How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

Fantasyland

The New York Times bestseller and Amazon.com #1 bestselling post-truth history of America

Not only a must-read for anyone wanting to understand Trump’s America but also a laugh-out-loud undiluted pleasure

This is an important book - the indispensable book - for understanding America in the age of Trump. It’s an eye-opening history filled with brilliant insights, a saga of how we were always susceptible to fantasy, from the Puritan fanatics to the talk-radio and Internet wackos who mix show business, hucksterism, and conspiracy theories.

Fantasyland presents the very best kind of idea – one that, in retrospect, seems obvious, but which took a seer like Kurt Andersen to piece together. The thinking and the writing are both dazzling; it is at once a history lesson and an oh-so-modern cri de coeur; it’s an absolute joy to read, and will leave your brain dancing with excitement long after you’re done

Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics

The most important book that I have read this year.

I’ve never read a history book that is as insightful and at the same time as funny as this one.

This is a blockbuster of a book. Kurt Andersen is a dazzling writer and a perceptive student of the many layers of American life. Take a deep breath and dive in.

Charged with enough anger and wit to become necessary reading.

New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen is host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast. He co-founded Spy magazine, served as editor-in-chief of New York Magazine, and was a cultural columnist and critic for Time and the New Yorker and contributes to Vanity Fair and the New York Times. Read more about him at his website: http://www.kurtandersen.com/

You’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts 
 
Fantasy is the USA’s primary product. From the Pilgrim Fathers onward America has been a place where renegades and freaks came in search of freedom to create their own realities with little objectively regulated truth standing in their way. The freedom to invent and believe whatever the hell you like is, in some ways, an unwritten constitutional right. But, this do-your-own-thing freedom also is the driving credo of America's current transformation where the difference between opinion and fact is rapidly crumbling. 
 
So how did we get to this weird pseudo-reality, where science and objective facts are dismissed in favour of opinions and wild speculation, or indeed, fantasies? The post truth, fake news, free-for-all mentality isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. If you want to understand Trump's America, how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you have to go back to the very beginning and take a dizzying road trip across five centuries of crackpot delusion and make-believe from Salem to Scientology. 
 
Fantasyland is a journey that connects the dots between crazed franchises of true believers – a rich freak show tapestry from Mormons to Flat-Earthers and satanic panic, new age quacks to anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists of every stripe, creationists to climate change deniers, UFO-obsessives to gun-toting libertarians, showmen hucksters from P T Barnum to Trump himself, all topped off with a dangerous dose of anti-government paranoia and pseudoscience. Along the way, New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen has created a unique and raucous history of America and a new paradigm for understanding our post-factual world.

The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump (A So-Called Parody)

You Can't Spell America Without Me

**As featured in The Times and BBC Newsnight** 
The blisteringly funny satirical account of Donald Trump’s first year as President, as imagined by Alec Baldwin and Kurt Andersen.

Hilarious, unbelievable, and quite clearly one big long-running joke

Iterating the many running gags would only ruin the fun. 'There will be a moment when this will be over,' Baldwin has said. 'When Trump will fade into ignominy, and take with him his ability to outstrip satire.' Will reality return to America? Until it does, books like this are ammunition.

Alec Baldwin is a multiple Emmy, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award-winning actor, producer, comedian and philanthropist. He has also been nominated for an Oscar and a Tony Award and the author of the New York Times bestseller A Promise to Ourselves.

'Hilarious, unbelievable' - The Sunday Times Books of the Year 
 
**As featured on BBC Newsnight** 
 
The blisteringly funny satirical account of Donald Trump’s first year as President, as imagined by Alec Baldwin and Kurt Andersen. 
 
'I have the best words, beautiful words, as everybody has been talking and talking about for a long time. Also? The best sentences and, what do you call them, paragraphs. My previous books were great and sold extremely, unbelievably well--even the ones by dishonest, disgusting so-called journalists. But those writers didn't understand Trump, because quite frankly they were major losers. People say if you want it done right you have to do it yourself, even when 'it' is a 'memoir.' So every word of this book was written by me, using a special advanced word processing system during the many, many nights I've been forced to stay alone in the White House--only me, just me, trust me, nobody helped. And it's all 100% true, so true--people are already saying it may be the truest book ever published. Enjoy.' 
 
You Can’t Spell America Without Me is presented by America’s foremost Trump scholar Kurt Andersen as well as America's foremost mediocre Trump impersonator, Alec Baldwin.

Kurt Andersen

Essential, absorbing, infuriating, full-of-facts-you-didn't-know, saxophonely written. This is one of those situations where the book is better than the review, so you should read it... a radicalized moderate's moderate case for radical change.

Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review

Nostalgia is the antithesis of history. Anderson brilliantly exposes how nostalgia — the strategic oversimplification of our past — has erased complexity and friction from our country’s narrative to serve a single goal: to preserve the status quo for the benefit of those in power. As such, Evil Geniuses documents how history and nostalgia are engaged in a hand to hand combat that may determine our future.

Ken Burns, director of The Civil War and The Roosevelts: An Intimate History

Evil Geniuses is Kurt Andersen at his riveting best - a genuinely original exploration of the forces that have shaped today's economy and society, and what can be done to repair the damage. A route map out of the strange season of pandemic.

Matthew D'Ancona, editor and partner of Tortoise Media and author of Post-Truth

Elegantly written, full of insight, and ultimately optimistic, Evil Geniuses challenges America to do better, to be better. A wry look at what went wrong and sober thinking about what needs to happen now. If you want to know why America is where it is and how it can change, this is your book.

Justin Webb, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme

This is the one book everyone must read. . . With lucid writing and head-snapping insights, Kurt Andersen explores how the right and big business, with unabashed greed, deliberately reengineered our economy. To fix that will require understanding the roots of the problem. . .  A triumph.

Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci

Evil Geniuses is a vivid catalog of American sociopolitical history - a dedicated deep dive into this country's paradoxical legacy of innovation and ego, with Andersen as its clear-eyed, masterful archivist.

Rebecca Carroll, WNYC cultural critic and host of the podcast Come Through

Wow. Evil Geniuses is engaging, enraging, enthralling, appalling; a true tour de force. And most of all, it's the truth - about how these rapacious bastards have picked this country's bones for the last fifty years, and what the rest of us need to do to turn the tables. . . Exactly the book we need right now.

Michael Tomasky, Daily Beast columnist and author of If We Can Keep It

Back when the idea of President Reagan still seemed a stretch and President Trump was barely a joke, some serious, smart, committed people with vast appetites and little shame - right-wing intellectuals and billionaires, CEOs and Washington hustlers - launched a long war to create a paradigm shift and rewrite our social contract to their benefit. Andersen's dazzling, mind-bending, must-read chronicle of that fifty-year crusade explains how it happened, why it succeeded, and, unsettlingly, what that victory means: America is now theirs.

John Heilemann, co-host of Showtime’s The Circus, co-author of Game Change and Double Down

How did the United States turn from its long-standing egalitarian ideals to its present course of socially and morally catastrophic inequality? Kurt Andersen interrogates the past half century with characteristic intellectual ambition and literary bravado to find out. At once cultural history, memoir, and riff, Evil Geniuses explains how our country found its way into this predicament, and how we might yet get out of it.

Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush Tragedy and Ronald Reagan

The Unmaking of America – A Recent History

How an elite cabal rewrote the American dream for their gain – and left the rest of world behind. 
 
Evil Geniuses is the secret history of how, over the last half century, from even before Ronald Reagan through Donald Trump, America has sharply swerved away from its dream of progress for the many to a system of unfettered profit and self-interest for the few. 
 
As the social liberation of the 1960s finally ended in the chaos of Vietnam and Watergate, a cabal of rich industrialists, business chiefs, wide-eyed libertarians and right-wing economic radicals were waiting, determined to claw back everything they saw as rightfully theirs. 
 
Largely out of sight, they rapidly built and funded a new empire of think tanks and academic institutions and professional organisations, lobbying and political groups, using them to transform politics, media, finance, the legal system and US laws to reinvent and control the political economy. A throwback to the robber barons of a century earlier, they sold the remade system to the people as a nostalgic return to traditional American values. Within a decade, America’s flourishing forward-thinking vision was incarcerated by the unchecked financial accumulation and political power of the super-rich. 
 
Now, the moneymen are running the show. 
 
In this hugely entertaining and deeply researched cultural and economic exposé, New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen maps the rich history of intricate networks, unlikely connections and dark truths which are controlling a nation, revealing how on earth America got to where it is now – and what it might do to win its progressive future back.

Kurt Andersen

Praise for Evil Geniuses

Essential, absorbing, infuriating, full-of-facts-you-didn't-know, saxophonely written. This is one of those situations where the book is better than the review, so you should read it... a radicalized moderate's mode ...

Nostalgia is the antithesis of history. Anderson brilliantly exposes how nostalgia — the strategic oversimplification of our past — has erased complexity and friction from our country’s narrative to serve a single ...

Evil Geniuses is Kurt Andersen at his riveting best - a genuinely original exploration of the forces that have shaped today's economy and society, and what can be done to repair the damage. A route map out of ...

Essential, absorbing, infuriating, full-of-facts-you-didn't-know, saxophonely written. This is one of those situations where the book is better than the review, so you should read it... a radicalized moderate's mode ...

Nostalgia is the antithesis of history. Anderson brilliantly exposes how nostalgia — the strategic oversimplification of our past — has erased complexity and friction from our country’s narrative to serve a single ...

Evil Geniuses is Kurt Andersen at his riveting best - a genuinely original exploration of the forces that have shaped today's economy and society, and what can be done to repair the damage. A route map out of ...

Essential, absorbing, infuriating, full-of-facts-you-didn't-know, saxophonely written. This is one of those situations where the book is better than the review, so you should read it... a radicalized moderate's mode ...

Nostalgia is the antithesis of history. Anderson brilliantly exposes how nostalgia — the strategic oversimplification of our past — has erased complexity and friction from our country’s narrative to serve a single ...

Evil Geniuses is Kurt Andersen at his riveting best - a genuinely original exploration of the forces that have shaped today's economy and society, and what can be done to repair the damage. A route map out of ...

Books by Kurt Andersen

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