Killing Cool: Fantasy vs. Reality in American Life

Do you live in the real world? Many Americans don’t. “Cool” people, for example, imagine they can ride a mystical “next wave” to greater glory. Such seemingly innocuous thinking can pose serious threats to self and society. Tragedy ensues when teenagers take up smoking to be cool, presidents try to be cowboys and young men justify their cynical sexual games by invoking misinterpretations of Darwin. In eleven illuminating essays ranging across American culture, Killing Cool explores our troubling tendency to falsify reality and the self. It also offers solutions to the problems it describes, ways of re-connecting with reality and becoming who we really are. In the tradition of Allan Bloom’s "The Closing of the American Mind," Kurt Keefner brings philosophy, psychology and culture criticism to bear on syndromes we normally don’t notice but that actually permeate our lives.