The Ideal of Culture: Essays [Hardcover]

Who is the greatest living essayist writing in English? Joseph Epstein would surely be at the top of anybodys list. Epstein is penetrating. He is witty. He has a magic touch with words, that hard to define but immediately recognizable quality called style. Above all, he is impossible to put down.The Ideal of Culture contains 63 essays on a wide variety of subjects, each a pure pleasure to read.Who is the greatest living essayist writing in English? Joseph Epstein would surely be at the top of anybodys list. Epstein is penetrating. He is witty. He has a magic touch with words, that hard to define but immediately recognizable quality called style. Above all, he is impossible to put down. Joseph Epsteins The Ideal of Culture: Essays is the fourth such volume from Axios Press and contains 63 essays. Subjects range from domestic life to current social trends to an appraisal of contemporary nuttiness. It follows the much acclaimed Essays in Biography, 2012, A Literary Education and Other Essays, 2014, and Wind Sprints: Shorter Essays, 2016. After reading Epstein, we see life with a fresh eye. We also see ourselves a little more clearly. This is what Plutarch intended: life teaching by example, but with a wry smile and such a sure hand that we hardly notice the instruction. It is just pure pleasure.Introduction I. The CultureThe Ideal of Culture From Parent to Parenthood Death Takes No Holiday Wit Genius Cowardice Old Age and Other Laughs Whats So Funny? The Fall of the WASPs The Virtue of Victims Cool The Sixties University of Chicago DaysII. Literary Erich Auerbach Kafka Orwell Proust C. K. Scott Moncrieff The Young T. S. Eliot Philip Larkin Willa Cather George Kennan Isaiah Berlin Michael Oakeshott John OHara F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Most Successful Failure Wolcott Gibbs Evelyn Waugh J. F. Powers Edward Gibbon Herodotus Tacitus Encyclopaedia Britannica  The Eleventh Grammar Clich?s Lil³.