Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture Review

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(More customer reviews)This is essentially a book of social history, although it brings together the disciplines of economic history, gender studies, architecture, and popular culture. Hurley discusses how diners, bowling alleys, and trailer parks reflected the social values of the 1950s and 1960s. The chapters on the three building types go into excruciating detail; for example, every nuance of diner design and operation is discussed and scrutinized for meaning. The book would have been improved if the author had covered more building types in the same number of pages.
Hurley's overriding theme is laudable: On the outskirts of most towns, there is a region that constituted that community's "commercial strip" during the 1950s and 1960s, before America discovered fast food, shopping malls, and big-box stores. Most of us drive through these past-their-prime commercial strips every day, seeing nothing but obsolete buildings. Hurley points out that these obsolete commercial strips are the equivalent of archeological sites, speaking volumes about how family values have evolved during the past half-century.

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Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts Review

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(More customer reviews)Yet another roadie book but `Readymades' is a cut above the usual photographic selection of what can be seen along the nation's back roads. For a start the book is landscape, just the right shape for images that are basically horizontal. Secondly the photos are divided into sections rather than loosely hung together by state or date order. Thirdly the choice of material is refreshing, for example, tract housing, freight cars, trailers or storage units (no kidding).
This is Jeff Brouws second road book, his first, the excellent `Highway: America's Endless Dream', was more the traditional photographic road book, a mixture of everything plus a selection of interesting black and white images from the thirties and forties. I like the formal arrangement of `Readymades'. By having each of the eleven chapters devoted to a particular theme he "presents the subject in the most factual terms possible" as Diana Gaston says in her intro. The chapters are tract housing, signs, abandoned drive-ins, farms, pickups, abandoned gas stations, boxcars, signs two, trailers, bowling and finally storage units.
Partially painted pickup trucks are just that, twenty-five of them are all taken side on and nicely framed within the image area. Twenty-six abandoned gas stations (in black and white) are one to a page and just the sort of thing Robert Frank would have stopped his car for back in the fifties. Freight cars, again one to a page and neatly framed, are an amazing colored selection of various shades of rust and railroad livery. Perhaps the most unusual chapter is storage units, hardly the sort of thing to capture the creative eye but here they are, eighteen shots including a stunning one taken in West Virginia in 2001 showing three power station cooling towers in the distance, the storage units in the middle and a parking lot in the foreground. The photos of these units remind me of Lewis Baltz and his photos of the industrial parks in Irvine, CA, simple oblongs just placed in the landscape.
`Readymades' is a refreshing look and presentation of the vernacular everyday and I think it might well turn out to be a classic photo book of the decade.
***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

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Rock Music in American Popular Culture: Rock 'N' Roll Resources (Haworth Popular Culture) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is super useful if you are looking for resources on the early-mid period "rock and roll" era of popular music. Although this books claims to have been published in 1995, the world portrayed is strictly pre-indie period- rock writing here is either archival work into the "great artists" of the rock canon or thematic essays (songs about food, songs about baseball) or different aspects of the rock marketplace (bootlegging.) The tone of the essays is 80s american studies style: Some technical jargon but nothing a college graduate can't understand. It's probably the perspective of this book: Locked forever in the great period of 80s AOR rock, that is both this books greatest strength and weakness, so be advised. But it's worth picking up for the early period bibliographical materials.
I think this is the kind of book that could open some interesting vistas for the perceptive reader.

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How does rock music impact culture? According to authors B. Lee Cooper and Wayne S. Haney, it is central to the definition of society and has had a great impact on shaping American culture. In Rock Music in American Popular Culture, insightful essays and book reviews explore ways popular culture items can be used to explore American values. This fascinating book is arranged alphabetically for quick and easy reference to specific topics, but the book is equally enjoyable to read straight through.The influence of rock era music is evident throughout the text, demonstrating how various topics in the popular culture field are interconnected. Students in popular culture survey courses and American studies classes will be fascinated by these unique explorations of how family businesses, games, nursery rhymes, rock and roll legends, and other musical ventures shed light on our society and how they have shaped American values over the years.

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