Blogging
”The Age of American Unreason”By Susan Jacoby
2008, Pantheon, $26
Hardback, 356 pages
My first encounter with the term “intellectual history” came within the past three years.
I was searching through the online faculty directories at area universities, trying to determine the specialties of various history professors, so I could get their expert opinions on a wide array of current events and places — from Appalachian poverty to Zambian politics, as it were.
I looked at Rhodes College’s Web page for Prof. Lynn Zastoupil. Under “Areas of Expertise,” it listed “European Intellectual History.”
“Cool,” I thought. “That would be a fun area to work in. Imagine researching, writing and teaching that all day.”
I have an uncanny ability to find the least remunerative fields fascinating and fun. The newspaper business, for example.
A century ago, I’d have been jumping into the buggy whip and horse-drawn wagon business with a great deal of enthusiasm.
So, Susan Jacoby’s latest book provides an unwelcome, sobering two-by-four upside the head for anyone who might think that the life of the mind is something the American public is ready to embrace on a large scale — after seven years under a president who can’t properly pronounce the word “nuclear.”
Wrap your mind around this: I’m about to write a review of a book about blogs on a blog about books.
Whoa.
Ultimate Blogs, edited by Sarah Boxer, is an anthology of some of the web’s most popular and well-done blogs. I’m not really sure who the target market for this book is, though. Is it people who know nothing about blogs and therefore need an introduction to them? At times, the way Boxer interjects explanations for internet slang suggests that yes, maybe she is writing for the uninitiated. Or is she compiling various blog entries for blog-savvy readers who are just looking to expand their digital-reading arsenal?
The good news, I suppose, is that this book can serve either type of reader. I’m a fairly seasoned blog reader, and there were blogs in this book I’d never heard of and have now added to my daily rounds.
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