The Seven Perennial Sins and Their OffspringKen Bazyn
Drawing on astonishingly wide reading (Lucian, Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dante, Heine, Flaubert, Ruskin, Orwell, Truffaut and Francis of Assisi are just some of the authors cited), Bazyn sets each of the seven 'deadly sins' - and seven 'subsins' - in the context of millennia of observations on the darker side of human nature. Never moralizing, but often amusing, the book provides a corrective to modern Christianity's neglect of this traditional resource for teaching responsibility in ethics. Slightly off-mint.