Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States . . . nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year.”—Lawrence O’Donnell

How did we get here?

In this sweeping, eloquent history of The us, 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 somewhat the ultimate expression of our national character. The us 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 The us 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 consider 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.

Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you wish to have in mind Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century The us, If you wish to know how the lines between reality and illusion have develop into dangerously blurred, you will have to read this book.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“This can be a blockbuster of a book. Take a deep breath and dive in.”—Tom Brokaw

“[An] absorbing, will have to-read polemic . . . a provocative new study of The us’s cultural history.”—Newsday

“Compelling and totally unnerving.”—The Village Voice

“A frighteningly convincing and every now and then uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.”—The Guardian

“This is an important book—the indispensable book—for understanding The us in the age of Trump.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling writer of Leonardo da Vinci

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