Berry (Watch with Me, 1994, etc.), small-town Kentuckian and agrarian philosopher, massages his favorite themes of community and small-is-beautiful in six brief, clear-as-a-bell essays. ``I am an agrarian: I think that farming is a high and difficult art . . . I am a member, by choice, of a local community. I believe that healthy communities are indispensable.'' Both farm and community life are being steamrolled by the centralized, monoculturing, spiritless zeitgeist that has been shaping American life for the past century or two. This has Berry in a swivet. How, he wants to know, if we consider ourselves vaguely intelligent beings, can we crush a way of life (i.e., the modest farmstead) that understands its work as good and necessary and dignifying; that isn't greedy; that teaches its children ``local geography, ecology, history, natural history, and local songs and stories''; that counsels ``good care, attention to details, awareness of small opportunities, diversity, and thrift''? Vraiment. To moan and groan is to go nowhere``We must have something else competently in mind.'' And therein lies the beauty of Berry; he's got some great suggestions, from how to decentralize, to fashioning wieldy farming economies, to establishing sophisticated, scaled forest communities. And he writes with a deliberate artistry that Robert Frost would have found appealing. Industrial society is so putrid to Berry that he can raise a few hackles, as when he talks about those who know ``how to use the land in the best way'' as if there were no alternatives. But this man's on fire, his mission to preserve an appreciation for the earth, replete with ``local knowledge, memory, and tradition.'' Small towns, with their fringe of 40-acre spreads, couldn't ask for a more articulate defender.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-887178-03-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
Excessive ambition weighs down this important revisionist history of advertising in the United States. Lears (History/Rutgers; No Place of Grace, 1981) argues that modern advertising does not, as most think, promote hedonism but on the contrary serves class and state interest by controlling social energies. In fact, he says, scientific and nationalist myths promoted by advertisers alienate Americans from the potentially subversive pleasures of material objects. Lears casts previous critiques of advertising—in particular those in the sociological tradition of Thorstein Veblen—in a new light, claiming that their puritanical condemnations of consumption further this containment of pleasure. These sophisticated arguments will make a significant impact on cultural studies. The difficulties here arise from Lears's efforts to embed his reflections in a social history of American advertising and a meditation on its relationship to art. Tracing traditional New World themes of magical abundance through the 19th-century era of peddlers and medicine shows, he shows how Protestant values of personal authenticity and plain speech formed an uneasy dialectic with promises of transformation offered by commercial culture. But his narrative dissipates as it moves into a string of meandering mini-biographies of figures like P.T. Barnum, Theodore Dreiser, and Edward Steichen while eschewing the case studies of particular advertisements and their reception that might have lent more weight to his theoretical contentions. In the final chapters he interprets treatments of advertising by novelists from Frederick Exley back to Henry James, concluding with a paean to American artist and ad designer Joseph Cornell. Lears seems to claim that the artistic imagination, high or low, can transcend our culture's dualisms. But these artists, with their fabled neuroses, seem problematic sources for a new vision of everyday life. While Lears's inquiry bears abundant fruit, he has stunted some of his ideas by cramming three books' worth of intellectual goods into one package.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1994
ISBN: 0-465-09076-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
Harris still has plenty to learn, but he provides an informative study of why the millennial generation faces more struggles...
A millennial writer talks about the coming crises his generation will face.
Millennials—defined by the author as those born between 1980 and 2000—have been sold on the idea that if they work hard in school, forfeiting play and creative time for work and sports, and go on to a four-year college, where they continue to work hard, then a solid, well-paying job awaits them once they graduate. But as Harris (b. 1988), an editor at New Inquiry, points out, many in that age group have discovered there is no pot of gold at the end of that particular rainbow. In today’s competitive economy, he writes, “young households trail further behind in wealth than ever before, and while a small number of hotshot finance pros and app developers rake in big bucks…wages have stagnated and unemployment increased for the rest.” Those who manage to attend college are often burdened by high student-loan debts, forcing them to work any job they can to pay the bills. Athletes who attend college on a sports scholarship pay with the physical wear and tear on their bodies and the stress of high-stakes games alongside a full academic schedule. Harris also evaluates how millennials interact with social media (a topic that could warrant an entire book on its own), which creates a never-ending link to nearly everything every day, never giving anyone a chance to unwind. Professional musicians, actors, and other performing artists face strong competition in a world where anyone can upload a video to YouTube, so those with genuine talent have to work that much harder for recognition. After his intense analysis of this consumer-based downward spiral, the author provides several possible remedies that might ease the situation—but only if millennials step forward now and begin the process of change.
Harris still has plenty to learn, but he provides an informative study of why the millennial generation faces more struggles than expected, despite the hard work they’ve invested in moving ahead.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-51086-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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