"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

"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 lucid and very funny jeremiad about how public discourse has been degraded."
Mother Jones

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 discoursethe 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.