Francis Wheen

Francis Wheen has built a career in journalism and biography by examining politics, public argument, and the appeal of grand claims. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World surveys fashionable beliefs and intellectual movements that Wheen sees as retreats from evidence and Enlightenment reasoning. PublicAffairs calls it a history of modern delusions, while his work for Private Eye and the Guardian places that critique within a long career of political journalism. Wheen has also written a biography of Karl Marx and a study of Das Kapital. Those subjects reveal the range behind this book: he moves from economics and ideology to popular culture, asking why confident stories can remain persuasive even when facts point elsewhere.