num_pages: 429
description: In this sweeping eloquent history of America Kurt Andersen shows that what's happening in our country today--this post-factual fake news moment we're all living through--is 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 centuries--from 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 extraterrestrials--our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies--every 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.
language: English
title: Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
publisher: Random House