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Fantasyland

How America Went Haywire : a 500-year History
Apr 17, 2018Rock_Shadow rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
An extremely valuable book. Just finished it and haven't quite digested it yet. I wish I could have written it; however, the book contains wider scope of popular history than I would have thought to include. I've been thinking about these specific topics even since I studied 18th and 19th century American literature, and have been utterly fascinated by Herman Melville's, "The Confidence Man". Kurt Anderson wrote a non-fiction book in the same spirit as Melville wrote his novel more than hundred fifty years ago: looking at the root of con games and gullibility of the Americans. Anderson's conclusion might be a little more optimistic than Melville's, but, wisely, both leave it open-ended.