The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, by James Marriott, Doubleday, 208 pages, $26
The last few years have seen a glut of sky-is-falling books about kids. Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation has made a generation of parents anxious. Jared Horvath's The Digital Delusion has fueled a backlash against technology in schools. The latest, James Marriott's The New Dark Ages, is the inevitable end point of the genre: heavy on lofty moral lectures but stripped almost entirely of scientific literacy or curiosity.
