Perspective

Daniel Boorstin has written extensively on politics with a particular focus on democracy and politics in America. He is a historian and seeks to understand current social and political dynamics through historical events. He suggests in this book that there are some negatives to the rapid development of technology and commerce, even though he received strong criticism for doing so and his work has been described as a "slander on the United States". Boorstin states that despite the views of his detractors, he wrote this book out of "affection for America".

Boorstin suggests that his task in the book is mainly to help point out some of the ways that Americans have come to deceive themselves. In the course of his studies, he has been less "impressed" by stated responsibility of various figures for our current problems and suggests that they are more a result of our successes...