For the last third of the twentieth century, Neil Postman was one of America's foremost social critics and education and communications theorists, and his ideas and accessibility won him an international following. An influential and revered teacher, he was a professor for more than forty years at New York University, where he founded the renowned Media Ecology program. Blessed with an unusually far-reaching mind, he authored more than twenty books, producing major works on education, childhood, language, news, and technology's impact on culture. Amusing Ourselves to Death remains his most reverberating and widely read book, translated into more than a dozen languages. He was educated at the State University of New York at Fredonia and Columbia University. He died in October 2003 at the age of seventy-two.