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  • Amusing Ourselves to Death

  • Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
  • Written by: Neil Postman
  • Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach
  • Length: 4 hrs and 49 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (151 ratings)

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Amusing Ourselves to Death cover art

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Written by: Neil Postman
Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach
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Publisher's Summary

In this eloquent and persuasive book, Neil Postman examines the deep and broad effects of television culture on the manner in which we conduct our public affairs, and how "entertainment values" have corrupted the very way we think.

As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given less and less expression in the form of the printed word, they are rapidly being reshaped to suit the requirements of television. And because television is a visual medium, whose images are most pleasurably apprehended when they are fast-moving and dynamic, discourse on television has little tolerance for argument, hypothesis, or explanation. Postman argues that public discourse, the advancing of arguments in logical order for the public good, once a hallmark of American culture, is being converted from exposition and explanation to entertainment.

©1985 Neil Postman (P)1994 Blackstone Audio Inc.

What the critics say

"A brilliant, powerful and important book....This is a brutal indictment Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one." (Washington Post Book World)
"[Postman] starts where Marshall McLuhan left off, constructing his arguments with the resources of a scholar and the wit of a raconteur." (Christian Science Monitor)
"A sustained, withering and thought-provoking attack on television and what it is doing to us....Postman goes further than other critics in demonstrating that television represents a hostile attack on literate culture." (Publishers Weekly)

What listeners say about Amusing Ourselves to Death

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Narration was very fast.

I found the book interesting and insightful. I understood it best when I set the playback at X .8.

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2 people found this helpful

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  • LJ
  • 2022-04-15

Lots of interesting points but ranty

Some of the arguments got lost because the author exaggerated and some of the arguments and examples, when dissected, did not hold water. The first part was interesting but towards the middle it became more of a rant unfortunately. Despite that it was to a large part interesting and inspired me to read "a brave new world".

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Interesting but dated

Considering that is written in 1985 and analyses the impact of media and television on the population, to say that it is dated is an understatement

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Absolutely brilliant

Scary, thought-provoking, and brilliant. I would recommend this to anyone. Narrator also did a fine job.

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Essential

Impossible to fully grasp our current state of being without this framework.

Terrifyingly prescient

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10/10

Amazing. Haunting in the worst ways but very much a great analysis on contemporary life

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Information is the gun powder

Brilliant look at TV from the eyes of Neil Postman in 1986. Thank You sir

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A must read to understand our culture

I am fascinated in understanding how and why our culture has devolved.

How did we have the strongest citizens and the best civilization and now we have the weakest citizens, our society is crumbling and we are all completely apathetic about it? A key part of the answer is found in this book. Very tight and potent.

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Brave New World vs 1984

This book expressed a lot of my feelings that we will sooner be in a Huxley world than an Orwell world. It is shocking when you switch “television” for “social media” when he speaks. A great book that is proving to be more timeless although good to have the context that it is written decades ago.

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It’s dated but no less relevant to today

The basics of his ideas are wildly more applicable today that he ever would have realised. Was a great book.

Not a great fan of the reader, it comes across a little like the “announcer” voice, or like an ad read guy. Would have been nicer for someone more connected to the material to have done it. Books read by their authors are so much better

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