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Translator: What is the gift to China

isbn: 780 19055 12

Title: Crazy America: Greed, Violence and the New American Dream (2nd Edition)-American Studies Series and Translation Series.

Page count: 259

Pricing: 20.0.

Publishing House: Social Science Literature Publishing House

Binding: paperback

Year of publication: May 2005-1

As one of the series of contemporary social problems, Crazy America-Greed, Violence, the New American Dream is a masterpiece with profound social significance. As J. Kozol commented on this book, "A masterpiece that strongly criticizes society, its description is true and shocking ..." On a sunny afternoon, I finished reading this book, but after closing it, my heart could not be calm for a long time. In some ways, every country has this "crazy epidemic" to some extent, and there is this selfish and anti-social madness.

brief introduction

Crazy America-Greed, Violence and the New American Dream was first published in 2002, and its original English name was American Wild: Greed, Violence and the New American Dream. Its author, Charles Derber, is a professor of sociology at Boston College in the United States and a former course director at the Institute of Social Economy and Social Justice at Boston College. He is an internationally recognized expert in political economy, international relations, American studies and American culture. His main works include Enterprise Empire: The Threat of Enterprises to Our Life and Our Countermeasures, Pursuing Attention: Strength and Self in Daily Life, Professional Workers: Mental Work in Advanced Capitalist Society, etc. This book is one of a series of books on contemporary social problems. As mentioned in the preface, it is a systematic study of social problems that are constantly emerging in contemporary society and need to be solved urgently from the perspective of sociology. The fields involved include all aspects of social problems, including personal "madness" and "madness" of companies and even the government. The madness in the title comes from the creation of the media. The author defines it as "a degenerate form of individualism, which consists of various antisocial behaviors", and "madness refers to the behavior of hurting others, destroying social structure and taking self as the value orientation", and further divides madness into "expressive madness". Tool crazy, economic crazy, political crazy, social crazy and a series of different ways. This book is divided into six chapters. The first five chapters discuss that "crazy epidemic" is rampant in all aspects of American social life through the analysis of a large number of real social problems, including extreme madness, such as murder, madness in the media and daily life, such as alcoholism and deception, and madness between capitalism and big companies and governments, such as sweatshops established by multinational companies in third world countries. The sixth chapter, "Beyond madness: Reviving civilized society", discusses the reflection on this crazy virus and puts forward some methods to eradicate it.

Although it involves some sociological viewpoints of Marx and Dackheim, this book is not a sociology textbook. There are no obscure academic words in the book. On the contrary, a large number of vivid examples make it an easy-to-understand book suitable for ordinary readers. However, compared with general reading materials, this book has a higher academic level and is positioned between popular reading materials and academic monographs. This is quite similar to "Between Civilization and Reality-Made in America" I saw last semester. The same works are about studying the United States. There is no easy-to-understand academic vocabulary, involving all aspects of American society and citing a large number of examples. Crazy America and Made in America are equally interesting to read and equally thought-provoking. But the different identities of the authors bring different feelings to the reading process of these two books. Made in America, written by the French, evaluates the United States and discusses its problems with a caring and detached attitude, sometimes with a ridiculous attitude. It has a unique perspective, neither praising the United States unilaterally nor criticizing the United States to pieces. The wonderful and original comments on some issues are jaw-dropping; Crazy America, written by Americans, focuses on the dark side of society, from hiring people to kill their wives to drug dealing, from street violence to child labor in big companies, from crazy shopping advertisements to the Florida vote counting scandal. The author's criticism of today's American society is more thorough, with less attitude towards crazy social problems and more sense of responsibility as a master.

Campus is no longer a pure land.

Campus and family are familiar to us students. When these two places are mentioned, many people will naturally associate them with calmness, safety and warmth. However, in this crazy society, "the view that university campus is a refuge away from violent crimes and other social dissolute behaviors is as outdated as the view that family is a safe harbor". At first glance, the author's words seem surprising, but it makes sense to think about it carefully.

Campus is no longer the pure land in many people's minds, and the concept of a considerable number of college students can't help worrying us. According to a survey cited by the author, in a class, 65% people agree with the statement that "nothing is more important to me than making myself rich". 75% of students said that their generation thought that "in the American economy, everyone lives for himself." Surprisingly, 96% people think that their generation thinks that "the most important virtue in a market society is competition." Under the support of this belief, extreme individualism has influenced people's behavior, and the campus has become more and more like the base camp of criminal activities. There are not only relatively minor criminal acts such as alcoholism, vandalism, theft, campus violence, sexual assault, but also murder, a vicious act that people never thought would happen in a pure campus before. Moreover, the surge in the probability of murder in recent years is enough to alert people and make college students start to worry that such things will happen around them. Compared with some murders in society, murders on university campuses are often caused by seemingly trivial things, such as a few quarrels. A few hundred dollars is enough to make people feel distressed. Most campus crimes are planned and implemented by ruthless and scheming student lunatics while awake, such as the Ma Jiajue incident of Yunnan University a few years ago and the most serious campus shooting incident of Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, which killed at least 32 people. In particular, the latter incident surprised us greatly. Of the 32 victims, at least 30 were completely innocent. They have never even seen the murderer. How can this not make people feel creepy? It's not just violent incidents. Today's campus is full of all kinds of unhealthy trends: students openly recruit "gunmen" on campus; More and more "exam-oriented companies" openly advertise on the internet; As long as you pay a certain fee, someone will help you draft and polish your paper; By bribing the marking teacher, you can improve your grades by one level; All kinds of novel cheating methods are constantly emerging, and even books and TV programs that teach cheating skills have appeared ... These things may not be as serious as homicide cases in nature, and on the surface, no one has suffered great losses, and even many people can profit from them and taste the sweetness. However, the hidden motives behind these events cannot but make people think deeply.

Family-a harbor that is no longer safe.

People often regard the family as a safe harbor and a warm refuge, but as everyone knows, most crimes take place in this place that people think is the safest, and the people closest to you may be the people who hurt you the most. At the beginning of the book Crazy America, the author tells a case of killing his wife and pretending to be a murderer. The murderer knew the image of black youth doing evil in the street in people's minds, so he cleverly fabricated a story of a black gunman killing his wife who was pregnant for eight months and self-mutilation to cover up the truth of the incident. The murderer shot his wife, although she was eight months pregnant, in order to get hundreds of thousands of dollars in life insurance compensation from her and use the money to open a restaurant. In another case, a pharmacist killed his wife who had been married for 14 years simply because she didn't want to bear the child's living expenses in case of divorce. In this increasingly indifferent society, people can kill the closest people around them for a little profit, which can't be said to be the craziest behavior. At present, various domestic crimes emerge one after another: wife killing, husband killing, domestic violence, adoptive father raping adopted daughter, stepmother abusing stepdaughter and so on. Has become a hot headline in the media. Compared with other crimes, criminals of family crimes sometimes have the most far-fetched and strange motives. A few years ago, there was a sensational infanticide case in the United States. The mother in the incident killed her newborn child for several years in succession, and the motive was actually to enjoy people's sympathy and concern for the mother who lost her child. Such an extremely crazy behavior makes people laugh and cry, but they don't feel the indifference and moral deficiency of this society at all.

In the specific social background of the United States, crazy behavior is more related to the influence of individualism. The author points out that Tocqueville was already worried about the fate of the United States as early as 150 years ago. He believes that the United States is easily influenced by individualism, and the madness shown in all aspects of today's society is the product of individualism. American individualism culture has been damaged beyond repair. Perhaps in order to balance the depression and social disappointment brought by the whole book, in the last chapter of this book, the author points out the bright side of American society and the other side that American society is fighting against the crazy virus, that is, the power of civilized society, and puts forward the hope for the future-"we can still unite to form what Tocqueville called a' grand alliance'". For me, this book shows me another scene under the surface prosperity of American society and gives me a deeper understanding of American social problems. Looking at the United States from another side, we have gained a lot.