Rating: 
Summary: Postman Delivers!
Review: This is my third Postman book and I am still enthralled in the reading of his works. Mainly, I believe, because he writes with a particular verve that I find lacking in many of his contemporaries. His discourse covers a wide range of topics, some of them superficially, but all of them intended to support his thesis: children are losing their childhood; and meaning needs to be revived in language, education, narrative, and culture. He is iconoclastic.Even though it is possible to read his book in a cursory manner, don't fault the easily accessible work as trite. Postman's criticism is erudite, precise and well-articulated. I hope he doesn't stop writing. His voice needs to continue.
Rating: 
Summary: Hopelessly Superficial and Self-Indulgent
Review: With the publication of "Building A Bridge To The Eighteenth Century", Neil Postman has produced another thoughtful, articulate, and informative tome describing the numbing effects of postmodern society on individual consciousness, moral values, and the disintegration of our culture. In previous books he cited the dangers associated with runaway technological innovation ("Technopoly") and the corrosive cumulative effect of the manipulation of what we see through electronic media, profoundly biasing the ways we come to view, interpret and understand the world at large ("Amusing Ourselves To Death"). Here he examines a multitude of problems associated with the obvious circumstances of our rapidly disintegrating sense of commonality with our fellows in local and regional communities. Not surprisingly, Postman finds solace and hope in the values and ideas of the Enlightenment, and in particular with authors like Voltaire, Goethe, Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. He quite artfully broaches the problems we currently have and meaningfully connects them to the assault on traditional systems of meanings that former societies had a wealth of. Yet Postman also understands one cannot simply glue or graft old ideas and values onto contemporary situations and expect them to cohere and work. Although he never quite articulates the notion, one can certainly connect the dots among the lines of his argument to disocver a stunning indictment of our present culture, which he apparently sees as hollow, superficial, and cravenly focused on material acquisition. In this fashion he seems to be accepting the arguments of a number of other contemporary thinkers who see the hope for the future in terms of recognizing what our material progress has cost. In saying that we have become so enamored of progress that we have lost our social narrative, he seems to be recognizing the degree to which our stated values and ideals no longer cohere or make adequate sense in terms of motivating or integrating the social community at large. In this he falls into a long tradition of social criticism that reaches back to classic sociologists like Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim, each of whom argued that rapid scientific and technological progress and the eclipse of the traditional values associated with Christian communities posed enormous dangers for continuation of western culture, since, unlike religion, science had no core values which could act to integrate the community by reference to common values and ideals. In this sense, one can draw a line between these 19th century thinkers and others like C. Wright Mills, John Maynard Keynes, the early Alvin Toffler (before he became an apologist and fellow-traveler of the rich and famous), and contemporary authors such as Noam Chomsky, Wendell Beery, and Theodore Roszak. This is a thoughtful and wide-ranging book written by someone who understands just how complex our current dilemma is, and who also appreciates that correcting it takes more than the kinds of superficial corrections in course being bandied about in this year of political promises and presidential campaigns. It also shows Postman's powerful intellect at work. He understands that progress in and of itself is meaningless unless it is informed by a meaningful direction in which to grow toward some greater fulfillment of real human possibilities. What we have now is hardly anything like meaningful progress; it is much more like a blind thirst for egregious acquisitions of more and more material wealth at the cost of everything we once treasured. This is an informed excursion into the past in order to better appreciate how we can use our traditional values more meaningfully to avoid the pitfalls of runaway technological innovation and the cultural detritus it has left in its wake. I highly recommend this book. Enjoy!
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