MYTHOMANIA: Tales of Our Times, From Apple to ISIS

60 years after Roland Barthes first explored the mythological underpinnings of 1950s consumerism in his seminal Mythologies, the preeminent cultural critic Peter Conrad takes up the challenge to trace myths into the 20th century from Tyranosaurus Rex to Donald Trump, as he surveys the old age wisdom behind the absurdities of popular culture in his formidably astute and always entertaining style. Building upon his much-praised BBC Radio 4 series 21st Century Mythologies, his exhilarating book exposes the absurdity and occasional insanity of our godforsaken, demon-haunted contemporary culture and he casts his brilliant beam upon subjects from the Queen to the Kardashians, via Banksy, Nando's, vaping, the vogue of the cronut, the mushroom-like rise of Dubai, the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, the growth of the Pacific garbage patch, and new essays on neon, Dubai, Michael Jackson and the incredibles. And observations on Stephen Hawking, Air Force One, vampires, techno sex and apocalyptic science fiction. In Judge Judy, he shows us a matronly Roman goddess dispensing justice with a fly swatter. In the metamorphosis of Caitlyn Jenner from Olympic athlete and paterfamilias into idealized female form he sees parallels to the deeds of the residents of Mount Olympus themselves. Finally, after surveying advances in biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence, he asks whether we might be on the brink of a post-human world. The opening and closing sections are new to this paperback edition which reflect more generally on the place of myth in our society, economy and the political and religious disputes that currently agitate our lives. Paperback, 256 pages.