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The Disappearance of Childhood
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Technopoly
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In this witty, often terrifying work of cultural criticism, Postman chronicles our transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it. According to Postman, technology is rapidly gaining sovereignty over social institutions and national life to become self-justifying, self-perpetuating, and omnipresent. He warns that this will have radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, religion, family, education, and more.
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Error in recording
- By D. Cassidy on 04-30-15
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Amusing Ourselves to Death
- Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
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In this eloquent and persuasive book, Neil Postman examines the deep and broad effects of television culture on the manner in which we conduct our public affairs, and how "entertainment values" have corrupted the very way we think. As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given less and less expression in the form of the printed word, they are rapidly being reshaped to suit the requirements of television.
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Incredible
- By Lonnie on 11-27-07
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How to Watch TV News
- By: Neil Postman, Steve Powers
- Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach
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- Unabridged
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America is suffering from an information glut. Most Americans are no longer clear about what news is worth remembering or how any of it connects to anything else. Thus, Americans are rapidly becoming the least knowledgeable people in the industrial world. Author and academic Neil Postman and television journalist Steve Powers tell you how to become a discerning viewer.
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Fair warning for TV watchers
- By Seth H. Wilson on 02-27-15
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The Shallows
- What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
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Weaving insights from philosophy, neuroscience, and history into a rich narrative, The Shallows explains how the Internet is rerouting our neural pathways, replacing the subtle mind of the book reader with the distracted mind of the screen watcher. A gripping story of human transformation played out against a backdrop of technological upheaval, The Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.
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Its true.
- By Joseph on 05-26-14
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Brave New World
- By: Aldous Huxley
- Narrated by: Michael York
- Length: 8 hrs
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When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.
Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media: has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.
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“Oh, Ford, Ford Ford, I Wish I Had My Soma!”
- By Jefferson on 10-03-11
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The Coddling of the American Mind
- How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
- By: Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff
- Narrated by: Jonathan Haidt
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
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The culture of “safety” and its intolerance of opposing viewpoints has left many young people anxious and unprepared for adult life. Lukianoff and Haidt offer a comprehensive set of reforms that will strengthen young people and institutions, allowing us all to reap the benefits of diversity, including viewpoint diversity. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what’s happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live and work and cooperate across party lines.
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superb book.
- By JBroadnax on 09-25-18
-
Technopoly
- The Surrender of Culture to Technology
- By: Neil Postman
- Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this witty, often terrifying work of cultural criticism, Postman chronicles our transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it. According to Postman, technology is rapidly gaining sovereignty over social institutions and national life to become self-justifying, self-perpetuating, and omnipresent. He warns that this will have radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, religion, family, education, and more.
-
-
Error in recording
- By D. Cassidy on 04-30-15
-
Amusing Ourselves to Death
- Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
- By: Neil Postman
- Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach
- Length: 4 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this eloquent and persuasive book, Neil Postman examines the deep and broad effects of television culture on the manner in which we conduct our public affairs, and how "entertainment values" have corrupted the very way we think. As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given less and less expression in the form of the printed word, they are rapidly being reshaped to suit the requirements of television.
-
-
Incredible
- By Lonnie on 11-27-07
-
How to Watch TV News
- By: Neil Postman, Steve Powers
- Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
America is suffering from an information glut. Most Americans are no longer clear about what news is worth remembering or how any of it connects to anything else. Thus, Americans are rapidly becoming the least knowledgeable people in the industrial world. Author and academic Neil Postman and television journalist Steve Powers tell you how to become a discerning viewer.
-
-
Fair warning for TV watchers
- By Seth H. Wilson on 02-27-15
-
The Shallows
- What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
- By: Nicholas Carr
- Narrated by: Paul Michael Garcia
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Weaving insights from philosophy, neuroscience, and history into a rich narrative, The Shallows explains how the Internet is rerouting our neural pathways, replacing the subtle mind of the book reader with the distracted mind of the screen watcher. A gripping story of human transformation played out against a backdrop of technological upheaval, The Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.
-
-
Its true.
- By Joseph on 05-26-14
-
Brave New World
- By: Aldous Huxley
- Narrated by: Michael York
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.
Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media: has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.
-
-
“Oh, Ford, Ford Ford, I Wish I Had My Soma!”
- By Jefferson on 10-03-11
-
The Coddling of the American Mind
- How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
- By: Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff
- Narrated by: Jonathan Haidt
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The culture of “safety” and its intolerance of opposing viewpoints has left many young people anxious and unprepared for adult life. Lukianoff and Haidt offer a comprehensive set of reforms that will strengthen young people and institutions, allowing us all to reap the benefits of diversity, including viewpoint diversity. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what’s happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live and work and cooperate across party lines.
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superb book.
- By JBroadnax on 09-25-18
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Why Liberalism Failed
- By: Patrick J. Deneen
- Narrated by: Brian Holsopple
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
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Of the three dominant ideologies of the 20th century - fascism, communism, and liberalism - only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism's proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions.
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a fine idea stuffed in a dead horse and beat
- By David on 09-26-18
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The Closing of the American Mind
- By: Allan Bloom
- Narrated by: Christopher Hurt
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In one of the most important books of our time, Allan Bloom, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago and a noted translator of Plato and Rousseau, argues that the social and political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis.
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VERY IMPORTANT WORK!
- By Douglas on 06-29-10
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After Virtue, Third Edition
- By: Alasdair MacIntyre
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In this classic work, Alasdair MacIntyre examines the historical and conceptual roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in personal and public life, and offers a tentative proposal for its recovery. While the individual chapters are wide-ranging, once pieced together, they comprise a penetrating and focused argument about the price of modernity.
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A Philosopher is a Philosopher
- By No to Statism on 11-16-19
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Unequal Childhoods
- Class, Race, and Family Life, Second Edition, with an Update a Decade Later
- By: Annette Lareau
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security.
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Essential reading for everyone
- By Jared on 10-09-12
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The Theory of Moral Sentiments
- By: Adam Smith
- Narrated by: Michael Lunts
- Length: 16 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) was the first major text by Adam Smith who, seven years later, was to publish what was to become one of the major economic classics, The Wealth of Nations (1776). However, Smith regarded The Theory of Moral Sentiments as his most important work because in it he identified the profound human instinct to act not necessarily in self-interest but through, as he phrased it, a ‘mutual sympathy of sentiments’.
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TMS - Background for Human Behavior
- By Harold Bishop on 08-23-19
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Grunch of Giants
- By: R. Buckminster Fuller
- Narrated by: Andrew Heyl
- Length: 3 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Here, Buckminster Fuller takes on the gigantic corporate megaliths that exert increasing control over every aspect of daily life. In the form of a modern allegory, he traces the evolution of these multinational giants from the post-World War II military-industrial complex to the current army of abstract legal entities known as the corporate world. GRUNCH stands for Gross Universal Cash Heist.
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when smart people speak it is best to listen
- By @insurancebillvj on 09-11-18
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iGen
- The 10 Trends Shaping Today's Young People - and the Nation
- By: Jean M. Twenge Ph.D.
- Narrated by: Madeleine Maby
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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An entertaining first look at how today's members of iGen - the children, teens, and young adults born in the mid-1990s and later - are vastly different from their millennial predecessors and from any other generation, from the renowned psychologist and author of Generation Me.
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Really, Amazon, no PDF?
- By Elizabeth on 10-19-17
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Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
- By: Richard Hofstadter
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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This book throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society.
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excellent narration and content
- By Vincent M. Maysee on 05-03-19
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Boys Adrift
- The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men
- By: Leonard Sax
- Narrated by: Allan Robertson
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Something scary is happening to boys today. From kindergarten to college, American boys are, on average, less resilient and less ambitious than they were a mere 20 years ago. The gender gap in college attendance and graduation rates has widened dramatically. While Emily is working hard at school and getting A's, her brother, Justin, is goofing off. He's more concerned about getting to the next level in his video game than about finishing his homework.
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Profound
- By Sunny Blaine on 12-03-17
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How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor
- By: James K. A. Smith
- Narrated by: Trevor Thompson
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" - it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work, A Secular Age, and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book, A Secular Age (2007), provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present - a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular.
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Accessible Charles Taylor!
- By Jesus on 05-29-18
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How Should We Then Live
- The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture
- By: Francis A. Schaeffer
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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As one of the foremost evangelical thinkers of the 20th century, Francis Schaeffer long pondered the fate of declining Western culture. In this brilliant book, he analyzed the reasons for modern society's state of affairs and presented the only viable alternative: living by the Christian ethic, acceptance of God's revelation, and total affirmation of the Bible's morals, values, and meaning.
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Want To Be Left Alone? Better Read Schaeffer
- By Doug D. Eigsti on 12-09-15
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The Rational Bible: Genesis
- By: Dennis Prager
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 19 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The continuation of Dennis Prager's bestselling five-part commentary, The Rational Bible. Why do so many people think the Bible, the most influential book in world history, is outdated? Why do our friends and neighbors - and sometimes we ourselves - dismiss the Bible as irrelevant, irrational, immoral, or all of these things? This explanation of the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, will demonstrate that the Bible is not only powerfully relevant to today’s issues, but completely consistent with rational thought.
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So glad I bought this!
- By Alex Martinez on 06-10-19
Publisher's Summary
Deftly marshaling a vast array of historical and demographic research, Neil Postman suggests that childhood is a relatively recent invention, which came into being as the new medium of print imposed divisions between children and adults. But now these divisions are eroding under the barrage of television, which turns the adult secrets of sex and violence into popular entertainment and pitches both news and advertising at the intellectual level of 10-year-olds. Informative, alarming, and aphoristic, The Disappearance of Childhood is a triumph of history and prophecy.
Critic Reviews
"Postman uses cogent arguments, sharp needles, and gentle humor to challenge listeners." (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
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Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jane Ord
- 11-28-15
Thoughtful and perceptive
This is a most interesting book to read in conjunction with such current works as The Big Disconnect by Catherine Steiner Adair and Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
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- fambram
- 05-25-19
An incredible essay on history, education, and media
Mindbending and extremely accessible. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book that has left me with this many thoughts to grapple with. I was blown away by the author’s thesis about the impact of print, school, and media through the centuries. What an incredible wide-sweeping historical essay. I believe that a great deal of the books’s theories about TV apply directly to social media as well. An incredibly relevant read.
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- Brooke
- 11-11-18
A Haunting And Prophetic Discourse
This book is a must-read for anyone concerned about todays youth. It is far more true now than perhaps it was even at the time of its composition in the late 1980s or early 90s. Parents, educators, youth ministers and others would do well to make this an essential part of their library. As Postman demonstrates, both childhood and adulthood are in many ways disappearing and just as alarmingly, reversing roles. #Intergenerational #Captivating #Creepy #Haunting #Depressing #TagsGiving #SweepStakes
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- Gambol
- 02-26-18
A bit of a stretch, and needs updating.
Although I think Postman is (was) on to something, he tends to stretch his conclusions far beyond what the evidence supports, weakening his argument unnecessarily. The book is also in need of an updated edition for the Internet age, as it was written early in the Reagan administration and focuses on television, rather than the Internet. A savvy reader will be able to look beyond this and extrapolate the arguments to the modern age, but we have much more data available nearly 40 years after this book was first published, and it would be much more interesting and topical should it specifically cover the Internet and social media.
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- Geoflaw
- BROOKLYN, NY
- 02-28-17
Enlightening
This book was truly Enlightening in that it opened my eyes to how pervasive the death of childhood has become in our society.