Get Real: How to See Through the Hype, Spin and Lies of Modern Life

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A passionate and entertaining guide to spotting and decoding the delusions we live under.
Oil companies advertise their green credentials. Billionaires organise 'grassroots' political movements. Cuts that target the poor are billed as progressive. Casually dressed employees play table football in airy open-plan offices, but work longer hours than ever before. To Eliane Glaser, these are all signs of the maddeningly surreal gap between appearance and reality in modern life. With the melting away of conflicts between East and West in the Cold War and Right and Left in our politics, the big ideologies were consigned to history. But Get Real argues that agendas never really disappeared. They just went undercover, creating a looking-glass world in which reality is spun and vested interests appear in disguise.

Busting the jargon and unravelling the spin, Get Real reveals the secrets about modern life that we were never supposed to know. It puts the truth and the power to choose firmly in our hands, because only by telling it like it is can we improve and maybe even save our world for real.

Reviews

A sharp, lively wake-up call to free ourselves from the illusions that we live by. Crystal clear, elegantly written and inspiring, it is all the more necessary to read Glasers book at a time when we are increasingly pressured to imbibe phony ideology, phony science and phony ethics Darian Leader

These are big ideas, laid out with precision, grace and urgency. I couldnt put it down Zoe Williams

In an age when journalists have, in large numbers, moved from the bullshit-detection business to the bullshit-promulgation business, it's always welcome to come upon a book that hoists its flag proudly in the first camp. Eliane Glaser's is one such Sam Leith, Guardian

'In a world filled with bullshit, Glaser wields a shovel like Rambo wields a machine gun' Time Out

Author Bio

Eliane Glaser, author of Get Real, is also a radio producer, and an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. Her book on Judaism without Jews was one of the Jewish Chronicles Books of the Year in 2007, and her articles have appeared in the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Humanist, the Financial Times, History Today, BBC History Magazine, Forward magazine in the US, the Jewish Chronicle and the Jewish Quarterly.