Product Description

Malice that cannot speak its name, cold-blooded but secret hostility, impotent desire, hidden rancor and spite--all cluster at the center of envy. Envy clouds thought, writes Joseph Epstein, clobbers generosity, precludes any hope of serenity, and ends in shriveling the heart. Of the seven deadly sins, he concludes, only envy is no fun at all. Writing in a conversational, erudite, self-deprecating style that wears its learning lightly, Epstein takes us on a stimulating tour of themany faces of envy. He considers what great thinkers--such as John Rawls, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche--have written about envy; distinguishes between envy, yearning, jealousy, resentment, and schadenfreude ("a hardy perennial in the weedy garden of sour emotions"); and catalogs the many things that are enviable, including wealth, beauty, power, talent, knowledge and wisdom, extraordinary good luck, and youth (or as the title of Epstein's chapter on youth has it, "The Young, God Damn Them"). Helooks at resentment in academia, where envy is mixed with snobbery, stirred by impotence, and played out against a background of cosmic injustice; and he offers a brilliant reading of Othello as a play more driven by Iago's envy than Othello's jealousy. He reveals that envy has a strong touch of malice behind it--the envious want to destroy the happiness of others. He suggests that envy of the astonishing success of Jews in Germany and Austria may have lurked behind the virulent anti-Semitism ofthe Nazis. As he proved in his best-selling Snobbery, Joseph Epstein has an unmatched ability to highlight our failings in a way that is thoughtful, provocative, and entertaining. If envy is no fun, Epstein's Envy is truly a joy to read.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #377678 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-15
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The Oxford University Press/New York Public Library Seven Deadly Sins series, of which Envy is the first volume, comes hot on the heels of Penguin's successful Lives, which provocatively pairs celebrated subjects with well-known writers in compact and accessible biographies. Unfortunately, Envy is insubstantial and unambitious even for its modest size. While it might have a seemed a good idea to get Epstein, author of the uneven but amusing Snobbery: The American Version, to address the related sin of envy, he does not seem to have anything very provocative to say about it. Derived from a public lecture, Epstein's opening chapters give a decent if unenlightening overview, larded with enough quotations from such greats as Schopenhauer and Lord Chesterfield to maintain interest. Over the course of 14 chapters, some of a few hundred words each, cliche turns up often (Shakespeare is "that most universal of writers," and Othello is about Iago, it turns out), yet the book's airy charm and lightly worn learning might work as diverting, high-toned amusement if not for the one-dimensionality of some of the ideas that emerge. For Epstein's notion of envy is ultimately that of the moneyed and powerful, who characterize any challenge to their power as being based on envy. Marxism? Envy. Feminism? Envy. The academy? Envy and "hopelessly radical political views." This kind of rhetoric might go over in a country club or cigar lounge, but in the world of ideas to which it is presumably addressed, it reads more like an example of the eighth deadly sin: smugness.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Seven writers have been invited to consider the seven deadly sins, and the results are being published in a promising series of small, cleverly illustrated, and, so far, scintillating volumes.

Epstein's recent book on snobbery has met with great acclaim, making him uniquely suited to the task of analyzing envy, since snobbery is based on its cultivation, and, indeed, Epstein is a witty and thoughtful elucidator of this covert and poisonous state of mind. Of the seven sins, Epstein observes, envy is the most common and insidious and the least enjoyable. He discusses various types of envy, the differences between women's and men's envy, Freud's preoccupation with it, and worlds in which envy rages (the arts and academia may be the worst). Epstein confesses to his own struggles with envy over the course of his musings, which grow in gravitas as he moves beyond individuals to consider how envy between nations leads to war and how anti-Semitism can be interpreted as a particularly malignant manifestation of this deadly sin.

Novelist and critic Prose brings her keen interest in our conflicted relationship with our bodies to her creatively, even voraciously researched and elegantly argued inquiry into the paradoxes of gluttony, a sin writ large on the body and, therefore, impossible to conceal. Prose notes that the term is rarely used now that overeating is viewed as a psychological and health problem rather than a "crime against God." Equally conversant in religious and secular perspectives, Prose turns to theology and art to illuminate the curious history of a sin rooted in a behavior essential to survival. She traces the line between gourmandism and binging and ponders the increase in obesity in our consumer culture and the stigma of being overweight in a society that loves excess in everything but body size. Gluttons now sin against "prevailing standards of beauty and health," and the punishment is living hell. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Whimsically packaged exminations of Lust by Simon Blackburn, Gluttony by Francine Prsoe, Envy by Joseph Epstein, Anger by Robert Thurman, Greed by Phyllis Tickle, Sloth by Wendy Wasserstein and Pride by Michael Eric Dyson become playgrounds for cultural reflection by authors and playwrights in Oxford's Seven Deadly Sins series."--Publishers Weekly (on the series)

"Epstein is a witty and thoughtful elucidator of this covert and poisonous state of mind."--Booklist

"Eternally fascinating to saint, sinner and everyone occupying the vast expanse between those two poles...penetrating and perspicacious.... Epstein's tone is as attractive as his judgment and analysis are sound."--San Francisco Chronicle

"A stimulating tour of the killjoy sin of envy."--Books and Culture

"Will win new readers for one of the most entertaining of contemporary writers.... Epstein cites an impressive range of authorities, from Aristotle to Gore Vidal ('Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies,' Vidal once wrote). Yet the real vim of the book comes from Esptein's honest search for envy close to home."--National Post

"Joseph Epstein begins this enviably witty and incisive little book about the most insidious, corrosive, and secretive of the seven deadly sins by cheerfully acknowledging the varieties of envy that lurk in his own soul."--The Jewish Book World

"Epstein explores this vice with candor and clarity...Though this book is compact and can easily be read in one sitting, it feels exhaustive. It delves into tortuous malebolge--resentment, schadenfreude, envy of youth, anti-Semitism, Marxism and so on--and examines how they are rooted in or fueled by envy.... The book's virtue lies less in explaining the vice than in warning of its danger. The reader who expects a smug, winking skepticism will be disappointed. Yes, Epstein has fun. (Each chapter comes with a New Yorker cartoon, but these wither in the heat of the author's wit. ) He is, nonetheless, deadly serious about a sin that 'tends to diminish all in whom it takes possession.' Epstein's writing is a rare alloy of sobriety, sophistication, and warm humor that--quite contrary to the spirit of his book--I wish I possessed."--National Review

"Epstein writes elegant and eloquent prose, and his thinking is sharp, thorough. Quotations are marshaled to buttress detailed arguments, and the architecture of his themes is embellished by a tableau of examples that call upon philosophy, literature and pop culture.... Oxford's slim volumes (Francine Prose on gluttony is to be published in November) offer an updated look at our own world, and will make a fine addition to anyone's collection of witty and incisive thinking."--Philadelphia Inquirer

"Eptein deftly untangles jeolousy from envy, Othello from Iago, and Nietzsche from Schopenhauer while decoding an impressive universe of things enviable and revisiting the seeds of resentment that gave rise to anti-Semitism."--Elle

"Diverting, high-toned amusement."--Publishers Weekly