Fantasyland

You're entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts

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.

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. To invent and believe what the hell you like is in some ways an unwritten constitutional right. Every citizen is more than ever gloriously free to construct and promote any vision of the world he or she devoutly believes to be true. That do-your-own-thing freedom - run amok since the individualism and relativism of the 1960s and later the unprecedented free-for-all world of the Internet, is the driving credo of America's current transformation where the difference between opinion and fact is rapidly crumbling.

Fantasyland is a journey that joins the dots between the disparate crazed franchises of true believers - America's endless homespun rebooting of Christianity from Mormons to charismatics, medicine shows to new age quacks, conspiracy theorists of every stripe, showmen hucksters from P T Barnum to Trump himself, Creationists to climate change deniers, extra-terrestrial obsessives to gun-toting libertarians, anti-Government paranoia, pseudoscience, survivalists and satanic panic. Along the way Kurt Andersen has created a unique and raucous history of America and a new paradigm for understanding our post-factual world.

"Not only a must-read for anyone wanting to understand Trump's America but also a laugh-out-loud undiluted pleasure" -- Will Storr, author of Selfie "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." -- Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs "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 "An absorbing, must-read polemic." Newsday "The most important book that I have read this year." -- Lawrence O'Donnell The Last Word, MSNBC

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-///

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