Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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58 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A small voice of reason, 17 Mar 2004
From the first page this book promises a great deal: Francis Wheen sets out to show how society, both Western and Islamic, has determinedly squandered the benefits of the Enlightenment and has developed an astonishing hostility towards contemporary science and rational thought.Wheen paints a picture that is both amusing and chilling: our citizens and leaders are in the thrall of hocus and spin; educated people consume with gusto the diet of drivel served up in the media; an entire nation loses its grip after the death of a Sloaney princess; and post-modernists conjure with words to question the reality of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. This would have been a better book if Wheen had built on its early momentum and resisted the lure of diatribe, but there is such a surfeit of material to support his thesis, and so much nonsense routinely peddled by famous people who should have known better, that he seems unable to stop. The result is erudite and funny, but in the end this is a string of good journalism, rather than the serious manifesto that it might have been. I recommend this book, and I hope that Wheen will soon produce another edition that not only updates us on the progress of this human ship of fools (which seems daily to surpass itself in its vainglorious stupidity) but also lingers more on the questions why, and what needs to be done.
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60 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A couple of points., 19 Nov 2006
It's a great book in many ways, of course. Francis Wheen is consistently amusing and shares a breadth of knowledge comparable with another journalistic polymath of our times, Christopher Hitchens. However, a few caveat emptors. Mr Wheen was an enthusiastic supporter of the invasion of Iraq. As the war has gone increasingly tits-up for the invaders, Wheen and other supporters from the left-wing, such as Nick Cohen, have been getting more and more agitated about the rightness of their cause. The result of this is that their concerns about the war, by a process of what could be termed guilty hysterical osmosis, are leaching into nearly everything they write. Mr Wheen and Cohen could be prosing about anything from shower caps to sangria these days, yet still manage to get a couple of sly digs in about the islamo-fascist-appeasing nature of the left. Just a warning, that's all.
I have to take issue with his criticism of Noam Chomsky in this book as well. Not only does Francis Wheen swallow the tired old canard that Chomsky supported Pol Pot, a slur which I recall (doubtless erroneously) was invented by dear old William Shawcross, it would also seem incumbent upon Wheen to correctly identify the ideology of those he seeks to mock. In other words, in this book which celebrates the spirit of enlightenment, he seems to have Chomsky down as some unreconstructed Maoist/Stalinist, a charge which is so laughably misguided, I can only assume the exquisitely educated Mr Wheen has never read a damn thing by Chomsky, who, as any fule kno, is a self-proclaimed libertarian socialist/anarchist, primarily influenced by Rudolf Rocker. Doh! You may as well accuse him of being a Jehovah's Witness. Chomsky's acerbic dislike of Leninists and other state socialists is very well known. He also rather applauds the spirit of the enlightenment in many of his works, namechecking von Humboldt among others as his intellectual heroes.
Hey ho, apart from these little gripes, it's still a bloody good read and one in the eye for those who still insist on the validity of creatonism, Deepak Chopra, Kabbalah, and other fairy tales for the terminally ignorant. Mind you, they're not going to be reading this sort of thing, are they?
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35 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent thought-provoking book, 25 Feb 2004
Francis Wheen covers a lot of ground in this book. If there is a criticism, it is that his analysis is not as in-depth as it could be. But it would have been a different, and excessively weighty, book if it had been.Mr Wheen could have gone for the easier option of going after the obvious targets of mumbo-jumbo such as complementary medicine and new ageism. These certainly get a look-in, but are far from the whole story. Mr Wheen has more interesting targets in mind including post-modernism and a variety of topics beloved of political left and right including the free market, globalisation and the Third Way. By straying into this territory, Mr Wheen guarantees that few readers will agree with everything he has to say; but as the whole book is about challenging the accepted wisdom of the day, this is perhaps no bad thing.
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