I’m reading a book right now (The Recognitions by William Gaddis) in which one of the characters reads Dale Carnegie’s book and the author uses this as a platform to lambast it for several pages. Here’s a sample:

[…] an action book: and herein lay the admirable quality of his work: it decreed virtue not for virtue’s sake (as weary Stoics had it); nor courtesy for courtesy (an attribute of human dignity, as civilized culture would have it); nor love for love (as Christ had it); nor a faith which is its own explanation and its own justification (as any faith has it); but all of these excellences oriented toward the marketplace. Here was no promise of anything so absurd as a void where nothing was, not so delusive as a chimerical kingdom of heaven: in short, it reconciled those virtues he had been taught as a child to the motives and practices of the man, the elixir which exchanged the things worth being for the things worth having.

I had never even heard of this book before reading about it so it’s kind of funny to see it show up here.