The marketing directors who make the rules of commercial publishing regard humor of any kind as so specialized a commodity that the chain bookstores make no distinction between the works of Voltaire and those of Garfield the Cat; both authors appear under signs marked HUMOR in order that the prospective reader will be advised to approach them with caution.—from 30 Satires
Known for his political essays, Lewis Lapham is a satirist who belongs in the company of Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain. He writes with pointed and often savage wit; over the last twenty years in the pages of Harper's Magazine he has experimented with satire in its several forms—as burlesque, pasquinade, invective, and deadpan jest. This first assemblage of Lapham's satires presents thirty pieces that hold their currency and humor against the tide of social and political change that has engulfed American society over the last twenty years. He reduces to absurdity most of the portentous topics of the day—Dickens' A Christmas Carol retold to praise the virtues of remorseless greed; the hydrogen bomb introduced as a solemn dinner guest who doesn't play tennis or speak English; gene banks in the form of well-trained pigs that accompany their wealthy owners in the first-class cabins of transatlantic jets.
