A (sometimes unintentionally) funny, narrow view of the wealthy that will tickle the outsider’s fancy.
A tell-it-like-it-is guide to faking it till you make it when it comes to wealth and class.
So you weren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth. What can you do to not only act like you were but to actually make (or perhaps marry into) the kind of money that puts you in the big leagues? Kerney, who comes from old money, has witnessed firsthand the differences between the haves and the have-nots as well as the manners and outlooks that separate old money from new. For chapters, he divides his guide into subjects close to the hearts of the haves (or the wants): On Vacation; Marrying Up; Name-Dropping, Bragging, Bigotry, and Gossip are just a taste of what an aspiring social queen or king will need to study up on if she or he is going to breathe in that rarified atmosphere. While much of Kerney’s advice is simply common sense—learn your table manners and be able to use them with ease, never condescend, don’t tolerate abuse from your spouse—others border on the absurd: Choose, of course, the less foppish Stubbs & Wooten needlepoint slippers, and if you must wear a Medic Alert bracelet, Tiffany’s gold is preferable. And did you know that occupations are a very middle-class concern? Instead, the haves “are much more interested in your interests and pastimes.” As a study in the milieu of the old-fashioned rich, this amusing book would be almost tongue-in-cheek if it weren’t so earnest. Being extremely wealthy—whether a relatively recent state of affairs or a generational hand-me-down—“takes more than hard work….There are not many people born with all that it takes.” Some of the most interesting parts of the book are the anecdotes about Kerney’s family; his grandmother, cousin and other extended family may have been better served by their own biographies. While this book can’t replace the classic tomes on manners and etiquette, it is worth a glance just to see what you’re missing—“top-notch” liquor and caviar, anyone?
A (sometimes unintentionally) funny, narrow view of the wealthy that will tickle the outsider’s fancy.Pub Date: April 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495441868
Page Count: 112
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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