The Book I'm Reading Now

Below find a synopsis, a review, and a preface to the book I am currently reading, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. I'm so excited to read it, especially in light of a statement someone recently made to the effect that the purpose of entertainment is to distract us from thinking about God!!

• Television has habituated us to visual entertainment measured out in spoonfuls of time. But what happens when we come to expect the same things from our politics and public discourse? What happens to journalism, education, and religion when they too become forms of show business? Twenty years ago, Neil Postman's lively polemic was the first book to consider the way that electronic media were reshaping our culture. Now, with TV joined by the Internet, cell phones, cable, and DVDs, it carries even greater significance. Elegant, incisive, and terrifically readable, it's a compelling take on our addiction to entertainment.

• As a fervent evangelist of the age of Hollywood, I publicly opposed Neil Postman's dark picture of our media-saturated future. But time has proved Postman right. He accurately foresaw that the young would inherit a frantically all-consuming media culture of glitz, gossip, and greed. --Camille Paglia

• Is it really plausible that this book about how TV is turning all public life (education, religion, politics, journalism) into entertainment; how the image is undermining other forms of communication, particularly the written word; and how our bottomless appetite for TV will make content so abundantly available, context be damned, that we'll be overwhelmed by "information glut" until what is truly meaningful is lost and we no longer care what we've lost as long as we're being amused. . .can such a book possibly have relevance to you?

Doesn't it sound fascinating?!