Susan Jacoby has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 4 ratings. The most-rated is The Great Agnostic.
The Age of American Unreason
Summary
Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon - one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, Jacoby surveys an antirationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought". Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public. Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment - from television to the Web - and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and antirationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion. At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.
©2008 Susan Jacoby (P)2008 Tantor
Freethinkers
Summary
At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers offers a powerful defense of the secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned, elegant prose, celebrated author Susan Jacoby traces more than 200 years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Moving from 19th-century abolitionism and suffragism through the 20th century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, Freethinkers illuminates the neglected achievements of secularists who, allied with tolerant believers, have led the battle for reform in the past and today. Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, and the once-famous Robert Green Ingersoll, Freethinkers restores to history the passionate humanists who struggled against those who would undermine the combination of secular government and religious liberty that is the glory of the American system.
©2004 Susan Jacoby (P)2017 Pitchstone Publishing
Never Say Die
Summary
In a narrative that combines the intensely personal with social, economic, and historical analysis, Susan Jacoby turns an unsparing eye on the marketers of longevity - pharmaceutical companies, lifestyle gurus, and scientific businessmen who suggest that there will soon be a "cure" for the "disease" of aging. She separates wishful hype from realistic hope in a wide-ranging appraisal of subjects that include the explosion of Alzheimer’s cases, the impact of possible cuts in Social Security on the economic future of aging boomers, and the fact that women make up most of the "oldest old." Finally, Jacoby raises the fundamental question of whether living longer is a desirable thing unless it means living better, and she considers the profound moral and ethical concerns raised by increasing longevity. Never Say Die is a lucid, provocative, and powerful argument that Americans, no matter their age, are doing themselves no favor by buying into the myth that they can stay "forever young."
©2011 Susan Jacoby (P)2011 Tantor
The Great Agnostic
Summary
A biography that restores America's foremost 19th-century champion of reason and secularism to our still contested 21st-century public square. During the Gilded Age, which saw the dawn of America's enduring culture wars, Robert Green Ingersoll was known as "the Great Agnostic". The nation's most famous orator, he raised his voice on behalf of Enlightenment reason, secularism, and the separation of church and state with a vigor unmatched since America's revolutionary generation. When he died in 1899, even his religious enemies acknowledged that he might have aspired to the US presidency had he been willing to mask his opposition to religion. To the question that retains its controversial power today - was the United States founded as a Christian nation? - Ingersoll answered an emphatic no. In this provocative biography, Susan Jacoby, the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, restores Ingersoll to his rightful place in an American intellectual tradition extending from Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine to the current generation of "new atheists". Jacoby illuminates the ways in which America's often-denigrated and forgotten secular history encompasses issues, ranging from women's rights to evolution, as potent and divisive today as they were in Ingersoll's time. Ingersoll emerges in this portrait as one of the indispensable public figures who keep an alternative version of history alive. He devoted his life to that greatest secular idea of all - liberty of conscience belonging to the religious and nonreligious alike.
©2012 Susan Jacoby (P)2017 Pitchstone Publishing
Strange Gods
Summary
In this original and riveting exploration, Susan Jacoby argues that conversion - especially in the free American "religious marketplace" - is too often viewed only within the conventional and simplistic narrative of personal reinvention and divine grace. Instead, the author places conversions within a secular social context that has, at various times, included the force of a unified church and state, desire for upward economic mobility, and interreligious marriage. Moving through time, continents, and cultures, Jacoby examines conversions to authoritarian secular ideologies. She also provides portraits of individual converts, including the Catholic Church father Augustine of Hippo; the German Jewish convert to Catholicism Edith Stein, murdered at Auschwitz and canonized by the church; boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who scandalized white Americans in the 1960s by becoming a Muslim; and even politicians such as George W. Bush. Finally, Jacoby takes on the question of why the freedom to choose a religion - or to reject religion altogether - is a fundamental human rights issue that remains a breeding ground for violence in areas of the world that never experienced an Enlightenment.
©2016 Susan Jacoby (P)2016 Tantor