Every summer, we at Jacobin sit down to ask ourselves, what would you like to read on a warm sandy beach? Our answers to this question have often been at odds with most people’s understanding of “light” reading. We’ve suggested histories of millenarianism in the Middle Ages and the German Democratic Republic alongside novels by Michael Magee and Rachel Cusk — and this summer is no different.
This year’s selections include a biography of the poet Sylvia Plath and novels by Susan Boyt and Jenny Erpenbeck but also the economist Mancur Olson’s book on why governments can’t build homes, roads, and factories.
For the last six months, I’ve been reading and rereading Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. It was published in 1961 and written just before the dawn of some huge social and political upheavals. Boorstin’s main concern is that “what dominates American experience today is not reality.” The book is incredibly prescient, describing precursors to what we now know as postmodernism, hyperreality, influencers, the notion that one could be famous for being famous, content, doing it for the ’gram, and fake news. It’s both alarming and refreshing to see that we’ve been culturally concerned with the same problems for at least sixty-five years.
When he wrote the book, Boorstin was already well-cemented as a political conservative, a proponent of consensus history, a downplayer of class conflict, and a believer in the primacy of the American “national character.” But in his youth, he’d been a…
Auteur: Editors
