SOURCE: Wolcott, James. “Son of Making It.” New Republic 184, no. 4 (24 January 1981): 34-6.

In the following review, Wolcott maintains that Epstein's argument in Ambition is weak and repetitious.

With Ambition, Joseph Epstein has taken the bicycle pump out of the garage and blown up an essay-length topic into an air-bloated tome of nearly 300 pages. Epstein, who contributes peppery, against-the-grain essays to the American Scholar, Commentary, and Harper's, enjoys playing the bookish crank, blowing smoke rings in the face of liberal piety. He now has set out to rehabilitate ambition's reputation, which he feels has become tattered and soiled in recent years. Lefties, intellectuals, novelists, Naderish do-gooders, hookah-toking dropouts—all have made ambition seem suspect. Under their influence, ambition no longer is seen as “the fuel of achievement” but as a Nixonian itch, a desire to have one's ruthless way in the world even if it means planting knives into...