Customer Reviews

Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (New Canadian Library)

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Great insight into the rich, powerful, educated and vain that will make you laugh at them and at the same time understand them better and see your own tendencies in that direction on occasion. This should be a must read for anyone that is employed by a country club or works in direct service to the elite. It might help the world if all our educators, CEOs and politicians were forced to read it as well. As Vanity, Superiority and Greed never seem to leave us this book will be a treasure to keep handy and pass down from one generation to the next. If you can't beat them, might as well laugh at them.

Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich is a short, fast-paced and very entertaining novel. I read it with great delight many years ago and it remains one of my favorite satiric works. During the financial meltdown of 2008, I read it again (for the fourth time) and marveled at how little has changed in the world of finance -- it's still rife with pretension, avarice, speculation, delusion and folly. Leacock knows whereof he speaks: he was an internationally respected professor of economics, and wrote his satiric fiction and essays as a profitable sideline. In his day, he was the most popular published humorist in the English-speaking world. Groucho Marx and Jack Benny were among his avid fans. Leacock's style is never pedantic or laboured -- his pen is more rapier than battle axe, and he's deliciously funny in a sly, understated way. Arcadian Adventures takes aim at entrepreneurial neophytes, predatory financiers and credulous denizens of private clubs. In other fiction and essays, Leacock satirizes everything from small town life to public institutions. I recommend all his works, and I recommend that you start with this one.