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

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PublicAffairs, 2005 M07 6 - 416 pages
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.

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Contents

Dare to Know
1
1 The Voodoo Revolution
9
2 Old SnakeOil New Bottles
39
3 Its 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
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About the author (2005)

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.

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