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Born Losers
A History Of Failure In America
by Scott A. Sandage
In the Carnegie Mellon history professor's look back at the past two centuries of American history, he reveals not our heroes and success stories, but our failures--the dark side of the American dream. In the process, he examines our society's shifting views of personal failure, and the psychological baggage that now comes with such labels. [Harvard University Press]
Harvard University Press, 384 pages
01/30/2005
$35.00
ISBN: 067401510X
Nonfiction
History
Social Sciences
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Library Journal Frederick J. Augustyn Jr.
Finely crafted and challenging treatise. [1 Oct 2004, p.95]
Boston Globe Richard Eder
Sandage is on Thoreau's side. His book, restless, stuffed with citations (and overstuffed), and sometimes stretching a point, a connection, or a bit of wordplay, suffers from exuberance but profits far more by it.
Daily Telegraph Robert Hanks
As a whole, the book presents a convincing argument and is winningly alive to literary parallels - success may be the grand theme of American history, but failures, from Bartleby through Gatsby to Willy Loman, dominate its literature.
San Francisco Chronicle Maria Fish
The glorification of personal accountability is a curious, if not damaging, tradition, and Sandage does a marvelous job of tracing its evolution. But he does not flush out much in the way of alternatives.
Wall Street Journal James Grant
Though his footnotes are models of scholarly rigor, Mr. Sandage's book may grate on the average red-states sensibility.
Washington Post Jonathan Yardley
If at moments Sandage lapses into the clotted patois of contemporary academia (he teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh), for the most part Born Losers is readable, interesting and thoroughly researched.
London Review Of Books James Morone
Sandage has done a marvellous job exploring the dark side of this peculiar American gospel: the blithe judgment that failure reflects a personal defect, that want is a species of sin, and the insistence that the sources of wealth and poverty lie entirely ‘in the man’.
The New Republic Christine Stansell
You cannot come away from this elegant book without a heightened awareness of the devastating costs of the go-ahead mandate for the downsized corporate executive, the bank teller denied a promotion year after year, the college graduate struggling to spring loose of internships to land a real job.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Andrew Stark
Sandage has acute insight into the nuances of plot and character in his studies, but out of each of them he draws much the same blunt conclusion: that Americans are bred in the bone to blame themselves for their failures to get ahead.
PopMatters Michael Sandlin
The book's assessment of the 20th Century history of American Failure does, however, read like a cursory survey, confined to the Epilogue.
Village Voice Joy Press
Sometimes gets lost in its raw material; like a bibliophile gone haywire in the archives.
Atlantic Monthly Benjamin Schwarz
Sandage fails to elucidate fully the cultural significance of the sources he's exhaustively examined, and the various and often seemingly unrelated elements of his analysis frequently don't cohere.
Publishers Weekly
Regrettably, these individual snapshots fail to cohere into a fully comprehensive portrait of the personal and social psychology of failure. That failure diminished a man is hardly revelatory, nor does it constitute the level of specific historical analysis one expects. [1 Nov 2004, p.52]
Kirkus Reviews
An earnest entry in an emerging academic discipline, but a dreary topic for recreational reading.
Los Angeles Times Joseph Epstein
[Sandage] has written a book on the interesting subject of commercial failure in 19th century America that is commonplace in its assumptions and predictable in its conclusions. [10 Apr 2005]
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