There are some books, masterpieces as they may be, that one simply is not ready to read. For me, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby comes to mind. Trudging through it as assigned reading for my highschool English class, I could not fathom why anyone would celebrate this blather about the antics of a bunch of silly people! Zoom ahead a decade and a half, and then rereading it, however, I was in awe– at once, continually, and sledding into that elegy of a last line– of its majesty, its poetry, its utterly American genius (although indeed, it is about a bunch of silly people). I say the same about Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
Are you ready to read Four Arguments? Or have you already? It’s an old book, originally published in the late 1970s. For me to read Mander’s masterpiece in this Age of the Smombies has been one of the most astonishing reads in my life. Yet I do not believe that I could have read it any earlier. Or, perhaps, I should say: would that I had read it earlier.
Nancy Peacock comments:
“I read this book many, many years ago, first as a series of excerpts published in the Mother Earth News, and later, I purchased it and read it again. It is profound. I have told so many people about this book, and yet my recommendation always falls on deaf ears. The fact that is was published in the ’70s does not make it any less profound today. In fact in my opinion, given the technologies its author likely did not imagine and how they have taken over so many lives, it is even more profound. Thank you for posting this.”
— Nancy Peacock
www.nancypeacockbooks.com
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