Description:
An incisive cultural history that captures a fractious nation through the prism of television and the rattled mind of a celebrity president
In the tradition of Neil Postman's masterpiece Amusing Ourselves to Death, Audience of One shows how American media have shaped American society and politics, by interweaving two crucial stories. The first story follows the evolution of television from the three-network era of the twentieth century, which joined millions of Americans in a shared monoculture, into today's zillion-channel, Internet-atomized universe, which sliced and diced them into fractious, alienated subcultures. The second story is a cultural critique of Donald Trump.
Reaching back to the 1940s, when Trump and commercial television were born, Poniewozik illustrates how Donald became "a character that wrote itself, a brand mascot that jumped off the cereal box and entered the world, a simulacrum that replaced the thing it represented." Viscerally attuned to the media, Trump shape-shifted into a boastful tabloid playboy in the 1980s; a self-parodic sitcom fixture in the 1990s; a reality-TV "You're Fired" machine in the 2000s; and finally, the biggest role of his career, a Fox News-obsessed, Twitter-mad, culture-warring demagogue in the White House.
Brief description: Matthew Josdal is a voice-over and theater artist originally from a small town in southwest Saskatchewan. Matthew obtained his BFA in drama from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, where he currently resides. He has narrated audiobooks in genres ranging from historical nonfiction to contemporary fantasy, along with most things in between. In addition to a fifteen-plus year career in acting for both stage and microphone, he recently completed all of his requirements for his honors degree in psychology.
Review Quotes:
"Poniewozik...expands on his newspaper work by dissecting the president through the lens of his favorite medium."
-- Entertainment Weekly