{"product_id":"2026100012385-secondhand-arcadian-adventures-with-the-idle-rich","title":"Arcadian Adventures With The Idle Rich","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage\u003cbr\u003ePages: Tanning and foxing\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA razor-sharp comedy of plutocratic excess, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich transports readers to the fictional Plutoria Avenue, a gilded street in a booming North American city where the obscenely wealthy conduct their schemes with supreme self-satisfaction — a world where money is the sole measure of virtue and power the only currency that matters. Stephen Leacock's 1914 satirical masterpiece chronicles the absurdities of robber barons, corrupt clergymen, crooked politicians, and feckless academics as they collude, swindle, and blunder their way through the upper echelons of society, each vignette a perfectly constructed farce that skewers the moral bankruptcy lurking beneath a veneer of respectability.\n\nWidely regarded as one of the finest works of North American satire, this companion volume to Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town illustrates Leacock's extraordinary gift for wielding irony as a scalpel, dissecting the pretensions of urban wealth with the same affectionate brutality he applied to small-town innocence. His prose is at once breezy and devastating — deceptively light in touch yet unerring in its targets — cementing his reputation as the foremost English-language humorist of his era. For a society still reckoning with the relationship between capital and conscience, Leacock's Plutoria Avenue feels alarmingly, and hilariously, familiar.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51022655422683,"sku":"2026100012385-SECONDHAND","price":15.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/3076018d-859b-413e-9370-3bee3d7a93bb.png?v=1793665404","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026100012385-secondhand-arcadian-adventures-with-the-idle-rich","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}