Customer Reviews

Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on Our Civil Religion

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Written in the 1980s when Reaganmania ruled, this book is just as apt for today. Lapham comes from the moneyed class, but he does not take their side. Instead, he offers insights into The Inheritors and The Parvenu from a perspective the rest of us will never attain. The chapter titles alone are worth the read:"The Golden Horde", "Social Hygiene", "Coined Souls". His wit is wonderfully displayed whether he's taking on the bored and clueless trust fund babies or the so-called poor who spend as if they actually have money. America's infatuation with wealth and material accumulation is indeed our civic religion.

This book should be read by every single "limousine liberal" and conservative crank who REALLY wants to know why no one can "fix" America. Written in 1988 when "Greed was Good," the book has aged tremendously well, because everything Lapham said back then is still true today, only a thousandfold more so. If he thought the national cost of mergers and acquisitions was high, we now know it was just the warmup act for the hedge-fund mentality of today.

Unlike other books written in the last 20 years that bill themselves as a sort of field guide to the rich, this is the only one I've seen that puts the way money works in context with the culture, the nation, and the larger world.

The year I graduated college Gordon Lightfoot sang, that "Away you will go sailing in a race among the ruins." Man--how right he was!

Highly recommended.

Essential reading for the populist-inclined millennial generation currently occupying a town near you. Lapham's meditations on the equestrian classes are spot-on and relevant even at this late date 25 years on.