On the docket...two by Susan Jacoby

Despite a sincere effort to restrain my book buying, I confess...I failed again.  Just picked up two paperbacks by Susan Jacoby.  One, The Age of American Unreason, I've read before and I felt a need to refresh my memory of the book.  It is an updated exploration of the same topic addressed in Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963.  Alas...in the intervening years, unreason has not diminished, and the recent election only highlighted that fact.

The second book is an earlier one by Jacoby:  Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.  I'm looking forward to this, since so many of our "founding fathers" were clearly free thinkers, and this had a significant impact on the formulation of the Constitution of the United States...a fact that is largely ignored by those who fall into the "unreasoning" category of most of the right-wing pundits of today.

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