About the Author:
UMBERTO ECO (1932–2016) was the author of numerous essay collections and seven novels, including The Name of the Rose,The Prague Cemetery, and Inventing the Enemy. He received Italy’s highest literary award, the Premio Strega, was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government, and was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
From Publishers Weekly:
By "hyperreality" Eco is alluding to the American "frantic desire for the almost real," the yen for fakes to fill a cultural void. The trenchant title essay analyzes the American psyche as it hops from erotic laser holograms to the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Disneyland. Eco, well known as a novelist (The Name of the Rose, is urbane, detached, elegant and sometimes obscure as an essayist. This uneven collection of newspaper and magazine pieces reflects the Italian scholar's love of the Middle Agesone essay compares American universities to monasteries, another focuses on Thomas Aquinasthough, for the most part, Eco relentlessly analyzes the present. He examines sport as a calculated waste of energy, presents a structuralist critique of Casablanca and offers commentaries on the Red Brigades, credit-card cheats, the religious revival and blue jeans as a latter-day version of knights' armor.
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