Buttering Up
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Scan day: 05 March 2014 UTC
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Description: Richard Klein reviews 'You're Too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery' by Richard Stengel.
A study of the fine art of flattery and where it will get you. lattery will get you nowhere, or so they say. It hasn't always been the case. In fact, as Richard Stengel magnificently demonstrates (do I overstate?), ingratiation has been a fundamental, perhaps an evolutionary aim of most social behavior and polite speech. ''You're Too Kind'' embraces the history of flattery from its origins in encomiums engraved on Egyptian tombs to the demagogy of the Presidential Point (presidents, beginning with Reagan, Stengel notes, pretend to pick out a familiar face in the crowd and nudge the wife, who also points and smiles: our rulers flatter us by appearing to be just like us, ''actually having friends''). Moving from Yahweh's need of flattery to the candor of Greece and the obsequiousness of Rome on down to Dick Morris and Bill Clinton, who flatters his interlocutors by intently listening, Stengel is able triumphantly to conclude (am I reaching too high?) that flattery is more pervasively present than ever, although disguised and venally debased in these relativizing times, in this age of irony.
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