Engaging, even while some of the author’s ideas fail to coalesce.
An examination of the nature of decoration and adornment.
In an age when people are told aesthetics are a mere marketing tool, former Reason editor Postrel (The Future and Its Enemies, 1998) argues that style is part of our consciousness itself: “The issue is not what style is used but rather that style is used, consciously and conscientiously, even in areas where function used to stand alone.” But if, as she argues, aesthetics is more widespread than it used to be, transcending economic boundaries, why is this so? Examining the subject of clothing, Postrel notes that in the late 1920s, a typical woman would have owned nine dresses—outfits that would have to be worn through all seasons, for work and for leisure. She contrasts this with a conversation overheard in her local Target, where a mother informed her preteen daughter that she couldn’t have another top since she already owned at least 30. Rising incomes and falling production costs don’t explain the whole story, she posits. Social and cultural shifts of the late-20th century have also put more emphasis on aesthetics—but that raises a question. How can something that’s been deemed innate gain cultural importance? The question is never fully answered, but the author takes us on an entertaining romp through the aesthetics of cars (in the ’50s and ’60s, car buyers focused on looks, while the gasoline shortages of the 1970s gave fuel efficiency more importance) and toilet bowl brushes (it’s possible to buy a $400 crystal and gold brush). She covers the popularity of Starbucks, the cycle of children’s names (“Sarah” and “Jessica” have eclipsed “Susan” and “Kimberly”), the role of hair, and more. Postrel concludes that as new styles and technologies develop, at some point the primacy of aesthetics will fade, and a new “age” will come to pass.
Engaging, even while some of the author’s ideas fail to coalesce.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-018632-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, challenging work of ``bottom-up'' history that gives a voice to the unlettered and the disempowered. Blackbourn (History/Harvard) transforms an apparently minor historical curiosity, an instance at best of religious pathology, into a fascinating, surprising, and moving picture of cultural turmoil in the new German nation-state. The event in question is the alleged visitation of the Virgin Mary to three schoolchildren in the remote Rhineland village of Marpingen in 1876, and the response thereto. With sure control of his material and an archaeologist's reconstructive gift, Blackbourn deftly reveals the Marpingen events as a tangled but telling intersection of multiple cultural currents: religious strife, both interdenominational and between competing tendencies in the Catholic hierarchy itself; local communal rivalry; class tensions; grassroots populist activism; Bismarck's ongoing Kulturkampf (``cultural war'') against the Catholic Church; and the upheavals in work and family life provoked by the confrontation of a traditional rural culture with the very different rhythms of a 19th-century industrial state. Blackbourn brushes against the grain of readers' expectations: He encourages us to regard the widespread popular support of the visionaries not as superstitious medieval credulity but as a sophisticated mobilization of deep-rooted cultural resources by a community beset by social dislocation. Conversely, the ``progressive'' modernizing forces of state authority, whose response to the apparitions varied from patrician condescension to outright contempt or suspicion, stand revealed as at least as self- righteous and blinkered (by a faith in secular rationality often as unyielding as religious dogma) as the peasants they undertook to control. The Church itself is riven and ambivalent, its sponsorship of the cult of the Madonna at odds with the increasingly authoritarian bent of the 19th-century Vatican. This dense, authoritative book demands and deserves an attentive reading and offers rewards few recent historical narratives can match.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41843-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
A markedly contemporary study that navigates the New Testament scholar past the perils of Pauline theology. Boyarin (Talmudic Culture/Univ. of Calif., Berkeley; Carnal Israel, not reviewed) attempts to ``reclaim Paul as an important Jewish thinker.'' He goes on to establish this primary apostle as a Hellenized Jew whose Platonic sensibility calls for a universal sameness that negates the divisions separating Jew from Gentile and man from woman. The disembodied spirituality of Platonic dualism allows females (especially virgins) to be equal to men under Christ, and allows an uncircumcised Christian of any gender to ``circumcise the foreskin of her [sic] heart'' with Hebrew Bible commandments universalized and allegorized. Boyarin does not glibly valorize Paul as a champion of feminism and an opponent of Jewish exclusivist chauvinism. After crediting Paul for being a radical social critic, the author makes clear how the apostle's pre-Marxist universalism too easily slid into violent coercion in the later, blood-soaked chapters of Christian history. Boyarin analyzes the work of many Christian scholars in concluding that Lutheran misinterpretations of Paul allow us to consider the apostle to be far more antagonistic to Jews and Judaism than he really was. The benefit of Boyarin's Jewish defense against hermeneutical Christian anti-Semitism is tempered by his disdain for a Judaic ``tendency towards contemptuous neglect for human solidarity'' and his anti- Zionism (``modern Jewish statist nationalism has been...very violent and exclusionary''). Sometimes he confuses Christian ``salvation'' theology with Jewish belief, and he fails to find any similarity between Pauline Platonism and the allegorical and universal levels of Torah laws. The final chapter digresses to a personal view of the ``essentialist/social constructionist dichotomy,'' but the book does end with ample notes and bibliography. A rewarding read for students of Christian theology willing to be challenged by today's multicultural, poststructuralist, postfeminist scholarship.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08592-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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