The book’s structure & rhetorical strategies/style

Chris Mooney organized this book in a way that you will recognize the problems he is talking about and then understand them, and finally, begin looking for new solutions. Chris pointed out the main struggle that science goes through, which is religion, for they are always conflicting setting each other back. By doing this, the reader can think of ways to get science and religion to coexist, something that many scientist believe is possible. Chris Mooney also writes about current problems that need scientist to solve, but politicians keep pushing the problems to the side and ignore the advice of scientist, which in turn will just create bigger problems.

The author’s persona, tone, and intended audience

I believe that the intended audience for this book is supposed to be for the general population. I believe that the author, Chris Mooney, wants the population to see the importance of science in our daily lives and in politics in order to have more technological and scientific advances in the future. His tone is more of an irritated tone towards politicians and corporate businesses that keep pushing science out of the mainstream and feeding the public pseudoscience and gossip and keeping the public unaware of what happening in the scientific community.

Thesis/Purpose of Unscientific America, How Scientific Illiteracy Affects our Future

The purpose of this book is to alert the audience of a growing problem in the American society. Throughout the book, the author, Chris Mooney describes how throughout the past 40 years, America has slowly been declining as a leader in the field of Science. He describes that after the cold war, technological advances slowed down because the U.S. no longer had a foreign enemy that it was competing with to be scientifically and technologically more advanced. Since then, the importance of science has dropped dramatically. I have never noticed science not being much of a curriculum at school since I never lived during the time when science was everywhere. But for Chris Mooney to talk about science no longer being taken seriously, and giving statistics such as "For ever 5 hours of cable news, 1 minutes is devoted to science." This book has alerted me of how serious this problem is because we are letting faith lead us, and when faith leads people, drastic things happen, such as the Salem witch trails.