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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Embarrassingly bad, February 24, 2008
This review is from: Sloth: The Seven Deadly Sins (Paperback)
I almost never give a book just one star in my reviews. If a book is so bad that it rates no more than a single star, I generally leave it unreviewed. The only times I violate this rule are when I run across books that not only are bad but also, in my judgment, harmfully bad. Wendy Wasserstein's little volume on sloth fits that description.
Wasserstein (who, since this book, unfortunately has died) was a brilliant comic playwright. On stage, her satiric wit in plays such as "The Heidi Chronicles" is wonderful. But why she was asked (or allowed) by the 7 Deadly Sins series editors to write on the vice of sloth is a mystery. She's clearly out of her depth. Alone of all the other authors, she has no obvious qualifications.
Instead of thinking deeply and writing cogently about sloth, Wasserstein shoots for the easy laugh. Her approach to sloth is to write a mock-manual on how to cultivate it, filled with faux easy-steps-to-laziness advice. Given that contemporary American culture is so obsessed with busyness and careerism that fewer and fewer of us actually know how to enjoy leisure time, Wasserstein's jabs at the fast-paced and frenetic life are well-taken.
The problem is that you get the point in the first five pages, and after that you look, without success, for substance. Even worse, Wasserstein mischaracterizes sloth from the get-go. Sloth isn't merely laziness; in fact, it's not clear that sloth is laziness at all. Sloth, as commentators from the desert fathers in the first centuries of the Christian era to psychologists and philosophers today maintain, is a form of despair, the inability to feel joy or gratitude. Sloth can lead to a dispirited lack of energy that leads to behavior frequently thought of as lazy. But lazyiness connotes a relaxed internal state that the person suffering from sloth simply doesn't enjoy. Neither is sloth leisured, nonbusy time. The latter is an opportunity, as Aristotle noted, for enrichment. The former is always a state of alienation and interior impoverishment. Wasserstein's failure to make these sorts of distinctions leads to a caricature rather than an analysis of sloth.
Sloth, when understood as despair, may be the single one of the 7 deadlies that most characterizes American culture. How doubly unfortunate, then, that the volume on sloth in the 7 Deadly Sins series is so inadequate. Its easy conflation of sloth with laziness only legitimizes our present-day tendency not to take it seriously. And this is where Wasserstein's bad book graduates into the harmful book category.
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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sloth: The Silliest of Sins, January 29, 2005
The New York Public Library and Oxford University Press conspired to develop a lecture series in which some of the most interesting modern minds ponder the most ancient human foibles: the Seven Deadly Sins. The lectures were given at the New York Public Library and the authors were permitted (encouraged?) to rework them for publication. Wasserstein's SLOTH and Robert Thurman's ANGER are the latest titles to join the series (ENVY and GLUTTONY were published in 2003; LUST and GREED in 2004; PRIDE is promised for this spring and hopefully will come before the fall).
Although I've bought all of the available titles, I chose to read SLOTH first (always having had a soft spot for this sin). It is not surprising that Wasserstein, an accomplished playwright, chose to adopt a persona to convey her message-that of a sloth guru, the author of a anti-self-help book entitled "Sloth: And How to Get It." The guru is so slothful s/he hasn't gotten around to forming a clear or specific sexual identity (At college, "I played sports on both men's and women's teams, and I had also danced the young male and female lead in the New York City Ballet's Nutcracker"; p. 19) Anyone who has tried all the new diet books, attended a 12-step group, guiltily read PEOPLE at the supermarket check-out line, or gotten caught up in church/synagogue, school, or office politics, will enjoy the many jabs Wasserstein delivers to institutions and champions advocating perfectability. SLOTH has the potential to become a modern satirical classic like C.S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS or Ambrose Bierce's THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY. However, unlike Lewis's great work, the jokes are mostly superficial, univalent, and very repetitive. It is, in the end, a one-joke book, and you could certainly accuse Wasserstein of taking enough trope to hang herself.
My disappointment (why I only gave this very funny book only four stars), is that Wasserstein only occassionally reveals a serious concern with the nature and history of her chosen "sin." When I got to chapter three ("The Concise History of Sloth"), I thought that Wasserstein at last was going to start taking her subject seriously. And she does--for four pages (pp. 24 to 28), where she gives a very brief description of how "accedia" (originally understood as "sadness") was usurped in the seventeenth century by "sloth" on the Church's list of the Big Seven Sins. But wisdom can be found among the book's many flippancies. For instance, in her chapter on "Uberslothdom" she asserts, "True sloths are not revolutionaries...Sloths are the lazy guardians at the gate of the status quo" (p. 104). Hmmm.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fine excuse for some much-needed social satire, July 23, 2005
Sloth, ah yes, sloth. (By the way, both pronunciations, sloth with a long "o" to rhyme with "both," and sloth with a short "o" to rhyme with "moth" are correct.) It's one of the seven deadly sins and this is one of seven books on them commissioned by the Oxford University Press and the New York Public Library. The books are all short and neat and beautifully presented. Each grew out of lectures sponsored by Oxford and the library.
Here we have Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein championing the cause of sloth as she parodies self-help tomes (she has apparently read a few) while satirizing the mass culture (and of course herself) to the reader's delight.
Wasserstein is not so much knockdown funny as she is entertaining. There are a few belly laughs and a number of chuckles, but mostly there is the sense that she is actually saying something of value about who we are and where we're going.
Clearly Wasserstein knows human foibles and she knows the seduction of the mass culture and especially that nasty admonition from others (especially your parents) to "make something of yourself." Ironically, while Wasserstein has indeed made something of herself, here--tongue only partially in cheek--she strongly advises you to just hang out on the couch. She has an "Activity Gram Counter" that limits you to 50 grams of activity a day. Eating a Krispy Kreme donut along with Sleepytime tea costs you 5 grams, the same as watching the Cartoon Network on TV, while reading the New York Times will set you back 30 grams. Not to worry, reading People Magazine rates a minus 5 grams, but watch out for those "Great turn-of-the-century Russian novels," the reading of which costs you a whopping 100 grams a session. In essence this is a celebration of sloth as the way to health and happiness, a stress-free life, a better world, and most importantly, a better YOU.
I think the book was mostly successful and I enjoyed reading it. However Wendy's assumption of a male self-help guru persona was not consistently maintained and should never have been employed since (1) it added nothing; (2) could not in any way disguise Wasserstein's unique voice; and (3) made for some confusion since it was obvious that the most telling observations came from a femme point of view. And this despite the fact that some of the humor revolves around an ambiguous sexual orientation; e.g., her persona claims that in high school he dated both men and women and believed that he "was going to be a father and a mother" and as president of the US "would have a charming First Lady" by his side "and be escorted by a poet laureate husband." (Random thought: if either Hillary Clinton or Condi Rice becomes the first woman president of the United States, will either's husband be the "First Gentleman"?)
Accompanying the text is some charming artwork by Serge Bloch, most of it line drawings, one of which appears on the cover, that of an amazingly relaxed and blissful stick-figure man in a hammock.
Wasserstein claims that reading this book only costs two activity grams and that rereading it is a "Sloth Zone Activity" resulting in a negative 25 grams. I hate to tell her but I read it while peddling my exercise bike.
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