Customer Reviews

Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace

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Excellent! Possibly the only book on the subject to seriously examine what popular interest in this subject actually says about our world. This book is not about arcana; if you're looking for new tales of crashed saucers or big-eyed Pleadians, look elsewhere. Instead, the author sheds light on questions of evidence, real government conspiracies, "plausible denial", perceptions of reality, witness veracity, televisuality, UFOs, etc., and challenges the reader to define exactly what is the "consensus reality". The chapter on the role of women during the U.S. space program and the "citizen witness" is by itself worth the price of admission. The freshest look at this topic in years.

As 1 of only 2 books on UFOs ever published by an academic press (the other being David Jacobs' UFO Controversy in America), this work brings the topic into the Ivy League: to the Cornell Univ. Press. Driven seekers of "THE UFO TRUTH" beware, this is not yet another book attempting to research and reveal the truth of UFOs, but a scholarly, critical analysis of the topic within the context of modern American sociology, psychology, political science and media (particularly Internet) studies. What most distinguishes it from other "cultural context" efforts is Ms. Dean's (QUITE solitary) respectful, non-dismissive treatment of her fellow citizen-observers, and the sharp comparision of the generally-private abduction experience to the televised theatrics of the space race. WHY she doesn't join the dismissive academic/media/"expert" mob is not revealed. Readers without personal exposure to the phenomena (who are ignorant of their ignorance) may simply join the mob by dismissing Ms. Dean analysis because it is devoid of judgementalism or the media's desperate search for the freakish at whom we can self-assuredly laugh.

The language is academic & the sentences long, but the complex concepts are expressed with clarity. The background UFO data is invisible (as other Amazon.com reviewers comment), but to readers fully educated in this topic, that would obviously multiply the book's size by a factor of 100 and repeat material available elsewhere. The last third of the book drags a bit and the illustrations are irrelevant and poorly chosen.

However, this has made my short list of "must read" UFO books, alongside those by Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs, Tim Good, Nick Pope, Stan Friedman, and the hilarious Out There by Pulitzer prize nominee and former NY Times reporter Howard Blum.

When you read a book this poorly concieved and expressed, you wonder what keeps you reading--right to the end. Perhaps I was in search of the book's most laughable or most outrageous claim (and the book is chock-full of wild and ill-founded claims), or maybe I wanted to prove to myself that cultural criticism in the wrong hands is a harmful thing. Let me be specific: what the book encourages, even celebrates, is paranoia. It leaves the concept unquestioned; rather, it is just assumed that, since we live in a paranoid world, we should just celebrate our paranoia. How this translates beyond individual neurosis, into the political, is never explained, nor, surprisingly, is even the slightest attempt made to articulate the significance of paranoia as a psychic condition. The aporias in this book render it a vertiable swiss cheese: more air than substance.

I found this book profoundly irritating from beginning to end. Of course, there were a few insightful passages sprinkled throughout the text, but one would expect this coming from cornell uni press. The majority of Dean's book, however, is full of sweeping and completely meaningless generalisations. Dean seems to be far too aware of her audience, and her relationship with her audience, than with her own scholarly contribution. This, i find, ends up getting in the way of an appreciation of the text. She tries so hard not to sound like one of those 'elitist academics' who have no idea about contemporary culture, but only comes across as far too self-conscious, pretensious, and patronising. For example, consider this statement; "I would like to claim that the connection between space and technology is uniquely my own, but it isn't." Oh really Jodi, how gracious of you!! Or consider this one for an empty generalisation; "The launch of Windows 95 is a bigger event than Galileo's window to Jupiter." Well, i'm sure time will highlight the glaringly careless and attention-seeking nature of such a statement, which also points to the problem with so much of cultural studies today. That is the a-historical treatment of cultural products/texts as though they exist within a vacuum. Throughout the book, i get the feeling Dean doesn't really know what she wants to say, indeed, has nothing to say, but says it anyway. Thus, she covers up the lack of substance with an overreliance on style (but there is a great lack of this too), as she comes up with some of the most convoluted sentence construction i have ever set eyes upon. Consider the following statement: "It is an age of aliens, an alien age when alien images and alien copies and copies of aliens appear unpredictably and unannounced in places they shouldn't, in places we can't understand, in multiple, contradictory, alien places." It sounds to me like Dean needs to learn a few more adjectives apart from 'alien'. And, she obviously needs to learn more about clarity and conciseness. I think the term the dictionary uses for Dean's problem is logorrhoea, otherwise known as verbal diarrhoea.

This book analyses critically the implications of mediated America for democracy in America. Dean complements her earlier work on the theory of discursive democracy by starting with contemporary society, rather than theory, and then considering the theoretical implications for democracy in light of her survey of media culture. Dean finds that contemporary conditions of proliferating standards of value make it difficult to come to democratic agreement. Thus, while liberal and democratic thinkers value rational inquiry as the foundation for truth, Dean finds faith, force, and prejudice the predominant basis for accepting some claims rather than others under these current conditions. In light of some rather unfair and indeed highly ideological reviews of her work recently (the NY Rev of Books comes to mind), I am left wondering, upon completion of the book,whether such reviewers have sought to kill the messenger for daring to utter her (critical) message.

It seems,after reading the book, having Jodi Dean as a professor, and taking more than 1 theory class, that most negative criticisms of this book come from those who are clueless. "Aliens" is a step-forward in critical thinking as well as cultural analysis. It does not pose any statements about existence or nonexistence, but rather the contemporay status of issues like truth and security. do not read this book if you are looking to solve the alien puzzle. However, if you are curious to a contemporary view of subaltern counterculture in ameria, this is not a bad place to start.

Was this book written on April Fool's Day? I mean, it is such a perfect example of bad scholarship, it can't have been done seriously.

Its dubious achievements include:

..Prose more pretentious than Talcott Parsons'. ..Page after page of footnotes in a book that was largely produced by watching TV and hanging around the internet. ..An almost 200 page discussion of a scientific and social phenomenon in which the author never bothers to take a stand on whether said phenomenon even exists.

It is especially this last point which proves that this work is to scholarship what the gooney bird is to avifauna. The gooney, you will recall, is the mythical bird that flies in smaller and smaller circles until it disappears up its own . . . Well, you get the idea.

In short, if you are one of those Americans who love to argue endlessly about subjects without any factual information whatsoever, you will love this book. If, however, you worry about this neo-dark age we seem to have entered wherein cults flourish to the death, people demonize their own elected government, angels and satan are omni-present and your neighbors insist that the grocery clerk is surely an alien, this work won't make you rest any easier.

Ah, but maybe, just maybe, this book was written tongue in cheek, if so, boy is it a hoot! In that light, some parts are even persuasive, like that bit about John Tesh being an alien . . .

Dean's attempt to contextualise America's post-war devotion to aliens appears to be a calculated effort to cash-in on a fashionable subject.

First, it does not appear Dean has conducted research into the subject of the alien in America culture - it is simply not enough to pluck texts out of the air at random.

Second, because of Dean's failure to define the book's research-object one is never clear what it is the author is trying to explain. At first one imagines Dean's aim is to explore America's relationship with the alien. However towards the second half of the book the 'study' appears to erupt into a half-baked critique of enlightenment thought and western civilization. Here, it appears Dean's alien is a vehicle for the exposure of an 'uncanny society'.

Bearing this point in mind, perhaps Marx and Freud would have been relevant starting points. However, not only does Dean fail to refer this repression / alienation thesis back to her original object (the alien) with any great certainty, but she also neglects to cross reference any of her thoughts (Surely figures such as Freud and Marx merit a mention). Failing this recognition one would imagine Dean may attempt to limit the scope of her analysis, thus curbing her arrogance. Yet, this does not occur either. Reading the text one often feels that Dean must be either blissfully ignorant (totally unaware of the whole western philosophical / sociological tradition) or monumentally arrogant.

Third, not is only is Dean's research weak but her prose is scrappy and confusing; 'Aliens In America' is poorly written at best, and is far from an enjoyable read. At least many 'publish or die' academics who insist on presenting their peers with poor research are decent enough to shroud their weaknesses in an endearing stlye.

To conclude, serious readers should avoid Dean's poor book and instead find Saler's excellent study of the Roswell myth.

This book purports to study the relation betwen epistemology and technology, but only manages to stutter a few inanities about postmodern skepticism and the information age. Neither well researched nor well written, Aliens in America fails to illustrate the phenomena in question in ways that are accessible to many readers. Students will doubtless find this book impenetrable. Some academics who were fooled by Sokal's famous hoax in the journal Social Text will probably be fooled again here.

This book only incites those who have bashed the work of postmodernists and cultural studies scholars. Unfortunately in this case, the criticisms all apply to this ill-concieved book. The editors at Cornell should hang their heads for approving this turkey.