The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

By Brooke Gladstone

Book Overview

Every week on the public radio show On the Media, the award-winning journalist Brooke Gladstone analyzes the media and how it shapes our perceptions of the world. Now, from her front-row perch on the day's events, Gladstone brings her genius for making insightful, unexpected connections to help us understand what she calls--and what so many of us can acknowledge having--"trouble with reality."

Reality, as she shows us, was never what we thought it was--there is always a bubble, people are always subjective and prey to stereotypes. And that makes reality actually more vulnerable than we ever thought. Enter Donald J. Trump and his team of advisors. For them, as she writes, lying is the point. The more blatant the lie, the easier it is to hijack reality and assert power over the truth. Drawing on writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Walter Lippmann, Philip K. Dick, and Jonathan Swift, she dissects this strategy, straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and shows how the Trump team mastered it, down to the five types of tweets that Trump uses to distort our notions of what's real and what's not.

And she offers hope. There is meaningful action, a time-tested treatment for moral panic. And there is also the inevitable reckoning. History tells us we can count on it.

Brief and bracing, The Trouble with Reality shows exactly why so many of us didn't see it coming, and how we can recover both our belief in reality--and our sanity.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 152350238X
• ISBN13: 9781523502387
• Release Date: May 2017
• Publisher: Workman Publishing
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 4.3" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Not really about moral panics

I was looking for a book examining the phenomenon of moral panics, this book was not that. It is a brief, somewhat quippy, look at the post-Trump perception of reality. Not a bad read, but not what the title makes it out to seem. Also, the author tries to present both sides of the argument, but does so in a manner that comes off as equivocating.