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The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America Spiral-Bound | September 1, 1992

Daniel J. Boorstin

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First published in 1962, this wonderfully provocative book introduced the notion of “pseudo-events”—events such as press conferences and presidential debates, which are manufactured solely in order to be reported—and the contemporary definition of celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” Since then Daniel J. Boorstin’s prophetic vision of an America inundated by its own illusions has become an essential resource for any reader who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths.

Publisher: Penguin Random House
Original Binding: Trade Paperback
Pages: 336 pages
ISBN-10: 0679741801
Item Weight: 0.6 lbs
Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8.0 inches

Praise for Daniel J. Boorstin's The Image

“A very informative and entertaining and chastising book.”
—Harper’s 
 
“A book that everyone in America should read every few years. Stunning in its prescience, it explains virtually every aspect of our mass media's evolution and seductiveness.”
—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Visit From the Goon Squad 
 
“An engrossing book—sensitive, thoughtful, damning, dead on target and in most respects unanswerable.”
—Scientific American
 
“Excellent. . . It is the book to end all books about ‘The American Image’—what it is, who projects it, what effect it has at home or abroad.”
—The Observer 
 
“A brilliant and original essay about the black arts and corrupting influences of advertising and public relations.”
—The Guardian

“Boorstin’s book tells us how to see and listen, and how to think about what we see and hear.”
—George Will

Daniel J. Boorstin was the author of The Americans, a trilogy (The Colonial Experience; The National Experience, and The Democratic Experience) that won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1989, he received the National Book Award for lifetime contribution to literature. He was the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and for twelve years served as the Librarian of Congress. He died in 2004.