The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink

Rating:
Summary: Dazzling Pyrotechnique
Review: Dery has taken on a most admirable task indeed in this book: containing the ongoing, ever deepening insanity of America and its so called culture- enough so to write intelligent, very engaging and sophisticated commentary on it. This is one guy I'd like to have as a next door neighbor because it would be most inspiring to hear him pontificate about my Weber Grill, lawn mower, X-box, etc. linking them with more far ranging societal pathologies ever mutating, replicating across the US if not the world at warp speed. Read this book out and temporarily ground yourself in some actual clarity, sanity, wit and wryness to boot.

Jaye Beldo: [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Like Coney Island, baby!
Review: Dery's compendium of stellar essays achieve the dizzying heights of literary incision that is all too rare at this end of the millenium. His wit, depth and powerful style inform both the reader and the Zeitgeist of heretofore unimagined and palpably novel analyses of America as Hypercapitalist theme park turned phantasmogoria.The book recalled to mind that fabulous poem by William Carlos Williams, The Pure Products of America go Crazy, from Spring and All 1923.Like his previous sphere-gasser,Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the end of the century, Mark Dery's superb research and synthetic skills pull together a truly colossal set of sources and deftly deliver them to dazzling effect.Dery's flourish and sardonic wit are both rare and endlessly entertaining. Like the early Tom Wolfe, his essays explore the uncanny, the gothic, and the downright pathological with flair and scholastic rigor that is equally well received by the educated bibliophile and the academic.J.G. Ballard's sleeve notes are no exageration!

Rating:
Summary: America Dances on the Edge of the Abyss
Review: Dery's initial metaphor--Coney Island as controlled chaos, an irruption of social taboos--sets the theme for this collection of essays exploring the fin de millenium American turn toward the countercultural, the outcast, the obscene,the pacifying. Exploring the place of Disney, talk radio and television, technology, Heaven's Gate, the Unabomber, aberrant art, freak culture, carnival celebrations and other social expressions beyond the pale, Dery suggests that in the century since Coney, America continues to indulge the dark and the chaotic, but it does so now in tones suggesting resignation more than despair. Suggesting a dialectic reaction, Dery posits the angst of postmodern American as a response to the loss of meaning and control that pervades its society. Gated communities attempt to carve out islands of control amidst urban terror; Disney offers a world whose simplicity and comfort counter the misshapen reality about us; all the while underground art movements aggressively mock corporate values. And for good measure,Dery is a scintillating writer, tossing off well-turned phrases and allusions that both entertain and clarify. A stimulating compilation of writings.

Rating:
Summary: America Dances on the Edge of the Abyss
Review: Dery's initial metaphor--Coney Island as controlled chaos, an irruption of social taboos--sets the theme for this collection of essays exploring the fin de millenium American turn toward the countercultural, the outcast, the obscene,the pacifying. Exploring the place of Disney, talk radio and television, technology, Heaven's Gate, the Unabomber, aberrant art, freak culture, carnival celebrations and other social expressions beyond the pale, Dery suggests that in the century since Coney, America continues to indulge the dark and the chaotic, but it does so now in tones suggesting resignation more than despair. Suggesting a dialectic reaction, Dery posits the angst of postmodern American as a response to the loss of meaning and control that pervades its society. Gated communities attempt to carve out islands of control amidst urban terror; Disney offers a world whose simplicity and comfort counter the misshapen reality about us; all the while underground art movements aggressively mock corporate values. And for good measure,Dery is a scintillating writer, tossing off well-turned phrases and allusions that both entertain and clarify. A stimulating compilation of writings.

Rating:
Summary: A perfect view of millenial America
Review: I found that this book captured near perfectly the sense of hyper-reality and unease that grips our civilization at the close of the millenium. With a series of at-first seemingly disconnected images, Dery weaves together a coherent and prismatic image of what America means in an age when meaning is equated with mere image. This is an author who is a journalist in the highest sense of the word, bringing the reader to a fresh understanding of the common everyday world which surrounds us all.

I whole-heartedly recommend this work.

Rating:
Summary: Pyrotechnic Insanitarium
Review: I heard Dery interivewed on KPFK in Los Angeles, and wondered if he was as gleefully subversive, jarringly insightful and downright hilarious in print. I wasn't disappointed! Imagine a brains-sloshing rollercoaster ride where your IQ is ten points higher--rather than lower--when you disembark. That's what you're in for.

[e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: a brave and sometimes brilliant look at the fin-de-siecle...
Review: Journalist Mark Dery offers a collection of essays that speak to the pre-millennial tension that each of us - from the gun- and food-hoarders to the cybergeek - likely feels to some degree. The book's title and ostensible theme are based on a comparison of postmodern America to the United States a century ago, when amusement parks like Coney Island ushered in a strange and scarifying new era. However, the book's strength is simply Dery's clever, free-associative explorations of subjects that both fascinate and repel us, as the century draws to a close. Freaks of nature. Excremental art. "X-Files"-loving conspiracy theorists. Some readers - myself included - may take issue with Dery's dim view of organized religion and with his underlying conclusion that capitalism and the free market are a source for many, if not most, of the world's ills. But anyone with a love for ideas who is unafraid to look the weirdest (and sometimes worst) elements of our culture in the face should read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Lots to say, nothing new.
Review: Mark Dery's writing style makes my mind wander and fails to pull me in. He mentions something about everything, from Ace Ventura's anal speech to the burning of Waco. "The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink" gives short insight into life's odd episodes, freak shows, and moments of insanity but misses out on making a statement worthy of reaction. As I read, I kept thinking, "yes, I know, so what?" Give me something, anything. I guess was expecting more.