Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire
Kurt Andersen argues that the United States has been hospitable to fantasy and magical thinking from its earliest days, and that this is not a recent breakdown but a long pattern. He traces a story from the Puritans and early religious revivals through P. T. Barnum, patent medicines, Hollywood, the cults and self help booms of the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of cable news and talk radio, and the arrival of the internet. He sees a long thread connecting these moments and argues that the result by the 2010s was a country where roughly a third of citizens held beliefs that have no basis in evidence. Published in 2017, the book is part history, part cultural criticism, and part warning.
What you might want to know about Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A five hundred year argument that America has always been unusually drawn to magical thinking, and that the internet age has put that tendency on overdrive.
No. It covers about five centuries of American history and treats recent politics as one chapter in a much longer story.
Andersen writes from a clearly skeptical, secular perspective and is critical of magical thinking across the political spectrum.
Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire was written by Kurt Andersen, published in 2017 by Penguin Random House.
Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire is 480 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
