From Publishers Weekly
Hutchinson, a former Hawaii bureau chief for the Hollywood Reporter and a self-anointed connoisseur of vice, offers this delightful little send-up of William J. Bennett's The Book of Virtues. Skipping merrily through a forbidden catechism of the Seven Deadly Sins?Lust, Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony, Pride, Envy and Anger?this captivating array of verse and prose moves from pre-Christian Greeks and Romans down through the Renaissance in France and England and on into the moderns. Represented are pearls from Greek historian Xenophon (c.430-354 B.C.), Dickens, Mark Twain, Woody Allen, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Flaubert, Tom Wolfe, Groucho Marx, e.e. cummings and Oscar Wilde, to mention a few. Lust is given top billing and afforded almost a third more pages than each of its six less intriguing sisters. Beginning with an erotic selection from Boccaccio's Decameron and ending with a "zipless" fantasy from Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, the anthology is a standard reference for those with the urge to brush up on the finer points of sin. Illustrations. BOMC and QPB selections.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Pretty obviously cocking a snook at William Bennett's surprise best-seller,
The Book of Virtues (1993), editor Hutchinson says of his own compilation, "Unlike in books purporting to teach morality, you will actually want to read the stories in this book." Well, you might first want to send Hutchinson to remedial writing classes to help him overcome tortured locutions like that one, but he's right, this vicious stuff, both prose and verse, is highly readable. It includes excerpts from Dickens, Flaubert, Austen, Virgil, Rabelais, Xenophon, Dostoyevsky, etc., among classic authors, and Woody Allen, Dan Jenkins, and John Kennedy O'Toole among contemporary writers; and it is sorted into seven chapters named after the seven deadly sins. Nothing in it, however, will corrupt anyone, nor raise a single eyebrow.
Ray Olson
