Overview

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 listener, 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?

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William Ian Miller is the Thomas G. Long Professor of Law at University of Michigan. He also has been a visiting professor at Yale, the University of Chicago, the University of Bergen, the University of Tel Aviv, and Harvard, and in 2008, was the Carnegie Centenary Trust Professor at the University of St. Andrews, where he is now also an honorary professor of history. He is the author of multiple books, including Humiliation, The Anatomy of Disgust, The Mystery of Courage, Faking It, and Losing It. David Colacci has been an actor and a director for over thirty years, performing coast-to-coast in lead roles of plays by a variety of playwrights, from Shakespeare to Sam Shepard to Steve Martin. He has worked as a narrator for over fifteen years, during which time he has read the works of such authors as Jules Verne, Henry Adams, John Irving, Michael Chabon, and John Lescroart. He has won AudioFile Earphones Awards, earned Audie nominations, and been included in Best of the Year lists by such publications as Publishers Weekly, AudioFile magazine, and Library Journal. David was a resident actor/director with the Cleveland Play House for eight years and has been artistic director of the Hope Summer Rep Theater since 1992. He currently lives in New York with his wife, narrator and actress Susan Ericksen, and his children, Mario and Elena.

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