Praise for MONEY AND CLASS IN AMERICA

“Money and Class in America is an angry book; it is also frequently right.”

—The Washington Post

“Acerbic in tone . . . Amusing and provocative.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Roams over the glitzy terrain of contemporary consumerism . . . Lapham effectively ridicules the widespread notion that money is omnipotent and can make everything all right.”

—Time

“Lapham is a wonderful writer, a connoisseur of the perfect world. Stimulating ideas are expertly interlarded with amusing anecdotes, and the catholic assortment of quotations is marvelous.”

—Businessweek

“A Brillo pad chafing the social psyches of this Teflon crowd . . . Lapham peppers his observations with priceless anecdotes of the absurdities of the rich and the only-wishing-to-be-so. Some of Lapham’s gems are side-splitting, culled from a lifetime amid the ivied walls and red-leather wingbacks of the nation’s clubby capitals . . . The author offers a sobering look at where we are headed if we do not see that we have sold our very humanness for the sake of the dollar bill.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Money and Class in America is an intelligent, well-written and witty book, and replete with insights and deflating anecdotes and observations about the fatuities of the rich and powerful—and their retainers.”

—The Boston Sunday Globe

“Lewis Lapham’s trenchant and stinging indictment of obsessive wealth in America is refreshingly direct. The issue itself is one many people would prefer not to have discussed—to the detriment, unfortunately, of a nation.”

—Barry Lopez

“A master satirist, [Lapham] has written a needed and important book . . . We should be indebted to Lapham for taking up the cudgels so trenchantly in the name of a more cultivated use of America’s wealth.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Contains as many hilarious, embarrassing truths about our society as a John Waters movie. Lapham writes with tongue firmly in cheek, celebrating the cheapness and vulgarity of mass consumption even as he pokes fun at it . . . His witty commentary takes in all of contemporary America . . . An irresistably funny work of social commentary masquerading as satire, with enough one-line gems of wisdom to stock several quote notebooks.”

—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A scathing indictment of American attitudes toward money and class. It is a witty, often disturbing diatribe against what he calls the ‘equestrian class.’”

—The Houston Post

“Lewis Lapham is blessedly cantankerous, stylish, elegant, erudite, unpredictable, cosmopolitan, cranky. What Mr. Lapham tells us about America’s love affair with money would make for awfully sad reading, were he not so witty, wickedly observant of the precincts of wealth through which, detached, he moves, and ultimately, wonderfully wise. Edith Wharton would have saluted him.”

—Barbara Grizutti Harrison

“Wonderfully witty . . . This book chronicling Americans’ obsession with money, status, consumption and other vices is satirical humor at its best . . . it’s Henny Youngman firing off Swiftian one-liners. Don’t try to read it all at once. Bite off half a chapter an evening—and laugh yourself into oblivion . . . It’s simply delightful social satire.”

—The San Diego Union

“This is a rich book . . . Lapham shows how the government, its people, and the business worlds have come to worship money and how that worship diminishes us all and leads us toward that ruin . . . Lapham the source is as important as the message. He’s no huckster. He’s not crying sour grapes. His work is credible and crafted keenly.”

—Topeka Capital-Journal

“In Money and Class in America Lewis Lapham incisively separates the reality of the contemporary United States from the layers of spurious cliché with which generations of false moralizing and special pleading have surrounded her . . . An angry masterpiece of insight. More than any work I know, it captures the essence of America in this second Gilded Age. Mr. Lapham’s book will endure in the literature of social observation.”

—Robert Stone