"The seven "deadly sins" are not to be found in scripture as such, but they have been a staple of Christian preaching since the early church. Ken Bazyn's The Seven Perennial Sins and Their Offspring is more indebted to literature than to personal experience, ethics, or the contemporary obsession with psychology. Drawing upon a vast storehouse of reading from a wide variety of disciplines, Bazyn offers a "thick description" of each of these "root"...