NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER *WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER * Andy
Borowitz one of the funniest people in America (CBS Sunday Morning) brilliantly chronicles
our embrace of anti-intellectualism (Walter Isaacson) in American politics from Ronald Reagan
to Dan Quayle from George W. Bush to Sarah Palin to its apotheosis in Donald J. Trump. Andy
Borowitz has been called a Swiftian satirist (The Wall Street Journal) and one of the country's
finest satirists (The New York Times). Millions of fans and New Yorker readers enjoy his
satirical news column The Borowitz Report. Now in Profiles in Ignorance he delivers a wittily
alarming polemic that tracks the evolution of American politics from grounds for gravitas to
festival of idiocy (The New York Times). Borowitz argues that over the past fifty years
American politicians have grown increasingly allergic to knowledge and mass media have
encouraged the election of ignoramuses by elevating candidates who are better at performing
than thinking. Starting with Ronald Reagan's first campaign for governor of California in 1966
and culminating with the election of Donald J. Trump to the White House Borowitz shows how
during the age of twenty-four-hour news and social media the US has elected politicians to
positions of great power whose lack of the most basic information is terrifying. In addition to
Reagan Quayle Bush Palin and Trump Borowitz covers a host of congresspersons senators
and governors who have helped lower the bar over the past five decades. Profiles in Ignorance
aims to make us both laugh and cry: laugh at the idiotic antics of these public figures and
cry at the cataclysms these icons of ignorance have caused. But most importantly the book
delivers a call to action and a cause for optimism: History doesn't move in a straight line
and we can change course if we act now.
