Farrell relates rageful outbursts to a culture that has been traumatized and now accepts the warrior pose as an inevitable result. “Farrell has undertaken yet another fascinating journey through modern culture and the human condition. This book is ambitious in its conception and compelling in its execution.”-Ralph Whitehead, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Thus, this book takes things that have been under our noses and places them before our eyes. The other occurs in the realm of imagination, and consists of images and ideas of the act of going berserk. In this sense, what Wall Street did in the early 2000s was to go berserk. In finding that the incidence of actual beserk rampages is on the rise, he also finds an increase in the realm of behavior – consisting of actions that are the figurative equivalent of going beserk. “In this work of extraordinary insight, Farrell enables us to discern an important pattern in culture. Drawing from a storehouse of cinema, news stories, ads, cartoons, literature, and lyrics from the post-Vietnam era, Kirby Farrell has painted a masterful, disturbing portrait of the American subconscious.”-James Aho, author of Sociological Trespasses “Like the ‘bear shirt’ of the Viking ecstatic from which the term is derived, the berserker is a cultural style both enthralling yet repulsive put on to secure oneself against death anxiety, the threatened disintegration of mind, self, body, or nation. A double reward, Berserk Style's landmark analysis of contemporary culture both enlightens us and empowers us."-Les Gasser, Professor of Information and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign For me, this is why Berserk Style is such a compelling and necessary read: like the best works on culture or humanities, it shows how deeply surprising cultural arrangements, perspectives, and strategies hiding in mundane and typical experience profoundly shape how we think and what we do. Beyond real but remote actions of the intoxicated or deranged, he demonstrates how 'berserk style' has become a widespread lens for organizing modern experience, and an often-troubling resource for mobilizing and rationalizing cultural and political action on scales both personal and grand. We usually think of 'berserk' behaviors, from apocalyptic rampages like mass school killings to ecstatic revels like Burning Man, as extremes of experience, outside ordinary lives. With rich evidence and fascinating detail, Farrell shows how contemporary culture has re-framed many varieties of the berserk into self-conscious strategies-'styles'-of sensemaking and control. Still, Berserk Style amazes me, for its audacity, its clarity, and the scope of its stories and insights. "As a scientist studying the workings of information in society, I've tracked Kirby Farrell's trenchant analyses of literature and culture for over 35 years. Here are some reviewers’ descriptions of the book: Terror and economics amok to binge addictions and The book’sĬhapters range from military violence in the War on Berserk Style in American Culture explores the wayĮxtreme behavior is disguised in everyday experience
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