How We Got Here

“David Shields’s genius for deploying the words of others to create wholly original essays is on brilliant display. The connective tissue of his comments is key, guiding us as we jump from Socrates to Luther to Melville to Nietzsche, all the way to Tucker Carlson and Trump. Both erudite and accessible, classical and pop, How We Got Here stitches together the threads of thought that have landed us in the nihilistic abyss of today. Illuminating.”

— Michael Greenberg

“I'm grateful for this brilliant book, which sagely counterposes the massive irony of twentieth-century philosophy with the way it's been put to use. Now that we know we're here, the next question is how we get out of here."

—Charles Baxter

“David Shields has written another sneakily essential book. This one is a murder mystery. Truth is dead, and Shields is the forensic detective on the case. He's got a notebook full of clues and no end of suspects. The question is, can he get a conviction?”

—Nicholas Carr

“A diagram of the origins and direction of our current intellectual quagmire. Kafka wanted to read only books that were on axe to break the frozen sea within us. Shield's book is an axe for the frozen sea that surrounds us."

— Stephe Marche

"I love this provocative, unsettling book, which is both prose poem and polemic. In the originality of its form, it enacts the very anxiety about language, and how it's deployed, that it takes as its subject."

—Vahini Vara

"I'm a sucker for sexy metaphysical arguments, none hotter-- and more relevant--than the ancient one: 'What is truth?' What's needed now is not another dreary pundit tussle over Fox News but someone like David Shields, who conjures up mad, aphoristic wisdom from Greek philosophers to the great Continental (and American) thinkers of the past two centuries. Shields has created a cacophony of voices that make us think more deeply than we believed possible about the question of truth. Can we define it, can we find it, can we fake it? Once I began How We Got Here, I couldn't stop reading."

— Ron Rosenbaum

"Shields's arguments — via his inspired annotations and brilliant literary assemblages — are always seductive, propulsive to read. In the electric and terrific How We Got Here, he goes full velocity into this demented American moment, and he nails it."

— Dana Spiotta