Like Vance Packard, Daniel Boorstin has discovered that wherever one turns nowadays—to politics, or television, or journalism—chaps in Brooks Brothers suits are working the oracle. In The Image: or What Happened to the American Dream, he looks back nostalgically to a more genuinely religious age when we had heroes not celebrities, ideals not images, dreams not illusions: the age before we ate the apple of knowledge (technological) and learned how to create artifacts and artifices which please us so much more than reality that we complain of Van Gogh paintings not measuring up to Van Gogh prints, and try to solve our foreign problems by projecting the right image instead of taking the right action.
The Image: or What Happened to the American Dream, by Daniel J. Boorstin. Atheneum, $5.00
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