I love Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death. A must-read. And I'll let you in on a big secret. An undiscovered gem called THE IMMORTALIST MANIFESTO by ELIXXIR (available on Amazon) takes Brown's thesis to its rational, ultimate conclusion.

Find out why CORNEL WEST, HARVARD (NOW PRINCETON) philosophy professor calls the author Elixxir FIRST RATE! ORIGINAL...RAZOR-SHARP."

If indeed our fear of Death and our desire for Immortality are as unquenchable as Brown rightly points out, then we shall never reconcile with Death, The Immortalist Manifesto argues. But instead humanity will track it down as "the last enemy" to be conquered. Only when Death is vanquished shall we be free from the bondage of Alienation, Repression, and Oppression.

The Big Book we've been waiting for. Unlike Brown's book, which is great for intellectuals, The immortalist Manifesto has the intellectual prowess but also the potential to change the world. And as someone :) said, the point is not only to interpret the world but to change it!

An uncomfortable but still convincing argument about history and longing. Gorgeously written and well worth a return to.

This is not really a review - time is lacking. Just a strong recommendation. If the question "What is the human animal?" is on your mind, read this book! In my opinion, Life Against Death ranks among the most important modern contributions toward an understanding of the human condition. It is on the same short list as Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. Like these works and indeed the subject, it is not an easy read. I am ordering a fresh copy and looking forward to the introduction by Christopher Lasch which I have not read. I also recommend Norman O. Brown's other works - in particular, Love's Body and the collection of essays, Apocalypse And/or Metamorphosis. I first read Brown in the 1960s and revisit him often. There are those who dismiss Brown as a 1960s enfant terrible (Life was in fact written in the 1950s) but listen to them not!

When people wonder why people turn in to who they are and form the society in wth which we live this book will help clarify things for them. If one wants a deep look at society's ills and its being formed by families, Christopher Lasch presents a very good insight, that for reasons of accuracy may not make everyone happy.

Compelling social commentary, and brilliantly written, perhaps not surprising since Lasch was not a social scientist, but rather a professor of English Literature, at Columbia if I recall right, but in any case, at one of the Ivy League colleges. Lasch became interested in social trends, and ended up writing this fine book on the decline and destruction of the family in American life. Although the book is 20 years old at this point, Lasch's ideas are if anything more relevant now than they were back in the 70's.

This book written back the middle of the 1980s is another one of a series of pessimistic,broad-reaching cultural studies written by Christopher Lasch. It is a follow-up to the more well known and influential work "The Culture of Narcissism".Mr. Lasch describes the emptiness and bleakness that he sees as a hallmark feature of the arts, of politics and society in thelate 20th century. Although one could disagree with his opinions, I think that this a well written indictment of modern times.

Lasch has a great intellect: he's read deeply and though he's strong-minded, he's also compassionate. Here he examines faulty ideas, often finding the grain of truth that's given them wing. In THE MINIMAL SELF, still deeply relevant to our times, he explains two urges in light of man's destructiveness and our lack of faith in a future: a regressive, narcissistic wish to merge with the environment, in a timeless solipsism that negates the past and the present; or else, a strict adherence to rules and regulations that demand obedience by threat of punishment and retribution, and which harken back to false nostalgia for a simpler past.

Lasch shows us that it's much more complicated than that: that our obsession with survival, our lack of faith in language to communicate commonalities (and its exploitation not just by the media but by activists trying to counter the media's insidious influence), and our confusion about how to structure, or de-structure (destroy) our lives leads us back to Freud, back to humility, and back to separation, away from narcissistic fantasies of either merger or omnipotence.

In brilliant, thoughtful, complex prose, Lasch argues for an enlightened dependence, a reliance on the cultural sphere to give meaning to our inner drives and our recognition of the objective outside world, and thoughtfulness and sobriety in place of infantilism and fantasy. Lasch argues for mature play, and his is a convincing argument.

It is simply amazing that anyone still bothers with Christopher Lasch. He is apparently one of those neo-conservative writers who desperately wish to be considered 'faithful' to the old Left. Well, he's not fooling me. I picked this thing up at the library and was hooked- not for his ideas, which are predictable and even conservative, but for the way he thinks he has something conclusive to say about everything. He is afraid of contemporary feminist challenges to his own assumptions, is afraid of African Americans making a world for themselves, afraid of everything. As a feminist and a white Woman who empathizes with African Americans and other exploited peoples, I know I can find better discussions of the politics of race and gender in the United States. Don't bother with this one, please.

It is difficult to find fault with the main thesis of True and Only Heaven: that "progress" is nothing more or less than an illusion and that in the end, as the poet wrote,"the paths of glory lead but to the grave". Mr.Lasch arrives at this conclusion via a ciruitous route of some five hundred pages of spectacular erudition while at the same time never lapsing into scholarly jargon that might cause the general reader to become hopelessly befuddled. Although the title suggests an author who was either conservative or neo-conservative,in truth it's difficult to say what ideology he embraced--if any--since he is critical of both the Left AND the Right. Clearly, Lasch, who died several years ago, had become thoroughly disenchanted with a society that had fallen into a pit of mindless consumerism and materialism. As critical as he is of Reagan's America, one can only guess what he would have thought of the America of Bill Clinton.

This book is a must read for anyone who believes that our country is slowly becoming unhinged.

I frequently argue that the breadth of Lasch's moral vision requires a thorough reading of his ouevre, not just an individual title. That said, TRUE AND ONLY HEAVEN comes the closest to encapsulating what Lasch, as one of the last best public intellectuals, had to say. Part of HEAVEN's success in this regard is its simple length, which allows for a more comprehensive statement. More important, though, is that here finally Lasch is explicitly taking as subject what was his central obsession all along: the locomotive degradation of allegiance to the Jeffersonian ideal in a heedless process called "progress." Those accustomed to the spirited polemic of his more famous work may find themselves slowed by the more overtly scholarly nature of this one, but the payoff is big in terms of a foundation in the animating ideas of the lifework of the best cultural critic of his era. Lasch is never simple. He is always subtle, and always stoic: he makes Hawthorne and Nietszche look like playground amatuers. More importantly, his perspective is radical enough (meaning, truly alternative--almost anarchic)and his arguments innovative enough that one may finish his book and only think one has read it. A close, careful read, however, will yield a take on the malaise critical to any sort of "progress" in the discourse about the future of democracy in America.

Normally, I can't stand revisionist history. It tends to sacrifice historical accuracy for political proselytizing. Howard Zinn's "Peoples' History of the United States" is a case in point: almost everything Zinn says seems dedicated to supporting the author's left-wing agenda.

Hofstadter's book neatly transcends this problem. It is most definitely revisionist. Each chapter examines a different American political leader, with a great deal of in-depth detail and criticism. However, Hofstadter escapes the political trap of mentioning only the negative or only the positive points about his subjects. Both sides are always examined in detail.

This evenhandedness results in a very interesting and useful text. Rather than heroes and villains, our past politicians come across as human beings, and very interesting ones at that.

A choice history text, both detailed and objective.

Richard Hofstadter, late professor at Columbia University, launched the Consensus school of history with his book, The American Political Tradition, and the Men Who Made It. Published on the heels of World War II, Hofstadter examines twelve central American political figures, mostly, but not all, presidents. Although originally written as twelve separate essays, Hofstadter binds all of his portraits together via common themes running throughout the work and enunciated in the Introduction. While the Consensus view of American history only held sway for a brief number of years, Hofstadter, rightully, continued to be considered one of the most brilliant historians in the country. The book is a classic of American history, one of the rare texts that both explores history, and is history.

The late Dr. Hofstadter published this book in 1948. It is a solid if not spectacular overview of American political thinking showing remarkable insight for the time it was published.

His subjects include the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Wendall Phillips, William Jennings Byran, Theodroe Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. He starts off with the founding fathers whose maxim was expressed in the words of John Jay:"the people who own the country ought to govern it," this refering, of course, to the wealthy minority which wrote the constitution in the first place. He shows that in large part throughout its history the factional battles in the country have been waged between two factions of poweful or at least relatively powerful interests: financiers and manufacturers against small farmers, small banks against big banks, Northern manufacturers and financiers against Southern feudal lords. The general population, though Hofstadter does not say this explicity, seem to have been largely bystanders. In his message to congress of December 1888, Grover Cleveland noted that:

We find the wealth and luxuries of our cities mingled with poverty and wretchedness and unremunerative toil. A crowded and constantly increasing urban population suggests the impoverishment of rural sections, and discontent with agricultural pursuits.... We discover that the fortunes realized by our manufacturers....result from the discriminating favor of the government and largely built upon unde exactions from the masses of our people. The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor.

He examines the rise of politicians co-opting radical forces and their ideas. William Jennings Bryan ran for election for president in 1896 as the country was trying to climb out of a severe recession and made almost the sole basis of his campaign "free silver" whereby the money supply could be increased by the coinage of silver along with gold and supposedly help the suffering farmers, which, of course, earned him much subsidy from the Western silver interests. He ignored the full advocacy of workers rights and the many ways which farmers were exploited by the railroads, middleman, tarrifs, etc. which had earned the Populist party a million votes for president in 1892. Theodore Roosevlt, while declaring in 1886 that he would like to get his cowboys together to go shoot down the Haymarket protestors, tried to maintain the status quo capitalism by increasing regulation of big business to save it from its own stupidity and greed and enacted some laws and engaged in some meaningless"trust bustings" (e.g. Northern Securities in 1903)to try to stave off popular discontent.

His portray of Woodrow Wilson is rather interesting. Throughout the book he engaged in laborious dissection of the personalities of the prime characters in this book trying to discover the basis for their policies. He portrays Woodrow Wilson with something bordering sympathy: an idealistic loner who was simply carried away by forces out of his control. The U.S. got out of the recession of 1914 by supplying the allies in World War one with war materials. Thus American business developed a substantial interest in seeing the allies prevail, even when the British were enaging in extensive harrassment of American shipping; Wilson kept silent over this but, of course, got into a hot lather over sea violations by Germany which was being strangled to death by the British navy. He portrays Wilson as being deeply disturbed at having to enter the war and feared for what Hofstadter vaguely refers to as an attack on the constitution. I think he is refering to the red scare and anti-german hysteria launched by the Wilson administration; the jailing of Eugene Debs by the man whom one of the reviewers below oddly terms one of the "liberal icons of the left."--I have a feeling that the reviewer knows little about the actual "left." Anyway Hofstadter discusses Wilson's idealistic efforts during the Versailles treaty, severely handicapped by the European powers. Of course, one might ask, though Hofstadter does not, what Wilson was doing as he was reinstituing virtual slavery in Haiti and conducting an extremely racist and brutal occupation of the Dominican Republic.

Anyway Hofstadter ends with a discussion of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. The "prosperity" of the 1920's with its unrestrained capitalist economic policies created the usual conditions for a depression (sort of similar to current times): saturated markets leading to speculative bubbles, debt ridden export markets, consumer spending unable to keep pace with the expanding economy and so on. Once the depression came on, Hoover rigidly preached rugged individualism and self-reliance to the poor people clamoring for federal government relief, something that he had not preached to big business while handing out subsidies and exorbitant tax breaks while secretary of commerce in the Harding and Coolidge administrations. Anyway, he got kicked and Franklin Roosevelt came in and took off the rough edges of the depression but did not actually end it (indeed it reappeared strongly in 1937-38 after the administration's austerity program) until World War two economic policies were implemented.

It is true that Lasch relied a lot on psychoanalysis in his intellectual barrage against the American culture, but his point of view is certianly worth considering. To start with, the book makes an attempt to be comprehensive which is not crime except that many of the issues he touched upon would require further elaboration within a much broader theoritical framework. He borrows extensively from Freud, criticises Fromm and squeezes Horeny in, thus sacrificing many other branches of social sciences to place psychoanalysis at the forefront. It is not a great book and one should not be lured by the big words, but it does have its interesting moments.

Some critics called this book overheated, but I do not believe that Lasch's style was faulty. His arguments ring true and are very persuasive. His insights into American culture are impressive, and he demonstrated sound knowledge of all the social sciences. The book is extremely well-written, never redundant, and always entertaining. This is a definitive indictment of American society, and is still valid twenty years later.

No cultural or political analyst on either the left or right offers as profound and penetrating an analysis of our contemporary culture as Lasch did. The preceding criticisms of Freud show inadequate understanding of Lasch's points (it may be asked, what other frame of analysis can you offer for disordered personalities?). Lasch's other books are equally provocative and thoughtful, but perhaps not as beautifully and forcefully written as this polemic.

In this book 'The Revolt of the Elites and The Betrayal of Democracy'Lasch is taking a critical look at democracy. According to him people should try to achieve the goal of democracy by working towards it. He states that the accumalation of wealth for personal benefit is incorrect. He felt that wealth should be used for the development of the nation. My first response to reading this book was that Lasch had a vision. He was very philosophical and philanthrophic, he believed in the betterment of the community and the nation rather than just one individual or a group of individual's whom he calls Elites who are in revolt against Middle America. In an age where people are getting more and more materialistic Lasch is concerned about the well being of democracy. He wants individuals in a democracy to uphold moral values such as sharing the wealth for nation's benefit rather than for themselves.Lasch did not like the way Elites are creating two classes Those who have the money, education, and power and those who don't and how the group that has it exploits those who don't have these qualities. He wants the nation to look forward to continuity of ideals such as exchange of ideas and debates in a secular way. This is a great book in which Lasch expresses the hope of distrubution of excess wealth for the betterment of nation.

In "the Revolt of the Elites" Christoper Lasch powerfully and persuasively contends that that the values and attitudes of professional and managerial elites and those of the working classes have dramatically diverged. Although the claim is controverted, many of us on the right (especially social conservatives) agree with the quasi-populist/communitarian notion that democracy works best when all members of society can participate in a world of upward mobility and of achievable status. In such a world, members of society will perceive themselves as belonging to the same team and care about ensuring that that team succeeds. But how can society achieve this sort of mutual interdependence if its members are not part of a community of shared values? As Christopher Lasch explains: "[T]he new elites, the professional classes in particular, regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension." For too many of these elites, the values of "Middle America" - a/k/a "fly-over country" - are mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, and retrograde views of women. "Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television. They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing." (28)

The tension between elite and non-elite attitudes is most pronounced with respect to religious belief. While our society admittedly is increasingly pluralistic, "the democratic reality, even, if you will, the raw demographic reality," as Father Neuhaus has observed, "is that most Americans derive their values and visions from the biblical tradition." Yet, Lasch points out, elite attitudes towards religion are increasingly hostile: "A skeptical, iconoclastic state of mind is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the knowledge classes. ... The elites' attitude to religion ranges from indifference to active hostility." (215)

Lash claims that the divergence in elite and non-elite attitudes is troubling for the future of democracy. Its hard for me to gainsay him. Yet, while "The Revolt of the Elites" is sobering - even a tad depressing - it deserves to be read even more widely than it has been. Lasch is no partisan. Conservative proponents of unfettered capitalism get bashed about the head by Lasch just as much as liberal critics of capitalism. Populists will find themselves nodding in agreement with some sections, while communitarians will concur with other sections. About the only folks who will be offended by all of "The Revolt of the Elites" are hardened libertarians and extreme left-liberals. Highly recommended.

The Revolt of the Elites articulates the growing disonnectedness between the social classes in the global economy. Lasch's work, for me, was an extenstion of Robert B. Reich's point in the Work of Nations, where he predicted that "knowledge workers" would secede from nationalistic idealism to become members of a globalist higher society. Lasch's thesis is based on this growing trend, which he sees as ultimately threatening American democracy and identity.

This reframing of America's social decline is consistant with the views of many prominant social conservatives and anti-globalists. As such, it draws much criticism from groups who have a stake in the economic changes that have taken root over the past thirty-years.

Despite the average rating of this book, open-minded readers will find Lasch's work to be well thought-out, convincing, and a pleasure to read.

I see no reason for anyone to waste any time on this book or on Lasch. Those of us challenging contemporary paradigms have had to endure a lot of hypocritical criticism lately, and Lasch is really not so different from other clueless white males who used to refer to themselves as left before jumping ship and swimming to the right. The reason that the contemporary unviersity course of study in the humanities favors individual experience and expression is because white heterosexist patriarchy has denied us this expression in the past. It is the structuring of Difference that has finally received some attention, instead of the usual empty and dry western civ type of stuff. I am proud to be a radical interrogating paradigms and subverting other people's dearest assumptions. Who needs a tiresome white male like Lasch whining about how radicalism has departed from his narrow-minded "principles"?

Lasch's "The New Radicalism in America," published in 1965 tells the history of radicalism in America through a series of portraits of well-chosen individuals. Some, such as Jane Addams and Walter Lippmann are still relatively well known, others such as Mabel Luhan Dodge, Lincoln Steffens, Colonel House, and Randolph Bourne as less well-remembered. Part of the appeal of this approach is the how Lasch positions and contrasts these leading and lesser lights within the context of the social and cultural movements they led, followed, or reported upon.

Lasch, the son-in-law of the liberal American historian Henry Commager, belonged to the post WWII generation of historians which searched for more objective ways to tell history than the progressive historians and writers such as Parrington and Croly, and the generation immediately afterwards, for example, Commager. Best known for his "The Culture of Narcissism," the "New Radicalism in America" is the work of a young historian attempting a critique of the grand, sweeping style of earlier generations, and to tell a story of a rise of a new class of personage on the public stage in America: the intellectual.

The intellectual in America rose out of the ashes of Victorianism. Its earliest avatars came from the bourgeoisie, appalled at the stifling, stunted one-dimensional roles assigned to their parents: the father as breadwinner, the predatory male who proved his fitness in the Spencerian business world, the mother who stayed home to create a haven in a heartless world for her husband and children, and who, as such was the arbiter of Victorian genteel culture and the inculcator of the social graces. For the daughters of the last generation of Victorians, such as Jane Addams and Mabel Dodge, the urge to strike through the pasteboard mask of the cult of Victorian womanhood was an almost physical necessity. Addams, observing a bullfight in Spain during a grand tour of Europe, was moved to finally act upon her sense of the emptiness of her position, and taking a cue from the early example of the settlement movement, went back Chicago and set up Hull House. Mabel Dodge, a banker's daughter from Buffalo, set up a salon in Greenwich Village and played the Grande dame to the era's intellectuals, socialists, union organizers, and writers. Going through husbands at a fairly rapid clip, she eventually moved to Taos, New Mexico and managed to get D.H. Lawrence and his wife to come to stay at her retreat. Narcissistic to the core, she embodies the free sexuality of the "new woman," who used the parlor as Victorians would never have used it: as a ring for clashing ideas.

Randolph Bourne, who frequented Dodge's salon along with cultural critics such as Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks, John Dos Passos, and Walter Lippmann, wrote about the Young Americans who believed that they could create a new world starting with the new model of public education proposed by John Dewey. He eventually fell out with Dewey over WWI, refusing to accept Dewey's argument that the war was necessary to pave the way for the pragmatic administration of elites who would bring the world closer to a rational state. Bourne comes off here as a prototype of the 60s cultural critic -- rejecting earlier radical's accommodation to power in the Wilson administration.

These new radicals diverged from earlier American traditions of philosophy and religion which tended to either support those in power, or whose criticisms were expressed in the political arena. The post-Victorians attack on the moribund culture they were intended to inherit was truly new. We can see its reverberations today in the emphasis on the cultural critique as the preferred technique of today's post-modernists. These new radicals believed that by destroying the genteel tradition, by discovering and promoting native traditions or importing a more humanistic culture from Europe, they could throw a wrench into the dehumanizing dynamo of American industrialism and the debased high culture which served as the other pole of its debased dialectic.

These histories of intellectuals from the 1960s, such as "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" by Richard Holfstadter, and "Men of Ideas" by Lewis Coser, are the histories of dead white men. They concentrate on telling of the growth of the intellectual class, their repeated induction into puissance and its gratifying perquisites, and their repulsion from power back to the margins. For a book that is now two generations removed from the fashionable currents of today, it remains remarkably fresh. Unlike so many writers of and on history now, who are so throttled by the theory and the malign influence of the first wave of post-modern critics that they do not dare write for a popular audience, Lasch writes to inform, to educate, and to provoke. Those whose retreat into academia a generation later and who generated a self-protective haze of obfuscation over their works, should consider ripping off that pasteboard mask (Melville), and forget their "knowingness." Write boldly. Attack directly. Remember that white males created the discourse in earlier times and that learning about those who rebelled against the narrowness the genteel tradition at the turn of the century in books such as this might actually be of some use in this post-modern era which cries out for political engagement. Read Randolph Bourne.

In light of the "cultural turn" in the human sciences which has so frazzled many of us who subscribed to the "old" distribution of intellectual labor in the university, Christopher Lasch's early study of the "left"--in many ways the book which began his lifelong engagement with issues pertinent to the proper and actual character of the Progressive cause--provides a new depth to what has so self-consciously flaunted its "newness," its "Post-whateverness." His thesis is that around the turn of the century the "radical" developed a new self-consciousness, and that this posture manifested itself in "cultural" radicalism whose politics was no longer confined to political economy, but which psychologized social issues and personal "artistic" experience. His biographical-vignette approach is especially effective at driving forward the themes, though it weakens his own argument--weak of the whole on what the ancients called "refutatio." I think his periodization is a little too cute and pat. The importance of 1963 is clear; 1889 is never satisfactorily developed and the reader must accept this date as if a revelation. This arbitrariness aside, Lasch has a keen descriptive eye--his dissections of Schlesinger and Mailer are particularly droll--and clean prose style throughout. For all its flaws, this book earns itself a hearty recommendation.

I just can't see how anyone could mistake this for an 'important' book. While incredibly courageous women like Jane Marcus and Mary Daly have demonstrated the patriarchal agenda of hatred which threatens the freedom of all Women, white male authors such as this one crazily accuse women of material greed! So while women don't earn as much money as males, it is a sign of big bad feminism that women wish to be paid for their efforts??? This is a worthless book by a priviledged white male writer, an enemy of women and thus an enemy of minorities.

I am a little shocked that Lasch is given so much credit for his "learning" when he leaves out so much of the glories of contemporary feminist discourse. He is fairly accurate on the past oppression of women, but he seems to miss the continuity into our own time. I suppose, when one considers the fact that he is a white male who uses the languages of patriarchy, that this is not such a bad effort, but it really only demonstrates the huge gap between male writing about the place of feminism in society, and the heroic efforts of feminists to make a place in society for women.

Lasch chronically falls victim to those who fail to grasp the radical nature of his critique. He approached social issues from a perspective which quickly eludes the typical intellectual constraints of right and left. WOMEN AND THE COMMON LIFE may well become the largest victim to the casual reads to which his work is so often submitted.

Despite all the talk about the dynamic nature of the patriarchy and renaissance drama, the main gripe of WOMEN is that feminism sold its soul for a mess of pottage. Primarily through comparison of Friedan's FEMININE MYSTIQUE and Goodman's GROWING UP ABSURD, Lasch reveals that feminism was uniquely poised to furnish a broad assault on the predatory capitalism, cheap consumerism and therapeutic stupor that has descended over the American scene. Instead, feminists all too frequently seek only to alter the rules so women too can gain entry into the careerist trap.

One senses that Lasch may have invested intellectually in feminism, hoping it would be the crucible for a revivified Jeffersonian agrarianism, but was subsequently let down. Perhaps because of this, feminism suffers the same excoriation as most other stripes of liberalism throughout Lasch's work. In any event, he has feminists dead to rights when he points out that a truly feminist, truly radical critique of American civilization would have sought to undermine, for the good of women, men and children, the gluttonous and heedless consumerism which so characterizes it. Far from missing the critical insights of feminism, Lasch eloquently argues that it is the feminists, particularly Friedan, who have forgotten their own insights, content to sacrifice their integrity on the altar of materialist fixation. In this tome, Lasch's reputation for erudition remains secure, and even tumesces in the ingenuity of its application through critical intelligence, and, notably, in a subtlety of argument not always present in previous work.

This book is crucial reading to those who find themselves inexorably compelled by feminist ideals, but who find it impossible to discover those ideals inhabiting any portion of the contemporary feminist landscape.

I appreciate what the author was attempting to do, but do not feel the book succeeds. It is too dry to read on its own (as a sort of William Safire-style curmudgeon rant on language), and not comprehensive enough to be a useful desk reference.

In addition, the first 30 or so pages are actually a biography of the author (who died a few years ago) by one of his colleagues. Perhaps to someone researching Lasch himself (who was, admittedly, a renown academic) this material would be interesting, but it isn't in the context of language reference.

The introductory essay alone makes this book worthwhile -- the editor traces Lasch's evolution as a historian, and shows how his interest in plain writing evolved along with his political thinking. The examples in the text are both entertaining and informative, and the writing advice is excellent. A good resource people who care about how writing and thinking impact our society.