Praise for The Pyrotechnic Insanitorium
"The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is both highly entertaining and deeply disturbing in a way that Mark Dery has made his own. The ever-growing pathologies of millennial America show up clearly on the X-ray screen of his penetrating analysis. Racily written, and filled with shrewd insights, this guidebook to the madhouse of the modern world is essential reading."
-J. G. Ballard, author of Crash
"Dery…mines Julia Kristeva and Entertainment Weekly with equal verve.…A provocative work of cultural criticism."
-Scott Stossel, The Atlantic Monthly
"With clarity and force Mark Dery has captured the tone of our times, taking us on a dizzying roller-coaster ride through the chaos of the modern world. A choice contribution to the study of American culture."
-Stuart Ewen, author of All Consuming Images
"Dery proves a provocative and cuttingly humorous guide…[with] a particular brilliance for collecting cultural detritus and bringing unseen connections to light."
-Tom Vanderbilt, Wired
"Dery…marshals a vast pop vocabulary with easy wit."
-James Poniewozik, The New York Times Book Review
"A hoot of a read, an eye-opener that pokes fun at both stuffed-shirt postmodern intellectualism and capitalist excess with equal glee."
-E. Burns, The San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Mark Dery is a sane guide to some very insane times. He has a good eye for the most bizarre and grotesque elements of contemporary American culture.…But whatever the subject, Dery deftly places it in the larger context of massive social and economic change. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is neither celebration nor invective, but something rarer and much more valuable; a master clinician's diagnosis of the symptoms of postmodernity."
-Steven Shaviro, author of Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism
"At the center of Dery's high-speed chase through the information landscape is a firm sense of moral gravity. Trust him when the world gets scary."
-Andrew Ross, author of Real Love: In Pursuit of Culture Justice
"Dery is one of those rare writers with a deep enough insight into the American soul, with an eloquence in all its stuttering dialects, to look America in its dark and gazeless eye, and not blink."
-McKenzie Wark, Higher Education (Australia)
"A series of essays that has the fin-de-millennium on the analyst's couch…Dery's observation of today's pathological public sphere is both horrific and hilarious."
-David Hurst, Chico News & Review
"Wildly entertaining."
-Robert David Sullivan, The Boston Phoenix Literary Supplement
"Dazzling…Armed with a vast and varied vocabulary of cultural references, [Dery's] contextual aperture adjusts with amazing swiftness.…Indispensable millennial reading…In his confident and searingly intelligent essays, Dery proves himself fit for the task of hyper-linking the disparate components of our culture together."
-Michael Depp, Gambit Weekly
"Mark Dery pokes his finger directly into the soft spots in the millennial American mind. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium manages to get serious and make for fun reading at the same time."
-Howard Rheingold, author of Virtual Communities
"Well-read, intellectually agile, and blessed with seemingly total pop-culture recall."
-Elaine Showalter, The Village Voice Literary Supplement
"So brilliant it blinds…There is pleasure in such writing, the pleasure of the spooky theme park with its dazzling lights and its hilarious rides that whirl you senseless."
-Celia Storey, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
"Required reading for all persons entering or living in the USA…A veritable road map of sideshow American culture on the highway to hell…Entertaining and informative, disturbing and delightful."
-www.disobey.com
