Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Elisabeth Sifton Books) [Hardcover]

Neil Postman (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: Viking Press; 1ST edition (1985)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B001F21Q5A
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,885,626 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I amused myself "to death!", July 30, 2009

By 

Barbara Stienstra (Goshen, New York United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Elisabeth Sifton Books) (Hardcover)

I had to read this book when it first was published, for a Mass Media class for my Broadcasting and Communications degree at a community college in the Catskills.
It was excellent, but as I read it, I had a notebook handy. I was an older student in the class and the older one's could appreciate the depth of the content, while the younger students simply could not grasp it. Many just "gave up" reading it.
[...]

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars *Required reading*, May 17, 2010

By 

Charles L. Newton (Atlanta GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Elisabeth Sifton Books) (Hardcover)

Neil Postman studied what happens as we are taking in the learnings of life - that process has changed, for the worse. Here he laid out (among other points) the reasons TV-"learning" is inferior to print learning, and what differences they actually make.

The people who founded the USA were probably the most literate concentration of humans in the world - but what's happened with the changes in the knowledge-process since TV (even the telegraph) appeared much later?

This pioneering book makes sense of much we suspect but may not be readily able to sum up. It may overstate a point or two, but it brings powerful insight. The "dumb-down" phenom is real, and a lot bigger than we may comfortably imagine. *Consider the effects* on our people and nation.