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`Snobbery: The American Version,' by Joseph Epstein; Houghton (288 pages, $25).

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From: South Florida Sun-Sentinel (via Knight-Ridder/Tribune NewsService)
Date: 20020805
Author:

Byline: Chauncey Mabe

Joseph Epstein's publisher claims that this is the first book on the subject since William Makepeace Thackeray's "The Book of Snobs," a period of well more than a century. Can this be true? Can it be that wags the likes of H.L. Mencken, Edith Wharton, Evelyn Waugh, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Tom Wolfe have resisted so ubiquitous and prominent and delicious a human failing?

Perhaps none of these other social critics/novelists thought the subject contained a book's worth of interest. Indeed, there are moments in "Snobbery" when you might doubt whether ...

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