The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

by Christopher Lasch

Overview

When The Culture of Narcissism was first published, it was clear that Christopher Lasch had identified something important: what was happening to American society in the wake of the decline of the family over the last century.

The book quickly became a bestseller. This edition includes a new afterword, "The Culture of Narcissism Revisited."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393348354
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/05/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	470,758
File size:	653 KB

About the Author

Christopher Lasch (1932–1994), professor of history at the University of Rochester, wrote, among many other works, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics and the best-selling Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

Editorial Reviews

Ranging with much virtuosity over the whole of modern life, he finds evidence only of change and decay. . . .Professor Lasch. . .provide[s] us with a black survey of the way we live now, and leave[s] us to use all our resources of theory and skepticism to make the best we can of it. —The New York Times Books of the Century

Frank Kermode

Cultural history at its best. . . . Provokes, startles, and keeps the reader arguing with himself as well as with the writer. . . . A book of fundamental importance.

Bruce Mazlish

Christopher Lasch has gone to the heart of our culture. The insights into personality and its social context are stunning. This is a courageous, important book.

Michael Rogin

Formidable intellectual grasp and the kind of moral conviction rarely found in contemporary, value-neutral history and sociology. . . . Lasch is on to something quite real.

Time

This is the big intellectual book of the season, the one for everyone to feel guilty about not reading.

Henry Allen - Washington Post

Brilliantly on target [and] idiosyncratically compelling.

Alan Wolfe - New Republic

Never has the case against narcissism been made with such an all-embracing sweep. . . . [Lasch] has brilliantly performed the first job of a social critic by prompting us to look at our reflection—shorn of vanity.

Valerie Lloyd - Newsweek

Lasch took in a remarkable range of contemporary experience, making many observations that, if anything, ring more true today. . . . [Readers] may want to seek solace in Lasch’s illuminations.

Lee Siegel - The New York Times