Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

Belief. The blurred line between reality and fantasy isn’t a contemporary development in American life, according to Kurt Andersen in his book titled, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. “America was the dreamworld creation of fantasists, some religious and some out to get rich quick, all with a freakish appetite for the amazing.” (p.427). Readers with strong religious beliefs will feel somewhat dismissed in those beliefs when they read Andersen’s categorization of them as fantasists. Readers who share Andersen’s worldview will find almost five hundred pages of statistics, anecdotes, and selective stories of American life to show that over a long period of time, fertile ground in America provided the soil in which fantasy and reality blurred and became widespread. Truth has become a matter of feeling, not fact, and that didn’t happen overnight. Whether offended or vindicated by Andersen’s book, every reader can understand our contemporary society better by reading about our past and seeing in that past the foundations of modern life. Rating: Four-star (I like it) Click here to purchase Fantasyland from amazon.com.