Overview

"Those who don't yet have an American standard of living usually want it, yet it would take three whole Earths to provide this for everyone alive today. This text brings together a group of writers to explore and resolve the paradox, including Jane Smiley (author of ""A Thousand Acres""), Bill McKibben (author of ""The End of Nature) and Juliet Schor (author of ""The Overspent American""). They investigate the roots of consumer culture and its meanings for us. The authors do not offer easy solutions for the future, rather, they seek to provide a deeper understanding of how far the issues reach into our societies and into our sense of ourselves."

Full Product Details

9781559635356

Table of Contents

Reviews

A learned assault on the present global addiction to things. PBS and Time magazine essayist Rosenblatt (Coming Apart: America and the Harvard Riots of 1969, A Memoir, 1997, etc.) assembles a stellar cast of contributors to argue against consumerism, the credo exemplified by the obnoxious bumper sticker He who dies with the most toys wins. Some of those contributors offer paeans to disappearing virtues, such as thrift and modesty; others tender modest and immodest proposals to reduce our desire for material goods, which Rosenblatt gently calls a strange basis for a civilization, but an effective one. In his introduction, Rosenblatt recognizes that he and his colleagues are swimming against the tide. After all, he notes, something like 90 percent of the American workforce is now engaged in making and selling consumer goods and services, from cheeseburgers to computers; and nearly everyone is behaving as if we had all suddenly come into Jay Gatsby's wealth, a point that Harvard-based social critic Juliet Schor underscores when she remarks, The new consumerism is . . . less socially benign than the old regime of keeping up with the Joneses, less benign because it is both more conspicuous and more closely bound with our notion of who we are, our things having come to serve as markers of social class and self-esteem alike. The essays included in this volume are of universally high quality, and there are some real standouts: William Greider examines our unwillingness to reduce waste and the forces at work against offering high-quality, durable, and affordable goods to all segments of society; Edward Luttwak ponders the new face of American indebtedness, which now, he says, has reached the unprecedented level of 89 percent of total household income ; Stephanie Mills considers the moral dimensions of excessive consumption in a time of extinction and biological crisis. Good stuff, this, offering fuel for an environmentalist's fire, and likely to give marketing specialists a headache. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available