The Optimist Has Not Left The Building

Although I've never actually done a tally, I'd estimate about 20% of my almost 1700 published blog posts have cited books that have moved me in some way.

I finished "The Death Of Truth" (2018) by Michiko Kakutani months ago. Ever since, I've wished her book was the first I'd ever mentioned here. My faulty reasoning? Perhaps, had Kakutani's book been my first unequivocal recommendation, more people would take my evangelism seriously and, in turn, read a book subtitled "Notes On Falsehood In The Age of Trump." I say this knowing well how confirmation bias steers all of us away from information that doesn't support our beliefs. But I'd be a moral coward if I didn't use this puny forum to direct more readers to such an important book.

" … a disregard for facts, the displacement of reason by emotion, and the corrosion of language are diminishing the very value of truth, and what that means for America and the world."

Aside from the historical perspective, erudition, and research that give it heft, this book brims with passages like the one above, many containing triptychs that can stop any discerning reader cold. And though Kakutani's subtitle is guaranteed to alienate those clinging to alternative facts, anyone who venerates the 60's - a nostalgic sinkhole I've fallen into many times - prepare yourself. This talented writer traces our cultural fondness for relativism - and the mendacity that fits that garbage like a glove - back to the "New" Left. Kakutani is even harder on the post-modernists. All this to say there's plenty of blame to go around.

I read "The Death Of Truth". Then, it wouldn't leave me alone but I couldn't figure out a way to do it justice. Then I read the Op-Ed in yesterday's NY Times by a White House insider. Hope returned and my strategy emerged.