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  • Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
    by Thomas H. Naylor, David Wann, John De Graaf, Vicki Robin, David Horsey
    ISBN 1576753573 (1-57675-357-3)
    Softcover, Ingram Pub Services

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    Book summary:

    Affluenza is an eye-opening, soul-prodding look at the wretched excess of today's American society. John De Graaf, David Wann and Thomas Naylor define it as something akin to "a painful, contagious, socially-transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more". Having begun life as two US TV programmes co-produced by De Graaf, this book takes a hard look at the symptoms of affluenza, the history of its development into an epidemic, and the options for treatment. In making its readers aware of this pervasive disease in an age when "the urge to splurge continues to surge", the first section is the book's most provocative. According to figures the authors quote and expound upon, Americans each spend more than $21,000 per year on consumer goods, average rates of saving have fallen from about 10 per cent of income in 1980 to zero in 2000, credit card indebtedness tripled in the 1990s and more people file for bankruptcy each year than graduate from college. "To live, we buy," explain the authors. They present many of the historical, political and socio-economic reasons that affluenza has taken such strong root in American society and, in the final section, offer practical ideas for change. These use the intriguing stories of those who have already opted for simpler living and are creatively combating the disease, through simple habit alterations to more in-depth environmental considerations and from living lightly to managing wealth responsibly.

    Many books make you think the author has crammed everything they know into a one-hit wonder attempt at knowledge transfer. The feeling you get reading Affluenza is quite different; the authors appear well-read, well-rounded and intelligent, knowledgable beyond the content of their book but smart enough to realise that we need a short, sharp jolt to recognise our current ailment. It's obviously a cliché that money can't buy happiness, but this book will strike a resounding chord with anyone who realises that time is more valuable than toys. Affluenza is a clarion call for those interested in being part of the healing solution. --S Ketchum [via]

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  • Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough
    by Clive Hamilton
    ISBN 1741146712 (1-74114-671-2)
    Softcover, Allen & Unwin

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    Anyone concerned about the level of their personal debt or frustrated by the rat race of aspiring to an affluent lifestyle will appreciate this critique of the effects of over-consumption. This analysis pulls no punches as it describes both the problem and what can be done to stop it. Analyzing the increasing rates of stress, depression, and obesity as possible effects of the consumption binge currently gripping the Western world, this report tracks how Australians overwork, the growing number of things thrown out, self-medicated drugs, and the real meaning of the word choice.
    [via]

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  • American Psycho
    by Bret Easton Ellis
    ISBN 0679735771 (0-679-73577-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.

    Blurb in Spanish: Mucho se ha hablado de American Psycho. Y lo cierto es que había razón para tanta polémica, pues esta novela de Bret Easton Ellis constituye una de las críticas más feroces que un escritor norteamericano ha hecho a su propio país: una sociedad autocomplaciente y orgullosa de si misma. Para su denuncia, el autor ha escogido un camino arriesgado: Patrick Bateman, el protagonista, no es un rebelde ni un paria; Patrick es un joven de éxito que, sin embargo, también es capaz de violar, torturar y asesinar. Como dijo Fay Weldom, American Psycho es de alguna forma el oscuro complemento de La hoguera de las vanidades, por cuanto descubre aquellos puntos negros de la vida de los supuestos triunfadores que la novela de Tom Wolfe quiso obviar. [via]

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  • Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
    by David Brooks
    ISBN 0684853787 (0-684-85378-7)
    Softcover, Touchstone Books

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    Book summary:

    It used to be pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. The bourgeois worked for corporations, wore gray, and went to church. The bohemians were artists and intellectuals. Bohemians championed the values of the liberated 1960s; the bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the 1980s.

    But now the bohemian and the bourgeois are all mixed up, as David Brooks explains in this brilliant description of upscale culture in America. It is hard to tell an espresso-sipping professor from a cappuccino-gulping banker. Laugh and sob as you read about the information age economy's new dominant class. Marvel at their attitudes toward morality, sex, work, and lifestyle, and at how the members of this new elite have combined the values of the countercultural sixties with those of the achieving eighties. These are the people who set the tone for society today, for you. They are bourgeois bohemians: Bobos.

    Are you a Bobo?

    Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature?
    Does your newly renovated kitchen look like an aircraft hangar with plumbing? Did you select your new refrigerator on the grounds that mere freezing isn't cold enough?
    Would you spend a little more for socially conscious toothpaste -- the kind that doesn't actually kill germs, it just asks them to leave?
    Do you work for one of those hip, visionary software companies where everybody comes to work in hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a 400-foot wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot?
    Do youthink your educational credentials are just as good as those of the shimmering couples on the "New York Times" weddings page?

    If you answered yes to any of those questions, you are probably a member of today's new upper class. [via]

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  • Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child And The New Consumer Culture
    by Juliet B. Schor
    ISBN 0684870568 (0-684-87056-8)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    Over the last fifteen years children's spending power has mushroomed to an estimated USD30 billion in direct purchases and another USD600 billion of influence over parental purchases. Advertising and marketing has exploded alongside expenditures and now totals more than USD12 billion a year. Ads targeted at children are virtually everywhere - in schools, museums and on the internet - and strategies for capturing the child wallet have become ever more sophisticated. Marketers are intruding into a child's most private space, organizing stealthy peer-to-peer viral marketing efforts, and using high tech scientific research methodologies. Together, these trends have led to a pervasive commercialisation of childhood in the West. By eighteen months babies can recognize logos, by two they ask for products by brand name. During their nursery school years children will request an average of twenty-five products a day, by the time they enter primary school the average child can identify 200 logos and children between the ages of six and twelve spend more time shopping than reading, attending youth groups, playing outdoors or spending time in household conversation. On the basis of first-hand research inside the advertising industry, BORN TO BUY lays bare the research, messages and marketing strategies being used to target children, and assesses the impact of those efforts. [via]

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  • Quart, Alissa: Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers
    Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers
    by Alissa Quart
    ISBN 0738208620 (0-7382-0862-0)
    Softcover, Perseus Books Group

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    In Branded, Alissa Quart takes us to the dark side of marketing to teens, showing readers a disturbingly fast-paced world in which adults shamelessly insinuate themselves into "friendships" with young people in order to monitor what they wear, eat, listen to, and buy. We travel to a conference on advertising to teenagers and witness the breathless and insensitive pronouncements of lecturers there. We meet the unofficial teen "sales force" for a new girls' perfume (the unpaid daughters of the company's saleswomen) and observe the attempts of mega-corporations to purchase the time and space for product-placement in schools. We witness the aggressive and potentially emotionally damaging ways in which adults seek to control vulnerable young minds and wallets. But we also witness the bravery of isolated and increasingly Internet-linked kids who attempt to turn the tables on the cocksure corporations that so cynically strive to manipulate them.Eye-opening and urgent, Branded exposes and condemns a segment of American business whose high-paid job it is to reduce teens to their lowest common denominator, to systematically sap youth of individuality and creativity. Engaging and thought provoking, Branded ensures that consumers will never look at the American way of doing business in the same way again.In Branded, author Alissa Quart spotlights the most nefarious of youth marketing techniques, revealing eye-opening facts about the commercialization of today's teens, including:--31 million teens now spend upwards of $153 billion on leisure expenses- clothing, CDs, and makeup-a year. 55% of American high-school seniors work more than three hours a day to earn the money to fulfill their need for stuff.--A growing number of high schools are sponsored by corporations. Textbooks regularly mention Oreo cookies and math problems contain Nike logos. Teenagers not only play ball in gyms rimmed with logos but also spend their English classes coming up with advertising slogans for sponsors, all under the auspices of their so-called public schools.--In the last two years, cosmetic surgery rates for teens have gone from 1% to 3% of the total 4.6 million surgeries performed each year. Teen liposcution has doubled; breast augmentation has increased by almost a third in the last five years.
    [via]

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  • The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
    by Thomas Frank
    ISBN 0226260127 (0-226-26012-7)
    Softcover, Univ of Chicago Pr

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    Book summary:

    In his book-length essay The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank explores the ways in which Madison Avenue co-opted the language of youthful '60s rebellion. It is "the story," Frank writes, "of the bohemian cultural style's trajectory from adversarial to hegemonic; the story of hip's mutation from native language of the alienated to that of advertising." This appropriation had wide-ranging consequences that deeply transformed our culture--consequences that linger in the form of '90s "hip consumerism." (Think of Nike using the song "Revolution" to sell sneakers, or Coca-Cola using replicas of Ken Kesey's bus to peddle Fruitopia.)

    This is no simplistic analysis of how the counterculture "sold out" to big business. Instead, Frank shows how the counterculture and business culture influenced one another. In fact, he writes, the counterculture's critique of mass society mimicked earlier developments in business itself, when a new generation of executives attacked the stultified, hierarchical nature of corporate life. Counterculture and business culture evolved together over time--until the present day, when they have become essentially the same thing. According to Frank, the '60s live on in the near-archetypal dichotomy of "hip" and "square," now part of advertising vernacular, signifying a choice between consumer styles. [via]

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  • Holt, D.B.: The Consumer Society Reader
    The Consumer Society Reader
    by D.B. Holt, Juliet Schor
    ISBN 1565845986 (1-56584-598-6)
    Softcover, New Pr

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  • The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists
    by Warren Leon, Michael Brower, Union of Concerned Scientists
    ISBN 060980281X (0-609-80281-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Paper or plastic? Cloth or disposable? Regular or organic? Every day, environmentally conscious consumers are faced with the overwhelming catch-22 of a capitalist society--reconciling the harm we do by consuming, while still providing ourselves and our families with the goods and services we need. It's enough to make a city dweller crazy. Fret no more! The Union of Concerned Scientists has put together a well-researched and eminently practical guide to the decisions that matter. The authors hope that the book will help you set priorities, stop worrying about insignificant things, and understand the real environmental impacts of household decisions. For instance, you may be surprised to learn that buying and eating meat and poultry is much more harmful to the environment than the packaging the meat is wrapped in, even if it's Styrofoam. This guide takes on both sides of the consumer-impact argument, goring sacred cows of the environmentalist movement (like the strident emphasis on recycling) and the industrialist perspective (like the relentless message to buy more, more, more). If you're confused and overwhelmed by all the environmental decision-making in the modern world, you'll find new inspiration in this book. --Therese Littleton [via]

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  • A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
    by Lizabeth Cohen
    ISBN 0375707379 (0-375-70737-9)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    The three decades after World War II are often heralded as a Golden Era of American affluence. But as Lizabeth Cohen makes clear, the pursuit of prosperity defined much more than the nations economy; it also became a basic component of American citizenship. Consumers were encouraged to buy not just for themselves, but for the good of the nation.

    After a decade and a half of hard times resulting from the Great Depression and the war, the embrace of mass consumption, with its supposed far-reaching benefitsgreater freedom, democracy, and equalitytransformed American life. The extensive suburbanization of metropolitan areas (propelled by such government policies as the GI Bill), the shift from downtowns to shopping centers, and the advent of targeted marketing all fueled the consumer economy, but also sharpened divisions among Americans along gender, class, and racial lines. At the same time, mass consumption changed American politics, inspiring new forms of political activism through the civil rights and consumer movements and prompting politicians to apply the latest marketing strategies to their political campaigns.

    Cohen traces the legacy of the Consumers Republic into our time, demonstrating how it has reshaped our relationship to government itself, with Americans increasingly judging public servicesas if one more purchased goodby the personal benefits they derive from them.

    Brilliantly researched and reasoned, A Consumers Republic is a starkly illuminating social and political history. [via]

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  • Beaudoin, Tom: Consuming Faith: Integrating Who We Are With What We Buy
    Consuming Faith: Integrating Who We Are With What We Buy
    by Tom Beaudoin
    ISBN 1580511384 (1-58051-138-4)
    Hardcover, Sheed & Ward

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  • Linn, Susan: Consuming Kids: Protecting Our Children From The Onslaught Of Marketing and Advertising
    Consuming Kids: Protecting Our Children From The Onslaught Of Marketing and Advertising
    by Susan Linn
    ISBN 1400079993 (1-4000-7999-3)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Linn, Susan E.: Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood
    Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood
    by Susan E. Linn
    ISBN 1565847830 (1-56584-783-0)
    Hardcover, New Pr

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  • Cronicas Marcianas
    by Ray Bradbury, Francisco Abelenda
    ISBN 8445073850 (84-450-7385-0)
    Softcover, Minotauro Ediciones Avd

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    date in first page [via]

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  • Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge-And Why We Must
    by Kalle Lasn
    ISBN 0688178057 (0-688-17805-7)
    Softcover, Quill

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    Book summary:

    America is no longer a country but a multimillion-dollar brand, says Kalle Lasn and his fellow "culture jammers". The founder of Adbusters magazine, Lasn aims to stop the branding of America by changing the way information flows; the way institutions wield power; the way television stations are run; and the way the food, fashion, automobile, sports, music, and culture industries set agendas. With a courageous and compelling voice, Lasn deconstructs the advertising culture and our fixation on icons and brand names. And he shows how to organize resistance against the power trust that manages the brands by "uncooling" consumer items, by "dermarketing" fashions and celebrities, and by breaking the "media trance" of our TV-addicted age.

    A powerful manifesto by a leading media activist, Culture Jam lays the foundations for the most significant social movement of the early twenty-first century -- a movement that can change the world and the way we think and live.

    [via]

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  • Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America
    by Kalle Lasn
    ISBN 0688156568 (0-688-15656-8)
    Hardcover, Harpercollins

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    Adbusters is a magazine that attacks the culture of consumerism by turning its own tactics against it--employing the glossy tactics of advertising to encourage people to take part in "Buy Nothing Day" and "TV Turnoff Week." Culture Jam takes the revolution to another level, as the magazine's publisher, Kalle Lasn, issues a call to arms to "the advance shock troops of the most significant social movement" of the early 21st century. Dissatisfied with the results of both academic and mainstream liberalism and feminism, Lasn harks back to the situationist roots of the 1968 Paris uprisings, a brief moment when it seemed possible that men and women might be able to wholly re-create not only their own lives but society as well.

    That revolution stumbled and fell, however, and Lasn views contemporary existence as one in which people have almost entirely succumbed to the cultural mandates of consumer capitalism, turning to corporations for guidance about how to look and what to desire. He offers several tips on how you can "demarket your life," including talking back to telemarketers and intensified boycotts (want to strike a blow against tobacco giant Philip Morris? Stop buying Maxwell House coffees, Kraft dairy products, Post cereals, and Miller beer). Lasn also pushes for the return of corporations to a subordinate role in people's lives, citing the 1886 U.S. Supreme Court decision that rendered corporations "natural persons" in the eyes of the law as a horrendous miscarriage of justice that must be overturned. (One of his biggest targets is media conglomerates who are able to disseminate their ideology throughout the information spectrum; in an ironic twist of fate, perhaps, the publisher of Culture Jam became a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation scant months before the book's release.)

    Culture Jam is an extreme book--among its declarations: "consumer capitalism is by its very nature unethical"--and Lasn's reasoning is not without flaws. One of the weak links in his argument is his insistence that, because none of the major television networks will allow him to purchase airtime for his "subverts," there is "no democracy on the airwaves" and his freedom of speech is being denied. The First Amendment says only that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech"; it says nothing about what he deems the "right to communicate ... through any media." On the other hand, he also raises a more plausible line of attack--since it's the government that grants broadcasters access to the airwaves, citizens should press for more say in how broadcast licenses are distributed. But whatever the book's excesses, Lasn is driven by a righteous anger--and Culture Jam may likely convince you, too, that the models of material success presented to us are not only inadequate to true happiness, they must be overturned. --Ron Hogan [via]

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  • Harris, Daniel: Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic
    Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic
    by Daniel Harris
    ISBN 0306810476 (0-306-81047-6)
    Softcover, Perseus Books Group

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    From his perch somewhere in Brooklyn, New York, essayist Daniel Harris launches a loquacious jeremiad against the way in which consumerism and its ideologies have insinuated themselves into our sense of self. Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic is a critical examination of the everyday things that surround us--from washing machines to vitamin supplements, reproduction antiques to supermodels. Taking aim at cuteness, quaintness, coolness, the romantic, zaniness, the futuristic, deliciousness, the natural, glamorousness, and cleanness, he seeks to expose just how tangled is the web we have woven, his goal being to show "how the aesthetics of consumerism are the lies we tell ourselves to preserve our individuality." Buying a four-by-four does not make us roughriders or adventurers, despite the names such vehicles bear. We know this as we drive our Wrangler or Jeep through the smooth streets of suburbia, yet the off-road ads still appeal. The perversity is the way in which attempts at iconoclasm are themselves domesticated into corporate opportunity: dirty denim, pick-up trucks as general vehicles, "wackiness."

    Harris is not a man to mince his words. The reader sits almost breathless in the face of his vituperation. For example, discussing teenagers and coolness, he writes: "The romantic movement's cult of the child has created a foul-mouthed enfant terrible who has turned the playground into a necropolis, where prematurely aged Byronic figures stagger from the merry-go-round to the seesaw to the jungle gym, striking poses of misery and ennui, convinced that their solemnity lends them an air of sophistication and maturity."

    The critique is scathing and often penetrating. Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic is a bracing read and a call to consciousness. Even the least sophisticated consumers know they are manipulated. Even the most sophisticated, Harris argues, do not really acknowledge how much they, too, are willing dupes.--J. Riches [via]

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  • Don Delillo
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 079107031X (0-7910-7031-X)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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    Harold Bloom suggests Don DeLillo's work holds a proleptic sense of the triumph of terror. This text offers critical views on numerous DeLillo novels, including The Names, Mao II, Libra, White Noise, and Underworld. This edition of Bloom's Major Novelists will help any student delve into the work of this contemporary writer.

    This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School; preeminent literary critic of our time. Titles include detailed plot summaries of the novel, extracts from scholarly critical essays on the novels, a complete bibliography of the writer's novels, and more. [via]

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  • Don Delillo's White Noise
    by Harold Bloom, Jesse Zuba
    ISBN 0791070441 (0-7910-7044-1)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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  • The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
    by Peter Singer, Jim Mason
    ISBN 1594866872 (1-59486-687-2)
    Softcover, Rodale Pr

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    Book summary:

    Peter Singer, the groundbreaking ethicist whom The New Yorker calls the most influential philosopher alive teams up again with Jim Mason, his coauthor on the acclaimed Animal Factories, to set their critical sights on the food we buy and eat: where it comes from, how it is produced, and whether it was raised humanely.

    The Ethics of What We Eat explores the impact our food choices have on humans, animals, and the environment. Recognizing that not all of us will become vegetarians, Singer and Mason offer ways to make healthful, humane food choices. As they point out: You can be ethical without being fanatical.
    [via]

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  • Fast Food Nation
    by Eric Schlosser
    ISBN 0618130977 (0-618-13097-7)
    Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin College Div

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    On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating exposé with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant meatpacking corporations. Schlosser wants you to know why those French fries taste so good (with a visit to the world's largest flavor company) and "what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns." Eater beware: forget your concerns about cholesterol, there is--literally--feces in your meat.

    Schlosser's investigation reaches its frightening peak in the meatpacking plants as he reveals the almost complete lack of federal oversight of a seemingly lawless industry. His searing portrayal of the industry is disturbingly similar to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, written in 1906: nightmare working conditions, union busting, and unsanitary practices that introduce E. coli and other pathogens into restaurants, public schools, and homes. Almost as disturbing is his description of how the industry "both feeds and feeds off the young," insinuating itself into all aspects of children's lives, even the pages of their school books, while leaving them prone to obesity and disease. Fortunately, Schlosser offers some eminently practical remedies. "Eating in the United States should no longer be a form of high-risk behavior," he writes. Where to begin? Ask yourself, is the true cost of having it "your way" really worth it? --Lesley Reed [via]

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  • Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
    by Eric Schlosser
    ISBN 0060838582 (0-06-083858-2)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating exposé with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant meatpacking corporations. Schlosser wants you to know why those French fries taste so good (with a visit to the world's largest flavor company) and "what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns." Eater beware: forget your concerns about cholesterol, there is--literally--feces in your meat.

    Schlosser's investigation reaches its frightening peak in the meatpacking plants as he reveals the almost complete lack of federal oversight of a seemingly lawless industry. His searing portrayal of the industry is disturbingly similar to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, written in 1906: nightmare working conditions, union busting, and unsanitary practices that introduce E. coli and other pathogens into restaurants, public schools, and homes. Almost as disturbing is his description of how the industry "both feeds and feeds off the young," insinuating itself into all aspects of children's lives, even the pages of their school books, while leaving them prone to obesity and disease. Fortunately, Schlosser offers some eminently practical remedies. "Eating in the United States should no longer be a form of high-risk behavior," he writes. Where to begin? Ask yourself, is the true cost of having it "your way" really worth it? --Lesley Reed [via]

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  • Feed
    by M. T. Anderson
    ISBN 0763622591 (0-7636-2259-1)
    Softcover, Candlewick Pr

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    Book summary:

    This brilliantly ironic satire is set in a future world where television and computers are connected directly into people's brains when they are babies. The result is a chillingly recognizable consumer society where empty-headed kids are driven by fashion and shopping and the avid pursuit of silly entertainment--even on trips to Mars and the moon--and by constant customized murmurs in their brains of encouragement to buy, buy, buy.

    Anderson gives us this world through the voice of a boy who, like everyone around him, is almost completely inarticulate, whose vocabulary, in a dead-on parody of the worst teenspeak, depends heavily on three words: "like," "thing," and the second most common English obscenity. He's even made this vapid kid a bit sympathetic, as a product of his society who dimly knows something is missing in his head. The details are bitterly funny--the idiotic but wildly popular sitcom called "Oh? Wow! Thing!", the girls who have to retire to the ladies room a couple of times an evening because hairstyles have changed, the hideous lesions on everyone that are not only accepted, but turned into a fashion statement. And the ultimate awfulness is that when we finally meet the boy's parents, they are just as inarticulate and empty-headed as he is, and their solution to their son's problem is to buy him an expensive car.

    Although there is a danger that at first teens may see the idea of brain-computers as cool, ultimately they will recognize this as a fascinating novel that says something important about their world. (Ages 14 and older) --Patty Campbell [via]

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  • Fight Club
    by Chuck Palahniuk
    ISBN 0393327345 (0-393-32734-5)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    The only person who gets called Ballardesque more often than Chuck Palahniuk is, well... J.G. Ballard. So, does Portland, Oregon's "torchbearer for the nihilistic generation" deserve that kind of treatment? Yes and no. There is a resemblance between Fight Club and works such as Crash and Cocaine Nights in that both see the innocuous mundanities of everyday life as nothing more than the severely loosened cap on a seething underworld cauldron of unchecked impulse and social atrocity. Welcome to the present-day U.S. of A. As Ballard's characters get their jollies from staging automobile accidents, Palahniuk's yuppies unwind from a day at the office by organizing bloodsport rings and selling soap to fund anarchist overthrows. Let's just say that neither of these guys are going to be called in to do a Full House script rewrite any time soon.

    But while the ingredients are the same, Ballard and Palahniuk bake at completely different temperatures. Unlike his British counterpart, who tends to cast his American protagonists in a chilly light, holding them close enough to dissect but far enough away to eliminate any possibility of kinship, Palahniuk isn't happy unless he's first-person front and center, completely entangled in the whole sordid mess. An intensely psychological novel that never runs the risk of becoming clinical, Fight Club is about both the dangers of loyalty and the dreaded weight of leadership, the desire to band together and the compulsion to head for the hills. In short, it's about the pride and horror of being an American, rendered in lethally swift prose. Fight Club's protagonist might occasionally become foggy about who he truly is (you'll see what I mean), but one thing is for certain: you're not likely to forget the book's author. Never mind Ballardesque. Palahniukian here we come! --Bob Michaels [via]

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  • Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage
    by Heather Rogers
    ISBN 1595581200 (1-59558-120-0)
    Softcover, New Pr

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    Book summary:

    From waste basket to landfill, a vertiginous descent into the mysteriously hellish world of trash.

    " The average American discards almost seven pounds of trash per day.
    " With only 5 percent of the global population, the U.S. consumes 30 percent of the planet's resources and churns out 30 percent of its wastes.
    " Garbage production in the United States has doubled in the last thirty years.
    " About 80 percent of U.S. products are used once, then thrown away.
    " 95 percent of all plastic, two-thirds of all glass containers, and 50 percent of all aluminum beverage cans are never recycled; instead they just get burned or buried.

    Every day a phantasmagoric rush of spent, used, and broken riches flows through our homes, offices, and cars. The United States is the planet's number-one producer of trash; each American discards over 2,600 pounds annually. But where does all that garbage go?

    In Gone Tomorrow, journalist Heather Rogers guides us through the grisly, oddly fascinating world of trash. Excavating the history of rubbish handling from the 1800san era of garbage-grazing urban hogs and dump-dwelling rag pickersto the present, with its brutally violent mob-controlled cartels and high-tech rural "mega-fills" operated by billion-dollar garbage corporations, Rogers investigates the roots of America's waste-addicted culture. Gone Tomorrow also explores the politics of recycling, a popular but limited solution that, as Rogers points out, should only be seen as a first step toward much greater reform.

    Part exposé, part social commentary, this work traces the connections between modern industrial production, consumer culture, and our disposable lifestyle. [via]

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  • The Good Life: Genuine Christianity for the Middle Class
    by David McCarthy
    ISBN 1587430681 (1-58743-068-1)
    Softcover, Baker Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    The Good Life: Genuine Christianity for the Middle Class My rating: didn't like it it was ok liked it really liked it it was amazing add to my books The Good Life: Genuine Christianity for the Middle Class by David Matzko McCarthy 2.88 of 5 stars 2.88 · rating details · 8 ratings · 2 reviews Intimate friendships, loving families, good food, and beautiful homes--middle-class Westerners enjoy so many gifts. Christians often feel guilty about their enjoyment of these gifts, but David McCarthy suggests that God provides these things for our enjoyment. In contrast to consumerism, which encourages shallow relationships, McCarthy explains how the love of God fosters a deep attachment to the world. He describes this in relation to marriage, family, friendship, hospitality, and work. A right ordering of our desires will lead Christians to an enjoyment of life that require less "stuff." This book will be appreciated by all Christians trying to live well in an affluent culture. [via]

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  • The Gospel According to Larry
    by Janet Tashjian
    ISBN 0440237920 (0-440-23792-0)
    Softcover, Laurel Leaf

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    Josh Swensen is not your average 17-year-old. At the age of two, he was figuring out algebraic equations with colored magnetic numbers. He is a prodigy who only wants to make the world a better place. Joshs wish comes true when his virtual alter ego, Larry, becomes a huge media sensation. Larry has his own Web site where he posts sermons on anti-consumerism and has a large following of adults and teens. Meanwhile, Larrys identity is a mystery to everyone. While it seems as if the whole world is trying to figure out Larrys true identity, Josh feels trapped inside his own creation. What will happen to the world, and to Larry, if he is exposed? [via]

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  • The Hidden Persuaders
    by Vance Packard, Mark Crispin Miller
    ISBN 097884310X (0-9788431-0-X)
    Softcover, Ig Pub

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    "One of the best books around for demystifying the deliberately mysterious arts of advertising."--Salon

    "Fascinating, entertaining and thought-stimulating."--The New York Times Book Review

    "A brisk, authoritative and frightening report on how manufacturers, fundraisers and politicians are attempting to turn the American mind into a kind of catatonic dough that will buy, give or vote at their command--The New Yorker

    Originally published in 1957 and now back in print to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, The Hidden Persuaders is Vance Packards pioneering and prescient work revealing how advertisers use psychological methods to tap into our unconscious desires in order to "persuade" us to buy the products they are selling.

    A classic examination of how our thoughts and feelings are manipulated by business, media and politicians, The Hidden Persuaders was the first book to expose the hidden world of motivation research, the psychological technique that advertisers use to probe our minds in order to control our actions as consumers. Through analysis of products, political campaigns and television programs of the 1950s, Packard shows how the insidious manipulation practices that have come to dominate todays corporate-driven world began. Featuring an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller, The Hidden Persuaders has sold over one million copies, and forever changed the way we look at the world of advertising.

    Vance Packard (1914-1996) was an American journalist, social critic, and best-selling author. Among his other books were The Status Seekers, which described American social stratification and behavior, The Waste Makers, which criticizes planned obsolescence, and The Naked Society, about the threats to privacy posed by new technologies.

    [via]

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  • Kaza, Stephanie: Hooked!: Buddhist Writings On Greed, Desire, And The Urge To Consume
    Hooked!: Buddhist Writings On Greed, Desire, And The Urge To Consume
    by Stephanie Kaza, Paul Hawken
    ISBN 1590301722 (1-59030-172-2)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • I Want That: How We All Became Shoppers
    by Thomas Hine
    ISBN 0060959835 (0-06-095983-5)
    Softcover, Perennial

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    Book summary:

    Shopping has a lot in common with sex.
    Just about everybody does it.
    Some people brag about how well they do it.
    Some keep it a secret.
    And both provide ample opportunities
    to make foolish choices.

    Choosing and using objects is a primal human activity, and I Want That! is nothing less than a portrait of humanity as the species that shops. It explores the history of acquisition -- finding, choosing, spending -- from our amber-coveting Neolithic forebears to Renaissance nobles who outfitted themselves for power to twenty-first-century bargain hunters looking for a good buy on eBay. I Want That! explores the minds of shoppers in the quest to nourish and feed fantasies, to define individuality, to provide for family, and to satisfy the needs for celebration, power, and choice -- all of which lead us to malls, boutiques, websites, and superstores.

    [via]

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  • In Persuasion Nation
    by George Saunders
    ISBN 159448242X (1-59448-242-X)
    Softcover, Riverhead Books

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    George Saunders has earned enthusiastic acclaim and a devoted cult-following with his first two story collections and the recent novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. With his new book, In Persuasion Nation, Saunders ups the ante in every way, and is poised to break out to a wide new audience.

    The stories In Persuasion Nation are easily his best work yet. "The Red Bow,"about a town consumed by pet-killing hysteria, won a 2004 National Magazine Award and "Bohemians," the story of two supposed Eastern European widows trying to fit in in suburban USA, is included in The Best American Short Stories 2005. His new book includes both unpublished work, and stories that first appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Esquire. The stories in this volume work together as a whole whose impact far exceeds the simple sum of its parts. Fans of Saunders know and love him for his sharp and hilarious satirical eye. But In Persuasion Nation also includes more personal and poignant pieces that reveal a new kind of emotional conviction in Saunders's writing.

    Saunders's work in the last six years has come to be recognized as one of the strongest-and most consoling-cries in the wilderness of the millennium's political and cultural malaise. In Persuasion Nation's sophistication and populism should establish Saunders once and for all as this generation's literary voice of wisdom and humor in a time when we need it most. [via]

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  • Jennifer Government
    by Max Barry
    ISBN 1400030927 (1-4000-3092-7)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    In the horrifying, satirical near future of Max Barry's Jennifer Government, American corporations literally rule the world. Everyone takes his employer's name as his last name; once-autonomous nations as far-flung as Australia belong to the USA; and the National Rifle Association is not just a worldwide corporation, it's a hot, publicly traded stock. Hack Nike, a hapless employee seeking advancement, signs a multipage contract and then reads it. He discovers he's agreed to assassinate kids purchasing Nike's new line of athletic shoes, a stealth marketing maneuver designed to increase sales. And the dreaded government agent Jennifer Government is after him.

    Like Steve Aylett, Alexander Besher, Douglas Coupland, Paul Di Filippo, Jim Munroe, Jeff Noon, and Chuck Palahniuk, Max Barry is an author of smartass, punky satire for the late capitalist era. It's a hip and happening field; before publication, Jennifer Government (Barry's second novel) was optioned by Stephen Soderbergh and George Clooney's Section 8 Films for a major motion picture. However, the level of literary accomplishment varies wildly among practitioners, from brilliant (Di Filippo and Palahniuk) to amateurish (Besher). This field is so hot, its writers needn't be nearly as accomplished as they'd have to become to break into any other form of fiction.

    That said, like many of his fellow turn-of-the-millennium satirists, Barry is uneven. He has a lively imagination and a sharp eye for the absurdities and offenses of hypercorporate capitalism. But, with its sketchy characters and slow dialogue, Jennifer Government will disappoint anyone who believes the cover copy's grandiose claim that this is "a Catch-22 for the New World Order." --Cynthia Ward [via]

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  • Heath, Joseph: Nation Of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture
    Nation Of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture
    by Joseph Heath, Andrew Potter
    ISBN 006074586X (0-06-074586-X)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • No Logo: El Poder De Las Marcas
    by Naomi Klein
    ISBN 8449312485 (84-493-1248-5)
    Softcover, Paidos Iberica Ediciones S A

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  • No Logo: No Space No Choice No Jobs
    by Naomi Klein
    ISBN 0312421435 (0-312-42143-5)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    Book summary:

    With a new Afterword to the 2002 edition,  No Logo employs journalistic savvy and personal testament to detail the insidious practices and far-reaching effects of corporate marketing-and the powerful potential of a growing activist sect that will surely alter the course of the 21st century. First published before the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, this is an infuriating, inspiring, and altogether pioneering work of cultural criticism that investigates money, marketing, and the anti-corporate movement. As global corporations compete for the hearts and wallets of consumers who not only buy their products but willingly advertise them from head to toe-witness today's schoolbooks, superstores, sporting arenas, and brand-name synergy-a new generation has begun to battle consumerism with its own best weapons. In this provocative, well-written study, a front-line report on that battle, we learn how the Nike swoosh has changed from an athletic status-symbol to a metaphor for sweatshop labor, how teenaged McDonald's workers are risking their jobs to join the Teamsters, and how "culture jammers" utilize spray paint, computer-hacking acumen, and anti-propagandist wordplay to undercut the slogans and meanings of billboard ads (as in "Joe Chemo" for "Joe Camel"). No Logo will challenge and enlighten students of sociology, economics, popular culture, international affairs, and marketing. "This book is not another account of the power of the select group of corporate Goliaths that have gathered to form our de facto global government. Rather, it is an attempt to analyze and document the forces opposing corporate rule, and to lay out the particular set of cultural and economic conditions that made the emergence of that opposition inevitable."-Naomi Klein, from her Introduction [via]

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  • No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
    by Naomi Klein
    ISBN 0312271921 (0-312-27192-1)
    Softcover, Picador

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    We live in an era where image is nearly everything, where the proliferation of brand-name culture has created, to take one hyperbolic example from Naomi Klein's No Logo, "walking, talking, life-sized Tommy [Hilfiger] dolls, mummified in fully branded Tommy worlds." Brand identities are even flourishing online, she notes--and for some retailers, perhaps best of all online: "Liberated from the real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing, these brands are free to soar, less as the disseminators of goods or services than as collective hallucinations."

    In No Logo, Klein patiently demonstrates, step by step, how brands have become ubiquitous, not just in media and on the street but increasingly in the schools as well. (The controversy over advertiser-sponsored Channel One may be old hat, but many readers will be surprised to learn about ads in school lavatories and exclusive concessions in school cafeterias.) The global companies claim to support diversity, but their version of "corporate multiculturalism" is merely intended to create more buying options for consumers. When Klein talks about how easy it is for retailers like Wal-Mart and Blockbuster to "censor" the contents of videotapes and albums, she also considers the role corporate conglomeration plays in the process. How much would one expect Paramount Pictures, for example, to protest against Blockbuster's policies, given that they're both divisions of Viacom?

    Klein also looks at the workers who keep these companies running, most of whom never share in any of the great rewards. The president of Borders, when asked whether the bookstore chain could pay its clerks a "living wage," wrote that "while the concept is romantically appealing, it ignores the practicalities and realities of our business environment." Those clerks should probably just be grateful they're not stuck in an Asian sweatshop, making pennies an hour to produce Nike sneakers or other must-have fashion items. Klein also discusses at some length the tactic of hiring "permatemps" who can do most of the work and receive few, if any, benefits like health care, paid vacations, or stock options. While many workers are glad to be part of the "Free Agent Nation," observers note that, particularly in the high-tech industry, such policies make it increasingly difficult to organize workers and advocate for change.

    But resistance is growing, and the backlash against the brands has set in. Street-level education programs have taught kids in the inner cities, for example, not only about Nike's abusive labor practices but about the astronomical markup in their prices. Boycotts have commenced: as one urban teen put it, "Nike, we made you. We can break you." But there's more to the revolution, as Klein optimistically recounts: "Ethical shareholders, culture jammers, street reclaimers, McUnion organizers, human-rights hacktivists, school-logo fighters and Internet corporate watchdogs are at the early stages of demanding a citizen-centered alternative to the international rule of the brands ... as global, and as capable of coordinated action, as the multinational corporations it seeks to subvert." No Logo is a comprehensive account of what the global economy has wrought and the actions taking place to thwart it. --Ron Hogan [via]

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  • Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping
    by Judith Levine
    ISBN 0743269365 (0-7432-6936-5)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Many of us have tried to call a halt to our spending at one time or another. But what if we decided not to buy anything for a whole year? Obviously, we would need necessities like food and soap, but how would be manage without new clothes, treats, entertainment? Funny, smart and self-deprecating, Not Buying It is a close look at our society's obsession with shopping and the cold turkey confession of a woman we can all identify with - someone who can't live without French roast coffee and expensive wool socks, but who has had enough of spending money for the sake of it. Without consumer goods and experiences, Levine and her partner Paul pursue their careers, nurture family relationships and try to keep their sanity and humour intact. Tracking their progress and lapses, she contemplates the meanings of need and desire, scarcity and security, consumerism and citizenship. She asks the big questions - can the economy survive without shopping? Are Q-tips a necessity? A thought-provoking account of the pleasures and perils of the purchase-driven life, Not Buying It will get readers talking about their reliance on the act of buying and the possibility of getting off the merry-go-round. [via]

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  • The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer
    by Juliet Schor
    ISBN 0465060560 (0-465-06056-0)
    Hardcover, Perseus Books Group

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    Book summary:

    If getting and spending define our lives, then Juliet Schor now has us covered. Six years ago, her book The Overworked American scrutinized the getting part. It focused public attention on the disappearance of leisure and the harmful effects thereof on families and society. It sparked a debate over whether Americans really work as much as we proudly claim. (If so, how to explain the audience for Monday Night Football?) Nevertheless, Schor can take credit for helping push Congress into passing the Family Leave Act in 1993.

    Now she is back with a critique of our spending. Schor notes that, despite rising wealth and incomes, Americans do not feel any better off. In fact, we tell pollsters we do not have enough money to buy everything we need. And we are almost as likely to say so if we make $85,000 a year as we are if we make $35,000. Schor believes that "keeping up with the Joneses" is no longer enough for today's media-savvy office workers. We set our sights on the lifestyles of those higher up the organizational chart. We seek to emulate characters on TV. For teenagers, "enough" is the idle splendor that hardly exists outside of what MTV un-ironically calls The Real World. Schor offers an original and provocative analysis of why many Americans feel driven and unhappy despite our success. As an alternative, she profiles several "downshifters" who've taken up voluntary simplicity in search of a more satisfying way of life. No policy solutions suggest themselves this time, only a change of heart. --Barry Mitzman [via]

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  • The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need
    by Juliet Schor
    ISBN 0060977582 (0-06-097758-2)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    If getting and spending define our lives, then Juliet Schor now has us covered. Six years ago, her book The Overworked American scrutinized the getting part. It focused public attention on the disappearance of leisure and the harmful effects thereof on families and society. It sparked a debate over whether Americans really work as much as we proudly claim. (If so, how to explain the audience for Monday Night Football?) Nevertheless, Schor can take credit for helping push Congress into passing the Family Leave Act in 1993.

    Now she is back with a critique of our spending. Schor notes that, despite rising wealth and incomes, Americans do not feel any better off. In fact, we tell pollsters we do not have enough money to buy everything we need. And we are almost as likely to say so if we make $85,000 a year as we are if we make $35,000. Schor believes that "keeping up with the Joneses" is no longer enough for today's media-savvy office workers. We set our sights on the lifestyles of those higher up the organizational chart. We seek to emulate characters on TV. For teenagers, "enough" is the idle splendor that hardly exists outside of what MTV un-ironically calls The Real World. Schor offers an original and provocative analysis of why many Americans feel driven and unhappy despite our success. As an alternative, she profiles several "downshifters" who've taken up voluntary simplicity in search of a more satisfying way of life. No policy solutions suggest themselves this time, only a change of heart. --Barry Mitzman [via]

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  • The Paradox Of Choice: Why More Is Less
    by Barry Schwartz
    ISBN 0060005696 (0-06-000569-6)
    Softcover, Perennial

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    Book summary:

    In the spirit of Alvin Tofflers Future Shock, a social critique of our obsession with choice, and how it contributes to anxiety, dissatisfaction and regret. This paperback includes a new P.S. section with author interviews, insights, features, suggested readings, and more.

    Whether were buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401(k), everyday decisions--both big and small--have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented.

    We assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction. But beware of excessive choice: choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In the long run, this can lead to decision-making paralysis, anxiety, and perpetual stress. And, in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression.

    In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains at what point choice--the hallmark of individual freedom and self-determination that we so cherish--becomes detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, Schwartz shows how the dramatic explosion in choice--from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs--has paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution. Schwartz also shows how our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse.

    By synthesizing current research in the social sciences, Schwartz makes the counterintuitive case that eliminating choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety, and busyness of our lives. He offers eleven practical steps on how to limit choices to a manageable number, have the discipline to focus on the important ones and ignore the rest, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices you have to make.

    [via]

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  • Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market
    by Susan Strasser
    ISBN 1588341461 (1-58834-146-1)
    Softcover, Smithsonian Inst Pr

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    Book summary:

    This sweeping history provides the reader with a better understanding of Americas consumer society, obsession with shopping, and devotion to brands. Focusing on the advertising campaigns of Coca-Cola, Kelloggs, Wrigleys, Gillette, and Kodak, Strasser shows how companies created both national brands and national markets. These new brands eventually displaced generic manufacturers and created a new desire for brand-name goods. The book also details the rise and development of department stores such as Macys, grocery store chains such as A&P and Piggly Wiggly, and mail-order companies like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. [via]

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  • Status Anxiety: Library Edition
    by Alain De Botton
    ISBN 0375725350 (0-375-72535-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The firstthe story of our quest for sexual loveis well known and well charted. . . . The secondthe story of our quest for love from the worldis a more secret and shameful tale. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first.

    This is a book about an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us, about whether were judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. This is a book about status anxiety.

    Alain de Botton, best-selling author of The Consolations of Philosophy and The Art of Travel, askswith lucidity and charmwhere our worries about status come from and what, if anything, we can do to surmount them. With the help of philosophers, artists and writers, he examines the origins of status anxiety (ranging from the consequences of the French Revolution to our secret dismay at the success of our friends) before revealing ingenious ways in which people have been able to overcome their worries in the search for happiness. We learn about sandal-less philosophers and topless bohemians, about the benefits of putting skulls on our sideboards, and about looking at ancient ruins.

    The result is a book that isnt just highly entertaining and thought-provoking, but that is genuinely wise and helpful, too. [via]

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  • Ryan, John C.: Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things
    Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things
    by John C. Ryan, Alan Thein Durning
    ISBN 1886093040 (1-886093-04-0)
    Softcover, Sightline Inst

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  • Syrup
    by Maxx Barry
    ISBN 0140291873 (0-14-029187-3)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    An over-the-top debut about a young wannabe buzzmaker who will do almost anything to get ahead and get a date, for fans who laughed out loud at Nick Hornby and Helen Fielding.

    He's young, he's in LA, and he's trying to carve a path in the most powerful, corrupt, and insane industry in the world: marketing. So when Scat (you don't get far in this business as plain old Michael) is hit with a million-dollar idea for a new soda, he teams up with 6, a woman whose cold-blooded political skill is the perfect counterbalance for his naivete. While she knows all the angles, her own angles leave Scat sleepless. Together, can they hold on to the idea when the stakes are seven figures? Or will success remain one knife in the back away?

    Outrageously funny, smart, and hip, Syrup is a one-gulp adventure through the sticky worlds of corporate and sexual politics. In the book everyone will want to read this summer, Maxx (ne Max) Barry delivers a pitch-perfect sendup of our obsession with having it all. Self-absorbed and hilarious, Syrup is a Bright Lights, Big City for the late 90s. [via]

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  • The Theory of the Leisure Class
    by Thorstein Veblen
    ISBN 1420925903 (1-4209-2590-3)
    Softcover, Digireads.Com

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    Book summary:

    In Veblen's first and best-known work, he challenges some of society's most cherished standards of behavior and with devastating wit and satire exposes the hollowness of many of our canons of taste, education, dress, and culture. Veblen uses the leisure class as his example because it is this class that sets the standards followed by every level of society. [via]

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  • The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions
    by Thorstein Veblen
    ISBN 1573922196 (1-57392-219-6)
    Softcover, Prometheus Books

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    Book summary:

    Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), the controversial American economist and social critic, argues that economics is essentially a study of the economic aspects of human culture, which are in a constant state of flux. In his best-known work, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Veblen appropriated Darwin's theory of evolution to analyze the modern industrial system.

    While industry itself demanded diligence, efficiency, and cooperation, businessmen in opposition to engineers and industrialists were only interested in making money and displaying their wealth in what Veblen coined "conspicuous consumption." Veblen's keen analysis of the psychological bases of American social and economic institutions laid the foundation for the school of institutional economics. [via]

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  • Trading Up: The New American Luxury
    by Michael Silverstein, John Butman, Neil Fiske
    ISBN 1591840139 (1-59184-013-9)
    Hardcover, Penguin USA

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    Book summary:

    A fascinating look at why millions of consumers are "trading up" to premium goods, and how companies can profit from this phenomenon.

    Middle-market consumers have more discretionary income than ever before and are willing to pay extra for "new luxury" goods and services-items that deliver higher quality, technical advantages, and superior performance to conventional products. Above all, consumers are looking for emotional engagement-they look to products to help them manage the stresses of everyday life, and to help them realize their aspirations. A new luxury good may be as simple as a shampoo ($9 from Aveda, versus $3 from Suave) that brings moments of comfort and sensual pleasure, or as complex as a car ($26,000 for a bottom-of-the-line Mercedes, versus $20,000 for a Pontiac) that delivers feelings of safety and excitement.

    Clothing, cars, beer, coffee, kitchen appliances, lingerie, personal care, pet food, restaurants-in dozens of categories, new luxury goods occupy a sweet spot in the market, because they can sell in much higher unit volumes than "old luxury" goods, but command much higher profit margins than ordinary products. But new luxury leaders-such as Callaway Golf, Victoria's Secret, Panera Bread, Belvedere vodka, Whirlpool Duet, and Williams-Sonoma-create andmarket their goods very differently than do conventional companies. Trading Up explores what's driving this move to premium goods, tells the inside stories of many New Luxury companies and their leaders, and offers insights and methods that can help the reader take advantage of this remarkable phenomenon. The book is based on the authors' experience in helping clients create billions of dollars worth of New Luxury products as well as on exhaustive supporting research. [via]

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  • Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods... And How Companies Create Them
    by Michael Silverstein, John Butman, Neil Fiske
    ISBN 1591840805 (1-59184-080-5)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    First published to media acclaim in October 2003, Trading Up revealed how todays middle-class consumers are seeking higher levels of quality, taste, and aspiration than had ever been possible beforein their choices of cars and clothing, vodka and beer, golf clubs and dolls, and much more. The book identified a major opportunity for entrepreneurs and innovators, managers and marketers, in every category of consumer goods and services. Now Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske have thoroughly revised this BusinessWeek bestseller with new research and new insights into the still- growing phenomenon of trading up. [via]

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  • Underworld
    by Don Delillo
    ISBN 0684842696 (0-684-84269-6)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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    While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the cold war and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.

    "It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.

    Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled. [via]

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  • Unfettered Hope: A Call to Faithful Living in an Affluent Society
    by Marva J. Dawn
    ISBN 0664225950 (0-664-22595-0)
    Softcover, Presbyterian Pub Corp

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    Book summary:

    In this prophetic call to faithful Christian living, Marva Dawn identifies the epidemic socio-cultural attitudes that destroy hope in our modern lives. Because affluent persons don't know what to value--how to choose what's important and weed out the rest--we remain dissatisfied with what we have and are compelled to want more. Dawn demonstrates, however, how Christians can organize their lives to live in ways that allow them to love God and neighbor and, in the process, alleviate the despair in their lives and in the lives of others in the world.

    [via]

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  • Strasser, Susan: Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
    Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
    by Susan Strasser
    ISBN 0805065121 (0-8050-6512-1)
    Softcover, Henry Holt & Co

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    Book summary:

    An unprecedented look at that most commonplace act of everyday life-throwing things out-and how it has transformed American society.

    Susan Strasser's pathbreaking histories of housework and the rise of the mass market have become classics in the literature of consumer culture. Here she turns to an essential but neglected part of that culture-the trash it produces-and finds in it an unexpected wealth of meaning. Before the twentieth century, streets and bodies stank, but trash was nearly nonexistent. With goods and money scarce, almost everything was reused. Strasser paints a vivid picture of an America where scavenger pigs roamed the streets, swill children collected kitchen garbage, and itinerant peddlers traded manufactured goods for rags and bones. Over the last hundred years, however, Americans have become hooked on convenience, disposability, fashion, and constant technological change-the rise of mass consumption has led to waste on a previously unimaginable scale.

    Lively and colorful, Waste and Want recaptures a hidden part of our social history, vividly illustrating that what counts as trash depends on who's counting, and that what we throw away defines us as much as what we keep. [via]

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  • Talen, Bill: What Should I Do If Reverend Billy Is In My Store?
    What Should I Do If Reverend Billy Is In My Store?
    by Bill Talen
    ISBN 1565849795 (1-56584-979-5)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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  • White Noise
    by Don Delillo
    ISBN 0140077022 (0-14-007702-2)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Winner of the National Book Award in 1985, White Noise is the story of Jack and Babette and their children from their six or so various marriages. They live in a college town where Jack is Professor of Hitler Studies (and conceals the fact that he does not speak a word of German), and Babette teaches posture and volunteers by reading from the tabloids to a group of elderly shut-ins. They are happy enough until a deadly toxic accident and Babette's addiction to an experimental drug make Jake question everything. White Noise is considered a postmodern classic and its unfolding of themes of consumerism, family and divorce, and technology as a deadly threat have attracted the attention of literary scholars since its publication. This Viking Critical Library edition, prepared by scholar Mark Osteen, is the only edition of White Noise that contains the entire text along with an extensive critical apparatus, including a critical introduction, selected essays on the author, the work and its themes, reviews, a chronology of DeLillo's life and work, a list of discussion topics, and a selected bibliography.
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  • Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping
    by Paco Underhill
    ISBN 158799044X (1-58799-044-X)
    Softcover, Texere

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    In an effort to determine why people buy, Paco Underhill and his detailed-oriented band of retail researchers have camped out in stores over the course of 20 years, dedicating their lives to the "science of shopping." Armed with an array of video equipment, store maps, and customer-profile sheets, Underhill and his consulting firm, Envirosell, have observed over 900 aspects of interaction between shopper and store. They've discovered that men who take jeans into fitting rooms are more likely to buy than females (65 percent vs. 25 percent). They've learned how the "butt-brush factor" (bumped from behind, shoppers become irritated and move elsewhere) makes women avoid narrow aisles. They've quantified the importance of shopping baskets; contact between employees and shoppers; the "transition zone" (the area just inside the store's entrance); and "circulation patterns" (how shoppers move throughout a store). And they've explored the relationship between a customer's amenability and profitability, learning how good stores capitalize on a shopper's unspoken inclinations and desires.

    Underhill, whose clients include McDonald's, Starbucks, Estée Lauder, and Blockbuster, stocks Why We Buy with a wealth of retail insights, showing how men are beginning to shop like women, and how women have changed the way supermarkets are laid out. He also looks to the future, projecting massive retail opportunities with an aging baby-boom population and predicting how online retailing will affect shopping malls. This lighthearted look at shopping is highly recommended to anyone who buys or sells. --Rob McDonald [via]

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Spanish

  • El Lorax
    by Aida E. Marcuse, Dr. Seuss
    ISBN 1880507048 (1-880507-04-8)
    Hardcover, Lectorum Pubns

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    When Dr. Seuss gets serious, you know it must be important. Published in 1971, and perhaps inspired by the "save our planet" mindset of the 1960s, The Lorax is an ecological warning that still rings true today amidst the dangers of clear-cutting, pollution, and disregard for the earth's environment. In The Lorax, we find what we've come to expect from the illustrious doctor: brilliantly whimsical rhymes, delightfully original creatures, and weirdly undulating illustrations. But here there is also something more--a powerful message that Seuss implores both adults and children to heed.

    The now remorseful Once-ler--our faceless, bodiless narrator--tells the story himself. Long ago this enterprising villain chances upon a place filled with wondrous Truffula Trees, Swomee-Swans, Brown Bar-ba- loots, and Humming-Fishes. Bewitched by the beauty of the Truffula Tree tufts, he greedily chops them down to produce and mass-market Thneeds. ("It's a shirt. It's a sock. It's a glove. It's a hat.") As the trees swiftly disappear and the denizens leave for greener pastures, the fuzzy yellow Lorax (who speaks for the trees "for the trees have no tongues") repeatedly warns the Once-ler, but his words of wisdom are for naught. Finally the Lorax extricates himself from the scorched earth (by the seat of his own furry pants), leaving only a rock engraved "UNLESS." Thus, with his own colorful version of a compelling morality play, Dr. Seuss teaches readers not to fool with Mother Nature. But as you might expect from Seuss, all hope is not lost--the Once-ler has saved a single Truffula Tree seed! Our fate now rests in the hands of a caring child, who becomes our last chance for a clean, green future. (Ages 4 to 8) [via]

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  • No Logo: El Poder de Las Marcas
    by Naomi Klein
    ISBN 8449310741 (84-493-1074-1)
    Hardcover, Ediciones Paidos Iberica, S.A.

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French

  • American Psycho-French
    by Bret Easton Ellis
    ISBN 2020253801 (2-02-025380-1)
    Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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    Book summary:

    Patrick Bateman est un jeune homme riche, beau et intelligent. Un golden boy de Wall Street à qui tout réussit. Il est par ailleurs parfaitement au fait des techniques de nettoyage et désincrustage de la peau les plus efficaces, il s'applique les meilleures crèmes pour le visage, ne porte que des vêtements de grands couturiers, utilise les derniers gadgets technologiques et passe ses soirées au Tunnel, la boîte branchée du moment. Bien sûr, tous ses amis sont comme lui.

    La seule différence, c'est qu'en plus Patrick Bateman viole, torture et tue. Mais il ne ressent jamais rien. Juste une légère contrariété lorsque ses scénarii ne se déroulent pas exactement comme prévu. À sa sortie en 1991, le roman d'Ellis suscita une vive émotion, aussi bien à cause de ses scènes d'horreur décrites quasi cliniquement que de son principal personnage, Bateman, symbole de la réussite économique, enfant prodige travesti en tueur sadique et immoral. Il faut dire qu'Ellis s'attaque de front à tous les excès de superficialité de l'Occident contemporain : sexe, culte du corps, de la richesse et de la jeunesse. Une entreprise de destruction commencée très tôt avec son premier roman Moins que zéro écrit alors qu'il avait 22 ans et que l'on retrouve dans Glamorama. Bret Easton Ellis ou l'art de mettre de l'acide sur les plaies béantes de la société. --Stellio Paris [via]

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