Product Description: Winner of the 1995 National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism, this work observes the spectacle of democratic life and values in our time, and asks who is signing in and who is checking out, of the American experiment at the "fin de siecle". Culled from Lewis Lapham's monthly "Notebook" column for "Harper's Magazine", these essays describe the period between the winter of 1989 and the spring of 1995 in which the American explaining classes were casting around for a national folktale to take the place of the communist conspiracy. In this book, Lewis Lapham draws a portrait of a society at a loss to know what to think or make of itself at the end of a century once defined as America's own. His observations speak to the moral and intellectual confusions visited upon the American ruling elites - in the media and the universities, as well as in business and government - during the years 1989-1995. The spectacle is both comic and sad, a march of folly that calls forth Lapham's range as an essayist. Lapham's sketches take as their occasions events as different from one another as the wars in Panama and the Persian Gulf, the apotheosis of Richard Nixon and the transfiguration of O.J. Simpson, the grim inspections of the American soul conducted by the agents of both the pious left (no smoking cigarettes, no dirty water in the swimming pools, condoms in the schools) and the zealous right (no serial murders in the movies, no lesbians in the army, prayer in the schools), the media's use of history as wallpaper and elevator music, the dwindling significance of President Clinton (vanishing as mysteriously as the Cheshire cat) and the bombastic arrival of Newt Gingrich ("a man for all grievances"), the practice of swindling the stockholders and the art of changing gossip into news. Lewis Lapham is the author of "Money and Class in America", "The Wish for Kings", "Fortune's Child" and "Imperial Masquerade".
Fantastic writing and great observations. Lewis Lapham reminds me of Gore Vidal. Both are master essayists, and both offer an honest critique of imperial ambitions abroad and Puritan impulses at home. Each man is a master of the political essay, and neither individual talks down to his audience.
This collection of essays was written from 1990-1995 and touches on the last vestiges of the Reagan oligarchy (George Herbert Walker Bush) and bemoans the lack of substantial policy changes in the Clinton epoch. Lapham isn't the typical "liberal"; for example, he calls for funding fewer arts organizations (but funding the "chosen few" substantially to get more 'bang from the buck'). While it is true that Lapham's viewpoints are generally considered Leftist, he refuses to be pinned down, lamenting the loss of smoking priveleges in public places nearly as much as the lack of health care for the uninsured.
I highly recommend this book and the critical thinking prominently exhibited by its author.
Excellent Mr. Lapham's pen strikes the page with brutal honesty. He's not afraid to decnonstruct the corruption in our political arena.
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