Suchergebnisse

Is it possible to have too many friends? Is your spouse supposed to be your best friend? How far should you go to help a friend in need? And how do you end a friendship that has run its course? In a wickedly entertaining anatomy of friendship in its contemporary guises, Joseph Epstein uncovers the rich and surprising truths about our favored companions. Friendship illuminates those complex, wonderful relationships without which we'd all be lost

Joseph Epstein's highly entertaining new book takes up the subject of snobbery in America after the fall of the prominence of the old Wasp culture of prep schools, Ivy League colleges, cotillions, debutante balls, the Social Register, and the rest of it. With ample humor and insight, Epstein uncovers the new outlets upon which the old snobbery has fastened: food and wine, fashion, high-achieving children, schools, politics, health, being with-it, name-dropping, and much else, including the roles of Jews and homosexuals in the development of snobbery. He also raises the question of whether snobbery might, alas, be a part of human nature. Snobbery: The American Versionis the first book in English devoted exclusively to the subject since Thackeray's THE BOOK OF SNOBS.

Rezension: The legal details are dated but the rest of the book has stood up, with at least as much wisdom as your average forty-year-old marriage. After Epstein and his wife split in the early 1970's, he took a close look at what Americans expect from marriage, and from divorce, and why. Combining research and analysis with what I'll call impersonal anecdote--rendered in a second-person voice rather than first-person--he developed an account at once specific and universal. This account is potentially useful to both the happily married and the unhappily married, as well as to the soon-to-be married and the soon-to-be unmarried. By divorcing, Epstein and his wife found a needed escape, yet his bias remains very much for the nuclear family despite its inescapable challenges and inherent flaws. In an epilogue, he comments that as more people divorce, and as traditional marriage continues to lose prestige, "good marriages will depend, even more than they do now, on selflessness, character, and love. They could well become our rarest works of art."

This personalized editorial examines the decline in popularity of the printed newspaper. A short history is provided focusing on the large percentages of adults who read a newspaper daily and the sharp decline in recent years with only "19 percent of those eighteen and thirty-four reported consulting a daily paper" and some families even received two different papers at their home each day. Instead of reading a newspaper in the morning, people are increasingly getting their information from the internet and television, the "Daily Show" in particular. Author warns of the biases in internet blogs and sites, preferring the journalistic integrity of the newspaper. Author concludes, "little more can be said in their favor than they do not require batteries to operate, you can swat flies with them, and they can still be used to wrap fish."

Brogan, Hugh: Alexis de Tocqueville : a life. - New Haven/Conn.. : Yale University Press, 2007 + Welch, Cheryl B.: The Cambridge companion to Tocqueville. - New York/N.Y. : Cambridge University Press, 2006 + Enthält Rezensionen u.a. von: Epstein, Joseph: Alexis de Tocqueville : democracy's guide. - London. : Harper-Collins, 2006

From the all-star cast who brought you The Seven Deadly Virtues comes a book with a look at the good life or the crazy-stressful-overwhelmed life of a father. The Dadly Virtues is a tongue-in-cheek collection of encouragement and guidance for any stage of fatherhood, from pacifying babies to prepping for senior prom, from cutting the cord to getting the first, "Best Grandpa" t-shirt. --Provided by publisher