The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium by Mark Dery

The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium by Mark Dery

From the far left to the far right, on talk radio and the op-ed page, more and more Americans believe that the social fabric is unraveling. Celebrity worship and media frenzy, suicidal cultists and heavily armed secessionists: modern life seems to have become a pyrotechnic insanitarium, Mark Dery says, borrowing a turn-of-the-century name for Coney Island. Dery elucidates the meaning to our madness, deconstructing American culture from mainstream forces like Disney and Nike to fringe phenomena like the Unabomber and alien invaders. Our millennial angst, he argues, is a product of a pervasive cultural anxiety-a combination of the social and economic upheaval wrought by global capitalism and the paranoia fanned by media sensationalism. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park ride through the extremes of American culture of which The Atlantic Monthly has written, Mark Dery confirms once again what writers and thinkers as disparate as Nathanael West, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sigmund Freud, and Oliver Sacks have already shown us: the best place to explore the human condition is at its outer margins, its pathological extremes.

Mark Dery is a critic of culture. He is most known for his books The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Edge, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, Flame Wars, and Culture Jamming, which focus on the politics of popular culture. He has been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, a Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at the University of California, Irvine, and a journalism professor at New York University. Distraction, Zeitgeist, Holy Fire, and The Caryatids are among the science fiction works written by Bruce Sterling.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780802136701
ISBN 10	0802136702
Title	The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium
Author	Mark Dery
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
Year published	2000-01-27
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.