The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: The Moral Origins of the Great Recession

Front Porch Republic Books, 2014-08-27. Paperback. Presumed 1st ed. Not stated. Used: Good - Shelf ware, some notations and underling to text. 100% readable. Clean. No odor or any kind.

Scarce title, and getting scarcer. Out of print. Absolutely appropriate title/topic for today. The demise of virtue - indeed!

David Bosworth writes with extraordinary grace and lucidity and calls to mind the
work of earlier practitioners like Christopher Lasch, Jacques Ellul and David Riesman-Robert Boyers (Editor, Salmagundi)


David Bosworth is a brilliant contrarian, the kind of thinker who identifies and cutsthrough what passes for the true, and provides us with the language for what we only
half-knew prior to reading him.-Stephen Dunn (Pulitzer Prize-winning poet)


Bosworth is, to my mind, a secular Emerson for our time"-Stephen Corey (Editor, The Georgia Review)


Although the financial disaster of 2008 proved devastatingly quick, the evolution ofthe bad faith that drove the collapse is a more gradual story, and one that David
Bosworth powerfully narrates in The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: TheMoral Origins of the Great Recession, his sweeping history of the forces driving
ethical, political, and economic change over the last sixty years. Here, Bosworthtraces how the commercialization of public spaces and electronic information has
created a new and enclosed American place. Chapter by chapter, he then shows howthe materialist values of this Virtual America have suffused our everyday lives,
co-opting alike the themes of our narratives, the planks of our parties, the practicesof our professions, and the most intimate aspects of our personal lives, including
our beliefs about God, marriage, and childcare. From Ronald Reagan and Disney-land to modern pharmacology and "prosperity theology, from the phony conserva-
tism of Wall Street to the faux rebellion of "transgressive" art, Bosworth's alternativestory of American life since 1950 relentlessly challenges today's dominant
narratives- narratives that, as he reveals, made both the calamitous invasion of Iraqand the economic collapse of 2008 all too likely.


A recipient of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the Editors' Book Award,David Bosworth is the author of two books of fiction and numerous essays on
cultural and ethical change in America. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington.