Fantasyland (Andersen)

Fantasyland:  How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History
Kurt Andersen, 2017
Random House
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400067213


Summary
The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States … nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year. —Lawrence O’Donnell

How did we get here?

In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, "fake news" moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA.

Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged.

From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies — every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails.

Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 22, 1954
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Awards—Langum Prize-Historical Fiction
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, New York


Kurt Andersen is an American novelist who is also host of the Peabody-winning public radio program Studio 360, a co-production between Public Radio International and WNYC. Andersen was born in Omaha, Nebraska where he attended high school. Later, he graduated, magna cum laude, from Harvard where he edited the Harvard Lampoon.

Journalism
In 1986 he co-founded Spy magazine with E. Graydon Carter, which was sold in 1991; it continued publishing until 1998. He has been a writer and columnist for New York ("The Imperial City"), The New Yorker ("The Culture Industry"), and Time ("Spectator"). He was also the architecture and design critic for Time for nine years.

Andersen was fired in 1996 from New York magazine, where he was an editor-in-chief, a position he occupied for two-and-a-half years. The ostensible reason was the publication's financial results, but Andersen attributed the firing to his refusal to kill a story regarding the rivalry between investment bankers Felix Rohatyn and Steven Rattner. The story had upset Henry Kravis, one of the magazine's owners.

In 1999 Anderson co-founded an online media news web site and biweekly magazine called Inside, which he and his co-founders sold to Primedia; Primedia closed the site in October 2001. From 2001 to 2004 he served as a senior creative consultant to Barry Diller's Universal Television, and from 2003 to 2005 as editorial director of Colors magazine. More recently, he co-founded the email cultural curation service Very Short List, was a guest op-ed columnist for The New York Times and editor-at-large for Random House.

Books
Andersen is the author of three novels, including Turn of the Century (1999), which was a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book of the year, and the bestseller Heyday (2007), which won the Langum Prize for the best American historical fiction of 2007. He published his third novel, True Believers (2012). His short fiction was published in the anthology, Stories: All-New Tales (2010).

Andersen has also published a book of humorous essays, The Real Thing (1980, 1982, and 2008), about "quintessentialism." He co-authored two humor books — Tools of Power (1980), a parody of self-help books on becoming successful, and Loose Lips (1995), an anthology of edited transcripts of real-life conversations involving celebrated people. Along with Graydon Carter and George Kalogerakis he assembled a history and greatest-hits anthology of Spy called Spy: The Funny Years (2006).

He also wrote Reset (2009), about the causes and aftermath of the Great Recession, and he has contributed to a number of other books. His bestselling cultural history, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (2017), attempts to explain American society's peculiar susceptibility to illusions.

Personal life
Andersen lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, the author Anne Kreamer, and their two daughters. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/3/2017.)

Book Reviews
Kurt Andersen's latest opus [tells of] a people who have committed themselves … to florid, collective delusion.… If there's a flaw in this book, it's repetitiveness. Andersen…goes for wide rather than deep So he doesn't examine, for example, how we would separate the junk from the gems.… "You're entitled to your own opinions and our own fantasies, but not your own facts — especially if your fantastical facts hurt people," he says.… But the attempt is brief and feels halfhearted … [and] leaves a reader worried that a short manifesto on facts won't save us. 
Hanna Rosin - New York Times Book Review


Americans believe what they want. That’s the heart of… the new book by Kurt Andersen.… He begins with Old World colonists seeking to forge a New World based on self-determination and freedom of thought, and ends with Donald Trump.… He offers not so much a diagnosis of a country alienated from its values but a second opinion.
Christopher Borrelli - Chicago Tribune


Calling it the "fantasy-industrial complex," Andersen documents the myriad entities — business, religion, politics, entertainment — that have produced a populace that eschews reality for fantasy, facts for fiction, real life for make-believe.… In this absorbing, must-read polemic, Andersen exhaustively chronicles a development eating away at the very foundation of Americanism.… "The good news …is that America may now be at peak Fantasyland. We can hope."
Paul Alexander - Newsday


With this rousing book, [Kurt] Andersen proves to be the kind of clear-eyed critic an anxious country needs in the midst of a national crisis.
San Francisco Chronicle


Andersen interprets American history, beginning with the Puritans, in part as a myth-driven, religiously fundamental mental, antiscientific engine that ultimately paved the way for the presidency of Donald Trump.… Verdict: [E]ngaging… for general readers and scholars alike.  —Karl Helicher, formerly with Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA
Library Journal


[A]n entertaining tour of American irreality."… Do your own thing, find your own reality, it's all relative." … A spirited, often entertaining rant against things as they are.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Fantasyland … then take off on your own:

1. Kurt Andersen refers to the "fantasy-industrial complex," a nod to President Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex." What does Andersen mean by the term, and do you think he is accurate in his assessment ... or that he overreaches?

2. The overarching thesis of Fantasyland is that Americans have come to believe that "opinions and feelings are the same as facts." Does the author make a convincing argument? What evidence does he marshal to support his premise?

3. Andersen presents a historical perspective, starting with the landing at Plymouth Rock. How does his portrayal of the Puritans converge with, or — diverge from — your understanding of colonial history? What did you learn in your history courses in school?

4. Follow-up to Question 3: Andersen writes about 17th-century colonist Anne Hutchinson, saying that she was uniquely American "because she was so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality." She lacked self-doubt. Don't many of us have those very traits — which we often refer to as "self-confidence"? Don't we, in fact, see those traits as positive? So … how can we know whether what we believe in is opinion or fact? How do we separate out fact from alternative facts … truth from fake news … reality from fantasy? How can we self-check our own subjectivity?

5. Andersen points to the 1960s era in which the culture of fantasyland "becomes a permanent feature of the American mental landscape." What does he hold up as examples?

6. As Andersen writes toward the end of the book, "You're entitled to your own opinions and your own fantasies, but not to your own facts — especially if your fantastical facts hurt people." Can you give specifics of some of those fantasies that cause damage to others?

7. Talk about the ways in which Hollywood (radio, film, and TV), fantasy games and reenactments, the internet, Oprah Winfrey, and even hair dye have contributed to the prevalence of fantasy in everyday life.

8. According to Andersen, our propensity for delusions/illusions has led to the presidency of Donald Trump. Do you agree … or disagree with his analysis?

9. Andersen skewers many public figures, both liberal and conservative. Does he take aim at particular individuals or institutions that you hold dear? If so, which ones?

10. Despite some attempt at even-handedness, modern Republicans come in for a lot of the blame in Fantasyland. Why does Andersen point the finger at the Right? Do you agree … or disagree?

11. Follow-up to Question 4: What does Andersen propose as a solution to the American fantasyland?

(Questions issued by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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