The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society

By Heather Mac Donald

Book Overview

One of the best of our urban journalists considers the upside-down world of public policy and the entrenchment of foolish ideas in closely reported stories from the streets of New York to the seats of intellectual power. Insightful and articulate...entertaining and provocative. -Richard Lamm, Wall Street Journal. Spirited, stimulating, eloquent essays...vivid and devastating....The Burden of Bad Ideas is social, cultural, and political criticism of the first order. -Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566633370
• ISBN13: 9781566633376
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
• Length: 255 Pages
• Weight: 1.09 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Starts as an interesting view - becomes a whine-festival.

She starts slowly to explain the transformation from an individual-based responsibility society to one that resolves individual responsibility and blames all woes on the varied society that creates the problem. A handful of perverts and commies have taken control of our institutions and perverted the institution’s purpose. Sounding like she stumbled upon some great secret and is giving the alarm, this book then quickly turns into some b-i-t-c-h session that moves from one institution to another. It becomes very repetitive and offers no solution. She should have stopped when she was ahead. I haven’t heard terms like the deserving and undeserving poor since the reruns of “My Fair Lady” when Alfred P. Doolittle said, “I intend to go on being undeserving”. Maybe it is just that a lot of her descriptions of society are of someplace far off or unique and have never made it here. However, her descriptions of schools do not match the ones I went to or the local ones that kids are going to today. She must have gone to a different Smithsonian than I did, and none of the examples of daily life match any reality that I have come across. If the book had a solution section, it would be “The Capitalist Manifesto” (a revolutionary plan for a capitalist distribution of wealth to preserve our free society) by Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler. This book is the “Turner Diaries” without the storyline. I rate it up there with the best of conspiracy theories. If you make it through this book without wondering what her problem is, then be sure to read “None Dare Call it Conspiracy”; at least there is an attempt to put some meat behind it. However, the book does describe a good nightmare if you can find it.