There is actually a love story (largely unrequited) amid all this finagling, but it's capitalism that charms you breathless.
A romance from MIT Press? Yes, because it's devoted to radical economic ideas delivered as marvelously inventive fiction.
Business scholar and NPR commentator Roberts (The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protectionism, 1993, not reviewed) hangs his debut novel on a trick, which of course we can't give away, but think clever twists à la The Sixth Sense. The story: Sam Gordon teaches high-school economics at the high-toned Edwards School in Washington, D.C. Sam's pro-capitalist ideas about economics sound an outlandish drumbeat for $ucce$$ that would have Ayn Rand hauling him straight into the bedroom. Though at first blush his ideas sound immoral and unprincipled, they're grounded in profound good sense. As Sam explains to unmarried English teacher Laura Silver: "There is an invisible heart at the core of the marketplace, serving the customer and doing it joyously." A hundred years ago, he tells her, forty percent of the American population lived on farms; today only three percent do. What if, out of "compassion," we'd passed laws against the improved technology that drove the kids off the farms, just as we might fetter today's industries and keep them stateside? Our new technologies would not have arisen. Never regulate business! Sam insists. Among his stunned students is Amy Hunt, daughter of powerful Senator Hunt (member of the school's supervisory board), and her parroting of Sam's radical capitalism around her house may get him in deep trouble. Meanwhile, a subplot goes forward as giant pharmaceuticals firm HealthNet moves to Mexico, causing a huge loss of jobs in an American factory town. Can watchdog Erica Baldwin's Office of Corporate Responsibility bring HealthNet's fanged CEO, Charles Krauss, to heel?
There is actually a love story (largely unrequited) amid all this finagling, but it's capitalism that charms you breathless.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-262-18210-6
Page Count: 266
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
A fairly pedantic and at times self-serving walk through the signs of our times. The idea that signs are a reflection of a society’s soul is an intriguing one. Unfortunately, Starr, now president of her family’s sign company, ArtKraft Straus, and Hayman (Journalism/New York Univ.) don’t delve as deeply into this idea as they promise when they write in their opening sentence, “Our signs tell us who we are.” Still, the book is fairly useful in its historic tracing of America’s fixation with neon, something about which Starr knows quite a bit since Artkraft Strauss has literally lit much of Times Square for the last century. The authors trace the beginnings of the square’s status as the supersign center of the world. There’s a section on O.J. Gude, nicknamed the “Lamplighter of Broadway,” and information on the division between Thomas Edison and his championing of direct current versus the alternating current theories of Nikola Tesla. The authors chronicle as well neon’s metamorphosis from a symbol of richness in the 1920s to its later tackier connotation. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the description of the creation of larger moving signs such as the 60-foot-tall Miss Youth Forum, a sensuous babe who sashayed across a 100-foot-wide sign on top of the Brill Building beginning in 1947. The section on how the lighting community banded together to fight the proposed renovation of Times Square, a rehabilitation that they feared would make the Great White Way a lot less white, is interesting as well. From Times Square, Signs and Wonders moves westward to look at the development of signs in Las Vegas, a.k.a. Glitter Gulch, and Hollywood. More than the average person would ever care to know about signage, but a serviceable history for lighting and marketing buffs nonetheless. (48 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-48602-2
Page Count: 303
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
A lighthearted look at a fading American institution and the products found on its shelves. Staten (Ol’ Diz: A Biography of Dizzy Dean, 1992; Did Monkeys Invent the Monkey Wrench?, not reviewed; etc.), who fondly remembers the corner drugstore of his own youth, briefly recounts the history of this fixture of American small-town life as “pharmacy and apothecary, drugstore and general store, prescription center and community center, soda fountain and social hub.” However, the greater part of his attention is devoted not to the institution itself but to its merchandise. Starting with the head and working his way down to the feet, Staten profiles selected items from aspirin to corn removers. Hair products, especially hair restorers, seem to have a special fascination for the balding Staten, who inserts regular reports on his personal experience with Rogaine (yes, he grew some hair, but not nearly enough). Among the capsule histories included here are those of dandruff shampoos, toothpaste, Band-Aids, Vaseline, condoms, and diapers. The curious can discover how Maybelline and Ben-Gay got their names and the real people behind Lydia Pinkham’s Herbal Compound and Dr. Scholl’s Foot-Eazers. Inexplicably, Staten adds an appendix listing the addresses of the 71 remaining drugstores in the country bearing the name Corner Drug. Rather less than a social history and far from comprehensive, but full of entertaining if trivial facts presented with good humor.
Pub Date: June 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83485-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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