Friendship
An Expose
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The amusing and erudite anatomy of modern friendship, from the New York Times–bestselling author of Snobbery.
Is it possible to have too many friends? Is your spouse supposed to be your best friend? How far should you go to help a friend in need? And how do you end a friendship that has run its course?
In a “smart, delightfully literate, and sophisticated” anatomy of friendship in all its contemporary guises, Joseph Epstein uncovers the rich and surprising truths about our favored companions (Los Angeles Times). Friendship illuminates those complex, wonderful relationships without which we’d all be lost.
“Reading [Epstein] is like spending an evening being flatteringly entertained by the most interesting guy at the party.” —The Seattle Times
“A brilliant and outspoken commentator . . . Epstein’s graceful style and irrepressible wit provide unalloyed pleasure.” —Chicago Tribune
“Brisk and delightful.” —The Wall Street Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The idealization of friendship, writes noted essayist Epstein, is "somehow false to the truth of friendship, at least as... we all live it." So Epstein examines the "art" of friendship, which "calls for regular maintenance through thoughtful cultivation." He opens with a "little taxonomy of friends," exploring the semantics of the word "friendship," and categories of friends (the saddest being the "ex-friend"). Epstein (Snobbery) goes on to explore his own friendships, in particular the category of the "best friend." He catalogues the factors that influence the nature and course of friendship, from shared traits such as ethnicity or regional roots to connections across barriers of generations and class, including the complications of friendship between the sexes. A survivor of a bad first marriage and long remarried, Epstein is astute on the permutations of friendship within and alongside marriage. At the center of the book is a celebratory memoir of a long friendship with an older, much respected friend (now dead). Another friendship, conducted almost entirely in diary-like e-mails, is celebrated for its literary merit. Drawing on Aristotle, Montaigne, Cicero and Pliny, Epstein lucidly paraphrases and applies wisdom to his own life experience, producing a meditative memoir that is refined and modest in tone, but perhaps too hermetic.
