Mantell
- Length: 15 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Atheism For Dummies offers a brief history of atheist philosophy and its evolution, explores it as a historical and cultural movement, covers important historical writings on the subject, and discusses the nature of ethics and morality in the absence of religion. A simple, yet intelligent exploration of an often misunderstood philosophy.
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Great topic...irritating narrator
- By Duke Playbent on 10-26-14
By: Dale McGowan PhD
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The Pun Also Rises
- How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics
- By: John Pollack
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The Pun Also Rises is an authoritative yet playful exploration of a practice that is common, in one form or another, to virtually every language on earth. At once entertaining and educational, this engaging book answers fundamental questions: Just what is a pun, and why do people make them? How did punning impact the development of human language, and how did that drive creativity and progress? And why, after centuries of decline, does the pun still matter?
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Punderful Little Book
- By B. Lane on 01-10-13
By: John Pollack
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The Metaphysical Club
- By: Louis Menand
- Narrated by: Henry Leyva
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Abridged
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Hardly a club in the conventional sense, the organization referred to in the title of this superb literary hybrid (part history, part biography, part philosophy) consisted of four members and probably existed for less than nine months.
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The Great American Experiment
- By Victoria on 12-08-03
By: Louis Menand
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Truth and Truthfulness
- By: Bernard Williams
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams. Writing with his characteristic combinationof passion and elegant simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more than we might imagine.
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Content is excellent but the sound quality falters
- By Andy B. on 09-08-23
By: Bernard Williams
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What listeners say about Amusing Ourselves to Death
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Andrew
- 09-29-12
JUST SLOW DOWN THE READING SPEED
What made the experience of listening to Amusing Ourselves to Death the most enjoyable?
Seriously negative reviewers, this book is so important for ANYONE and EVERYONE to be exposed to. Use the feature of Audible to slow down the reading speed of the book.
This book, along with books like The Influencing Machine and Republic Lost, are what are going to make difference in how hard or soft the USA falls from it's place as the super power in the world.
Reviewing based on the speed of the reading...you've GOT to be KIDDING ME.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Seth H. Wilson
- 02-18-15
A warning to the TV generation
It must be remembered that this book is almost 30 years old, so it's inevitable that some of its arguments no longer quite work. But in most ways they do. Moreover, they often apply to our current internet generation as well.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Brian
- 11-13-20
A mandatory read
Unbelievably, though written in 1984 about television this book did more to help me understand how modern society has been impacted by the internet than anything else I have read. If you like Sapiens or The Righteous Mind and are interested in understanding who we are as a society, you will love it.
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- Nathan Fox
- 05-28-21
Dated But, Forward thinking from a unique voice.
Postman would have a freaking cow over what people do nowadays. can ya believe it?
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- Ahnonymous Josch
- 09-05-17
Should be mandatory reading in this era.
Absolutely brilliant book. If anything, it was far too short for this subject, even though it was written in the early days of cable television.
I can't wait to read more recent works by Neil Postman.
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- FK
- 03-11-21
Food for thought
Really interesting look at how entertainment shapes discourse, education, and cultire. Even though it was written a while ago, it is still very relevant to connect to social media today.
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Overall
- Harrison
- 11-29-21
Good
Before I started the book, I assumed it would be about how people in the West watch TV, play video games, and etc because they have nothing better to do.
The book was actually about how TVs effect on society changes everything into entertainment.
He talks about a lot of problems with changing everything into entertainment.
Like how it corrodes politics, public discourse, journalism, and education.
For some reason I had trouble giving a good summary on what this book is about.
(I can't tell if thats due to unclear main points from the writer, or just me having gaps in my memory)
That being said, I think he's right.
Even more so in the age of Social Media, Netflix, and video games. (All of these are VERY lucrative businesses right now. I think in 2019 the entertainment industry got $100 billion in investment, that's as much as the oil industry)
It's really interesting how something that happened to TV in the past is also happening on social media right now.
This book revealed to me that TV and social media often suffer from the same problems.
Both of which are causing serious damage to society in all these ways mentioned in the book.
I guess TV and social media are more similar than we realize.
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- P.C. Aggart
- 04-10-21
Wish I had read/listened to this years ago
This book explained so much about our culture that I’ve been struggling to comprehend. It’s themes are just as applicable now in our social media dominated age as they were in the 80s when the book was written.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-14-22
insightful and worth the time listening
I think that the author makes a lot of great points about how television has changed our culture. The book definitely changed my perspective and attitude towards all media and that to me makes it a worthwhile listen.
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- Austin Barker
- 11-14-20
Love me some Neil Postman
This is watchman on the wall stuff right here. Postman gives a devastating critique of television, and by analogy to our day, all image media. He argues that the image media's subversion of text as the dominant form of reflected thinking has contributed to the death of rational society. I think he may overstate his case a little, but he speaks with a prophetic voice and I have to give credence to that fact. He may well be seeing something I'm not. As it is, the last chapter of the book really clinches the case, and the pen-ultimate chapter, on media in education, is super insightful.
This book is 5 star reading.
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