"In this book, William Ian Miller offers his reflections on the perverse consequences, indeed, often the opposite of intended effects, of so-called good things. Noted for his remarkable erudition, wit, and playful pessimism, Miller here ranges over topics from personal disasters to literary and national ones. Drawing on a truly immense store of knowledge encompassing literature, philosophy, theology, and history, he excavates the evidence of human anxieties around scarcity in all its forms (from scarcity of food to luck to where we stand in the eyes of others caught in a game of musical chairs we often do not even know we are playing). With wit and sensitivity, along with a large measure of fearless self-scrutiny, he points to and invites us to recognize the gloomy, neurotic, despondent tendencies of reasonably sentient human life. The book is a careful examination of negative beliefs, inviting an experience of bleak fellow-feeling among the author, the reader, and many a hapless soul across the centuries. Just what makes you more nervous, he asks, a run of good luck, or a run of bad?"--
These are the questions that Daniel Altman confronts in his provocative and indispensable book. The fate of the global economy, Altman argues, will be determined by deeper factors than those that move markets from moment to moment.
Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play
In a bizarre future world in which appliances talk back and cities are divided into zones based on musical tastes, dream designer and surfer Jonny X awakens to discover that his house has been stolen, he has become the target of a ...
Outrageous Fortune
Based on the hit TV series Outrageous Fortune, this outrageous family album introduce all the characters and their tips for a fulfilling life in the West, including recipes, love stories, defining moments and disasters.
A composer and descendant of aristocrats traces his 1950s childhood at opulent Leeds Castle, describing the strict rules of conduct that governed everyday life and the changes invoked by the cultural revolutions of the 1960s.
Outrageous Fortune
But even before Max Weber or R. H. Tawney had identified Protestantism with economic individualism and with a generally modernizing, entrepreneurial and capitalist mentality, it had been conventional in secular intellectual circles to ...
Outrageous Fortune: The Screenplay
And he shows how the family has coped with the latest modern scourges: drugs and AIDS. For All the Money in the World is not a hopeless story.