The Image, 50th Anniversary Edition, Daniel J. Boorstin
The Image, 50th Anniversary Edition, Daniel J. Boorstin
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The Image, 50th Anniversary Edition
A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

Author: Daniel J. Boorstin

Narrator: Timothy Danko

Unabridged: 10 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/18/2018

Synopsis

First published in 1962, this wonderfully provocative book introduced the notion of “pseudo-events”—events such as press conferences and presidential debates, which are manufactured solely in order to be reported—and the contemporary definition of celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” Since then Daniel J. Boorstin’s prophetic vision of an America inundated by its own illusions has become an essential resource for any reader who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths.

About Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004), educated at Harvard, Yale, and Oxford, was an American historian at the University of Chicago who wrote on many topics in American and world history. He was a Librarian of Congress Emeritus, having directed the US national library from 1979 to 1987, and helped create the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress. He had previously been director of the National Museum for History and Technology and of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

About Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff is an award-winning author, broadcaster, and documentarian who studies human autonomy in the digital age. He has been named one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He coined such concepts as “viral media” and “social currency” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a professor of media theory and digital economics. He has written regular columns for Medium, CNN, Daily Beast, and the London Guardian and made the PBS Frontline documentaries “Generation Like” and “Merchants of Cool.”

About Timothy Danko

Timothy Danko is an audiobook narrator whose work has included The Quest of the Thirteen and The Parting.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jon

My dad wrote this book. I remember stamping the pages with a rubber number-stamper on our dining room table. He'd spent ten years on his latest volume of The Americans; this he wrote in three months. This endures.......more

Goodreads review by Ryan

The central point of the book is so incisive that it not only survived the major technological and cultural shifts of the last 50 years but is made stronger by them: Most ofe take as important or news is image and artifice. Think aboutpress conferences to announce press conferences, awards, articles......more

Goodreads review by Eric_W

5+ stars This book should be mandatory reading. Boorstin, Librarian of Congress emeritus, is an outstanding social historian who defines pseudo-events as events created to promote. Generally, these events have no intrinsic newsworthiness. They are not spontaneous, they are usually arranged for the c......more

Goodreads review by Clif

Good thing Daniel Boorstin is deceased. Facebook would send him into despair - but it would not surprise him, as it is a logical extension of what this book is all about. The root of the problem he addresses is we demand and expect far more than real life can give, thanks to the illusions that the Gr......more

Goodreads review by Owen

"Always the play; never the thing" A superbly titled and entirely prescient book, this one. As America's Graphic Revolution was spiraling with television, movies, and other 'images' created for easy consumption, Boorstin wrote about how there is simultaneously much more and much less to everything we......more

Quotes

“A book that everyone in America should read every few years.” Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

“A very informative and entertaining and chastising book.” Harper’s

“An engrossing book—sensitive, thoughtful, damning, dead on target, and in most respects unanswerable.” Scientific American

“Excellent…It is the book to end all books about ‘The American Image’—what it is, who projects it, what effect it has at home or abroad.” Observer

“Tells us how to see and listen, and how to think about what we see and hear.” George F. Will, author of Men at Work

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