The Braindead Megaphone

In a serendipitous moment, someone sent me an e-mail quoting from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's recent non-fiction book, "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable": "Note that art, because of its dependence on word of mouth, is extremely prone to these cumulative-advantage effects... Our opinions about artistic merit are the result of arbitrary contagion even more than our political ideas are. One person writes a book... Read Full Review

This book is really funny - if you like David Sedaris, you will love this! Tammy at [...]

Insightful and funny at the same time. No one should miss this. I hadn't read anything by Saunders until my son told me about him. Like Sterling, as far as social and scientific commentary is concerned, he's way ahead of the curve. Not only that, he's extremely funny. I'm a voracious reader, especially science and science fiction. If you've never read George Saunders, this is the one to begin with.

This is very, very funny stuff with stong a ring of truth that leaves you thinking. I loved it and highly recommend it.

For the title essay alone, this is the nonfiction book of the year. Saunders coins this term "The Braindead Megaphone" for our mass media and the circus its made of everything from the OJ Simpson Trial to the War in Iraq - and how we end up thinking and talking about such events, from the most ridiculous to the most serious, in equivalent terms. Both the term and the essay are pretty much right on, and eminently useful...And... Read Full Review