Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-siècle

In Hotel America, 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 unique range of talents as an essayist - clarity of mind, acerbic wit, a thorough knowledge of American history (both ancient and modern), a sense of the absurd, a gift for the apt word and memorable phrase. Drawn across a broad canvas of incidental and scene. 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.