Stating that there has never been a greater need for democratic reform in the form of organized public protest, a history of American political dissent charges the Bush administration with forsaking democracy in favor of preserving the American oligarchy. Reprint.

Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy

Politics & Social Sciences

Lapham, Lewis

Politics & Government

Penguin??Books

Assesses the impact of the money dream on American class structures, culture, celebrity, crime, and politics, in a collection of observations and analyses of American society, values, and mores

Money and Class In America: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion

Sociology

Ballantine Books

As the editor of Harper's Magazine, Lewis Lapham has enjoyed entrée to America's "cultural elite," a class distinguished by its talent for currying favor, licking boots, and kissing ass. Now, in this scathingly funny and politically incorrect self-help book, Mr. Lapham offers his best advice to aspiring careerists seeking to ride in helicopters and see themselves on television. Drawing upon a lifetime of experience among the cogno-scenti, Mr. Lapham breaks rank and reveals the unspoken secrets of getting ahead: what to say, how to dress, when to lie, whom to befriend, where to be seen, and why it is absolutely essential to wear clean shoes. ("The first impression is also the last impression. You don't wish to be remembered as the stain on the rug.") Anyone interested in self-advancement will be transformed by Lapham's Rules of Influence, which offers proven nuggets of wisdom. For example, when trying to impress the boss, remember: "Flattery cannot be too often or too recklessly applied. Think of it as suntan lotion or moisturizing cream." Written with stinging wit and tongue planted firmly in cheek, Lapham's Rules of Influence is a brilliant critique of class and manners in America, packed with the kind of irreverent observation that only Lewis Lapham can provide. Seek out the acquaintance of people richer and more important than yourself, and never take an interest in people who cannot do you any favors. Rumor tinged with malice is the most precious form of gossip. When you are invited to spend a weekend with important journalists or movie stars, it is considered polite to bring four items of unpublished slander in lieu of a house present or a bottle of wine. Make unsparing use of clichés. The empty word is the correct word. Contrary to the opinion of snobbish New York intellectuals, the placid murmur of cliché is always preferable to the expression of strong feeling, which is an embarrassment. A truly fashionable dinner party ends at the moment when all the guests have arrived and everybody has been seen or not seen. Once attendance has been taken, the rest of the evening is superfluous. A good meeting is one at which nothing happens. Sit erect, second all the motions, remember everybody's name.

Lapham's Rules of Influence: A Careerist's Guide to Success, Status, and Self-Congratulation

Self-Help

Success

Random House]

For fifteen years, Lewis Lapham has written a monthly column in Harper's Magazine, for which he won a 1995 National Magazine Award for his "exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity." This major collection of Lapham's essays defines his distinct view of the way the world really works, through vivid analysis of media, language, culture, and education. Lapham brings an acute eye to the ways of Washington, the manners of the money class, and the stirrings of the global economy. With originality and breadth, he illuminates the quirks and essential truths of the American character.

Lights, Camera, Democracy! : Selected Essays

Literature & Fiction

Literary

AtRandom

Business & Money

Business Culture

Random House Publishing Group

It was the ultimate 1960s scene: the ashram in Rishikesh, India, where the Beatles, Donovan, Mia Farrow, a stray Beach Boy, and other 1960s icons gathered along the shores of the Ganges-amidst paisley and incense and flowers and guitars-to meditate at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The February 1968 gathering received such frenzied, worldwide attention that it is still considered a significant, early encounter between Western pop culture and the mystical East. But what went on inside the compound has long been the subject of wild speculation and rampant rumor. The Beatles, for example, have said they wrote some of their greatest songs there . . . and yet they also came away bitterly disillusioned. While dozens of reporters from around the world flew to the remote location to camp out at the entrance of the retreat, only one journalist was allowed inside: Lewis Lapham, now the esteemed editor of Harper's Magazine, then a reporter for The Saturday Evening Post, who was seen-along with Tom Wolfe-as one of the progenitors of the hip "New Journalism." Lapham's wry take on what he found inside the ashram won acclaim at the time, but here he includes some surprising material he's never written about before-from hysterically funny descriptions of the Maharishi's daily press conferences, to the high style demands of certain stars upon the hapless local tailor, to impromptu jam sessions and the true story behind the scandal that drove the Beatles out of Rishikesh and led to Lapham's eight-hour cab ride with Ringo Starr. In Lapham's deft and vivid prose, With the Beatles is an exhilarating and surprisingly intimate look at one of the pivotal moments of pop culture and some of its leading figures. Lewis Lapham is the editor in chief of Harper's Magazine and the author of numerous books of political and cultural commentary, including, most recently, last year's Gag Rule.

With the Beatles

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Melville House

Stating that there has never been a greater need for democratic reform in the form of organized public protest, a history of American political dissent charges the Bush administration with forsaking democracy in favor of preserving the American oligarchy. 40,000 first printing.

Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and Stifling of Democracy

Penguin Press HC, The

Winner of the 1995 National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism, this work observes the spectacle of democratic life and values in our time, and asks who is signing in and who is checking out, of the American experiment at the “fin de siècle.” Culled from Lewis Lapham‘s monthly “Notebook” column for Harper‘s magazine, these essays describe the period between the winter of 1989 and the spring of 1995 in which the American explaining classes were casting around for a national folktale to take the place of the communist conspiracy. In this book, Lewis Lapham draws a portrait of a society at a loss to know what to think or make of itself at the end of a century once defined as America‘s own. His observations speak to the moral and intellectual confusions visited upon the American ruling elites—in the media and the universities, as well as in business and government—during the years 1989–1995. The spectacle is both comic and sad, a march of folly that calls forth Lapham‘s range as an essayist. Lapham‘s sketches take as their occasions events as different from one another as the wars in Panama and the Persian Gulf, the apotheosis of Richard Nixon and the transfiguration of O.J. Simpson, the grim inspections of the American soul conducted by the agents of both the pious left (no smoking cigarettes, no dirty water in the swimming pools, condoms in the schools) and the zealous right (no serial murders in the movies, no lesbians in the army, prayer in the schools), the media‘s use of history as wallpaper and elevator music, the dwindling significance of President Clinton (vanishing as mysteriously as the Cheshire cat) and the bombastic arrival of Newt Gingrich (“a man for all grievances”), the practice of swindling the stockholders and the art of changing gossip into news.

Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin de Siecle

Verso

Waiting for the Barbarians

With invective all the more deadly for its grace and wit, Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s magazine, presents a portrait of a feckless American establishment gone large in the stomach and soft in the head. This acerbic commentary on the insouciance of the monied ruling class concludes with a forewarning piece where Lapham looks at the fate of indolent ruling classes throughout history.

Earlier this year some 2,000 of the world’s most prominent business and political leaders—among them Bill Gates and the President of Brazil, also George Soros and the Chairman of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank—made their way to Davos, Switzerland, for the 27th annual meeting of The World Economic Forum. They brought with them a wealth of good intentions as well as what the correspondent for London’s Financial Times estimated at “roughly 70% of the world’s daily output of self-congratulation.” This year the quorum of journalists included the incongruous presence of Lewis Lapham, a writer known for his not always flattering portraits of America’s ruling and possessing classes. The larger cast of an international plutocracy assembled in the shadow of an alp made famous by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, presented Lapham with a broader canvas on which to exercise his considerable talent for keen observation and sardonic wit. Diligently attentive to the program of scheduled events, Lapham goes to briefings on the outlook for Thailand and the subtleties of corporate espionage, carries forward the discussions over lunch or dinner at picturesque resort hotels, listens to speeches by eminencies as grave and diverse as Newt Gingrich, John Sweeney, the Chairman of Toyota, and the Vice Premier of China. He encounters finance ministers and professors of economics who gaze into the glass of the future and see little else except their own reflections. After five days in Davos he understands that the masters of markets and captains of commercial empire know as little about the likely movements of the global economy as the waiters supplying them with plum brandy and cheese fondue. “Although in many ways bountiful and in some ways benign, the colossal mechanism that generates the wealth of nations lacks the capacity for human speech or conscious thought, a failing the troubles those of its upper servants who wish to believe that it is they who control the machine and not the machine that controls them. Their armour proper forbids them from picturing themselves as mere stokers heaving computer printouts and Montblanc pens into a blind, remorseless furnace. They seek a more gracious portraiture, and so, every year in late January, they make their optimistic way from the low-flying places of the earth to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where, high up on the same alp that provided Thomas Mann with the setting for The Magic Fountain, they brood upon the mysteries of capitalist creation. Given the chance last winter to make the annual ascent, I didn’t see how I could refuse ... ”

The Agony of Mammon: The Imperial Global Economy Explains Itself to the Membership in Davos, Switzerland

Economics

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lapham, Lewis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lapham, Lewis

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lapham, Lewis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy

Money and Class In America: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion

Lapham's Rules of Influence: A Careerist's Guide to Success, Status, and Self-Congratulation

Lights, Camera, Democracy! : Selected Essays

Lapham's Rules of Influence: A Careerist's Guide to Success, Status, and Self-Congratulation

With the Beatles

Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and Stifling of Democracy

Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin de Siecle

Waiting for the Barbarians

The Agony of Mammon: The Imperial Global Economy Explains Itself to the Membership in Davos, Switzerland