Author: Kurt Andersen File Type: epub The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States . . . nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year.Lawrence ODonnell How did we get here? In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that whats happening in our country todaythis post-factual, fake news moment were all living throughis not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuriesfrom 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 sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrialsour love of the fantastichas made America exceptional in a way that weve never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasiesevery citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. 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. Fantasylandcould not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book. This is an important bookthe indispensable bookfor understanding America in the age of Trump. Its an eye-opening history filled with brilliant insights, a saga of how we were always susceptible to fantasy,from the Puritan fanatics to the talk-radio and Internet wackos who mix show business, hucksterism, and conspiracy theories.Walter Isaacson **Review This is an important bookthe indispensable bookfor understanding America in the age of Trump. Its an eye-opening history filled with brilliant insights, a saga of how we were always susceptible to fantasy,from the Puritan fanatics to the talk-radio and Internet wackos who mix show business, hucksterism, and conspiracy theories. Even the parts you think you know already are put into an eye-opening context.Walter Isaacson Kurt Andersen is Americas voice of reason. What is heCanadian? The people who should read this book wontbecause its a bookbut reality-based citizens will still get a kick out of this winning romp through centuries of American delusion.Sarah Vowell Fantasyland presents the very best kind of ideaone that, in retrospect, seems obvious, but that took a seer like Kurt Andersen to piece together. The thinking and the writing are both dazzling it is at once a history lesson and an oh-so-modern cri de coeur its an absolute joy to read and will leave your brain dancing with excitement long after youre done.Stephen Dubner About the Author Kurt Andersen is the bestselling author of the novels Heyday, Turn of the Century, and True Believers. He contributes to Vanity Fair and The New York Times, and is host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Awardwinning public radio show and podcast. He also writes for television, film, and the stage. Andersen co-founded Spy magazine, served as editor in chief of New York, and was a cultural columnist and critic for Time and The New Yorker. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he was an editor of The Harvard Lampoon. He lives in Brooklyn.

Author: Manoranjan Byapari File Type: pdf If you insist that you do not know me, let me explain myself you will feel, why, yes, I do know this person. Ive seen this man. With these words, Manoranjan Byapari points to the inescapable roles all of us play in an unequal society. Interrogating My Chandal Life An Autobiography of a Dalit is the translation of his remarkable memoir Itibritte Chandal Jivan. It talks about his traumatic life as a child in the refugee camps of West Bengal and Dandakaranya, facing persistent wantan experience that would dominate his life. The book charts his futile flight from home to escape hunger, in search of work as a teenager around the country, only to face further exploitation. In Kolkata in the 1970s, as a young man, he got caught up in the Naxalite movement and took part in gang warfare. His world changed dramatically when he was taught the alphabet in prison at the age of 24it drew him into a new, enticing world of books. After prison, he worked as a rickshaw-wallah and one day the writer Mahasweta Devi happened to be his passenger. It was she who led him to his first publication. Today, as Sipra Mukherjee points out, issues of poverty, hunger and violence have exploded the cautiously sewn boundaries of the more affluent world, rendering archaic the comfortable distances between them. Despite Chandal explicitly referring to a Dalit caste, this narrative weaves in and out of the margins.

Author: J. R. R. Tolkien File Type: pdf A new one-volume hardback edition of the first five books in The History of Middle-earth. J.R.R. Tolkien is famous the world over for his unique literary creation, exemplified in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. What is less well known, however, is that he also produced a vast amount of further material that greatly expands upon the mythology and numerous stories of Middle-earth, and which gives added life to the thousand-year war between the Elves and the evil spirit Morgoth, and his terrifying lieutenant, Sauron. It was to this enormous task of literary construction that his Tolkiens youngest son and literary heir, Christopher, applied himself to produce the monumental and endlessly fascinating series of 12 books, The History of Middle-earth. This brand new hardback edition brings together the first five volumes of The History of Middle-earth The Book of Lost Tales Parts 1 and 2, The Lays of Beleriand, The Shaping of Middle-earth and The Lost Road into one volume. Epic in scope and extent, and featuring rare maps and illustrations drawn by J.R.R. Tolkien, this first standard hardback volume of a planned trilogy will present the reader with a unique opportunity to own the entire History of Middle-earth in three large but sensibly priced volumes.

Author: Nicholas Thoburn File Type: epub []