Book Reviews

AConsumers Republic:
The Politics of Mass Consumption
in PostwarAmerica
Lizabeth Cohen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2003.
After September 11, 2001, President Bush
urged Americans to prove themselves as good
citizens. His request? Go shopping. In A Con-
sumers Republic: The Politics of Mass Consump-
tion in Postwar America, Harvard University
historian Lizabeth Cohen traces the relationship
between consumption and citizenship in the
postwar period. She argues that WWII was a
turning point debated by government, big busi-
ness, and consumer movements. The result was
the Consumers Republic, a strategy . . . for
reconstructing the nations economy and reafrm-
ing its democratic values through mass consump-
tion.
Cohen focuses on the tension between two
consumer/citizenship congurations. The citizen
consumer model emphasized publicly engaged
consumption and government protection for
consumers. In the purchaser consumer model,
individualized consumers expressed themselves
through buying, not politics. As Cohen shows,
consumption could advance the progressive
goals of social inclusion. As rationing became
critical during WWII, a woman gained inuence
through her imagined role as the consumer.
After the war, however, the purchaser consumer
model, which promised the eradication of class
distinction through mass consumption, won out.
Although postwar afuence meant prosperity for
many, without government intervention, the
Consumers Republic exacerbated inequalities,
especially for people of color and the working
class. For example, African Americans lack of
access to consumption catalyzed civil rights
activism around consumer sites such as lunch
counters.
Cohens best chapters examine suburbia after
WWII. Using New Jersey as a case study, she
shows how government policies and corporate
interests created prosperous white suburban
fringes surrounding decaying cities. With the
development of suburban shopping centers, the
need to go to cities vanished. The shopping center
was intended to satisfy suburbanites consump-
tion and community needs, which had similarly
been paired in the old town centers. Unlike town
centers, however, shopping centers were privately
owned and could deny access to undesirables:
protesters or the poor.
At the same time, Cohen notes that market
segmentation rose as social and cultural groups
such as African Americans, women, youth, and
senior citizens began to assert themselves in
a way that came to be called identity politics.
Segmentation had pernicious effects on politics.
Politicians since Eisenhower have been marketed
to interest groups, leading to the Consumerized
Republic where self-interested citizens increas-
ingly view government policies like other market
transactions, judging them by how well served
they feel personally, as opposed to how the
public good is served.
A Consumers Republic is an important book in
the growing eld of consumer history and would
223 Book Reviews
be useful for postwar American history courses.
Although it has been faulted for insufciently
acknowledging consumption pre-1930, Cohen
convincingly demonstrates why WWII repre-
sented an immense shift in American consumer
society. Her notion of the Consumers Republic
and the battles between apolitical purchaser
consumers and politicized citizen consumers
is an interesting one, though it is clear that Cohen
cannot conceptualize the current model of con-
sumption, which she denotes as consumer/
citizen/taxpayer/voter, a hodgepodge term.
Perhaps most problematic is Cohens handling
of gender and race. Although she is careful to
show how the Consumers Republic was stratied
by gender and race and how consumer move-
ments were lead by women and people of color,
the bulk of each chapter is devoted to the broad
subject of mass consumption, with separate
sections on gender and race following. This
method perpetuates the exclusion of women and
blacks from the national story. Furthermore,
Cohen discusses race only in terms of African
Americans. Clearly, other people of color were
grappling with the Consumers Republic in her
time period, and with the rise of market
segmentation, race and ethnicity became extre-
mely important. Cohen should have at least
explained her focus on African Americans.
In the end, Cohens contribution is bringing
politics into consumption and showing how the
Consumers Republic resulted from specic po-
licies with wide-ranging consequences. As she
writes, it is important to distinguish between
harmless and even self-afrming segmentation of
identities and interests and ones that rest of
stratication and inequality. When some groups
enjoy more resources and power . . . fragmenta-
tion serves not to validate difference but instead
to facilitate discrimination.
Mary Rizzo
University of Minnesota
All Shook Up: HowRock n Roll
Changed America
Glenn C. Altschuler. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003.
Weaving original research with secondary
literature, All Shook Up is a fascinating study of
the emergence of rock n roll in the 1950s and
early 1960s told not from the perspective of
individual artists but in a topical approach,
looking at issues of race, sexuality, generational
conict, and cultural issues. This is also a tale of
conict: black versus white, old versus young,
ASCAP versus BMI, and good versus bad
rockers.
Many adults rejected rock n roll because of its
implied or explicit sexual lyrics and the wild and
lewd gyrations on stage of such performers as
Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard.
However, this music became acceptable to others
because of three individuals. Pat Boone embraced
middle-class values, encouraged youth to obey
their parents, and presented rock n roll as
wholesome entertainment. Dick Clark of
American Bandstand, who initially did not care
for this musical style, also presented a wholesome
image of rock n roll with a strict dress code and
promised parents, many of whom became fans of
the show, to teach kids emotional maturity and
sexual responsibility. Finally, Ozzie Nelson
made rock music safe for both teenagers and
parents by having his son Ricky sing standing still
on the Ozzie and Harriet show.
Although many whites rejected rock n roll
because of its relationship to black rhythm and
blues and feared that the music would encourage
cross-racial sex, some prominent blacks also had
qualms about rock. For example, Martin Luther
King, Jr. found rock n roll and gospel music
totally incompatible, asserting that rock music
often plunges mens minds into degrading and
immoral depths. Although many know that Pat
Boone covered several black songs, such as Fat
Dominos Aint That a Shame (which Pat
224 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
wanted to retitle Isnt That a Shame) and Little
Richards Tutti Frutti, few realize that Fat
Dominos classic Blueberry Hill was rst
recorded in the early 1930s by Gene Autry, and
Chuck Berrys Maybellene was a reworked
version of a 1939 Roy Acuff song.
The Day the Music Died is generally
associated with the tragic deaths of Buddy Holly,
Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. However, as
Altschuler demonstrates, this is only part of the
meaning of this tragedy. Rocks popularity was
already on the decline because of the payola
scandal (DJs were paid money by record compa-
nies to play their records) and the removal of a
number of prominent performers from the scene.
Besides the death of Buddy Holly, Little Richard
left the music to become a minister in the
Seventh-Day Adventist church, Chuck Berry
was convicted of violating the Mann Act, Elvis
Presley was drafted into the US Army, and Jerry
Lee Lewis was publicly ostracized because he
married his thirteen-year-old second cousin. The
malaise to which rock n roll sunk remained until
the English invasion in 1964.
All Shook Up is a must read for anyone
interested in the early development of rock n
roll or understanding the cultural evolution of the
1950s and early 1960s. One can only hope that
Altschuler will produce a study of the British
invasion and the countercultural movement of the
late 1960s and early 1970s.
Dr. W. Terry Lindley
Union University
TheAmerican Child:
ACultural Studies Reader
Caroline F. Lavander and Carol J. Singley,
Editors. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2003.
When I rst received this book and read the
promotions on the back cover, I was worried that,
yet again, it would be a collection of politically
correct (at least as the world of academia denes
this) essays on how children, women, races, and
all minorities are and have been misrepresented.
And its hard to deny that there is a lot of that in
this. If thats what you want, this is a book for
you. However, the rst essay I read, because I am
interested in such material, was Michelle A.
Masses Constructing the Psychoanalytic Child:
Freuds From the History of an Infantile
Neurosis. I was strongly impressed by it. She
really does know Freud beyond the usual shallow
condemnations of him, and thus embraces the
nuances of his theories and self-judgment. In fact,
her essay alone is enough to recommend this
book.
Im not sure that the claims in the introduction
that the United States is distinctive in the ways
that it has seized upon the image of the child in
opposition to that which is constructed or
institutionalized, and in the extent to which it
has promoted the child as a force of resistance as
well as innocent vulnerability are valid, both
from the perspective of what has gone on in the
past around the world and in the perspective of
what is currently going on in the United States.
Nor am I convinced that the extension of this to
the uniting of the nations ongoing assertions of
the right to self-invention; the entitlement to
youthful, even reckless, adventure; and the pursuit
of innite possibilityalign the nation with what
is often taken for granted as the essence of
childhood are to be believed without some
strong clarication and support. But I guess the
idea is to raise the questions and get us to think
about them.
The essays, meaning to offer an overview of
various concerns about childhood in America, go
into such things as how the childrens world of
play represents the overriding cultures concerns
with material things (Gillian Brown, Childs
Play); how such childs play constructs class
consciousness (Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Playing at
Class); how nineteenth-century forms of play
created gender roles (Melanie Dawson, The
Miniaturizing of Girlhood: Nineteenth-Century
Playtime and Gendered Theories of Develop-
225 Book Reviews
ment); how representations of bonds between
children and their pets expressed the racial
relationships between whites and blacks in the
later nineteenth century (Lesley Ginsbery, Of
Babies, Beasts, and Bondage); and, sticking with
the nineteenth century, how the canon of chil-
drens literature found and then created patterns
for female behavior (Kelly Hager, Betsy and the
Canon).
As this partial list suggests, the essays tend to
deal with past representations of the child more
than the current situation. Dont be fooled into
thinking that this will give you a lot on the
current situation with children. In fact, nearly all
of the essays are dealing with the time period
from the second half of the nineteenth century
through the rst half of the twentieth century.
The scholars are contemporary, so their views on
these past times are from a contemporary
perspective, although I dont nd a lot of really
innovative thinking coming throughjust more
examples of the general scholarly communitys
current views. If what youre after is a collection
of some of the recent academic views of child-
hood, or if a really good essay on one of Freuds
case studies excites you, you will probably nd
this book valuable.
Harry Eiss
Eastern Michigan University
American Heretic: Theodore Parker
&Transcendentalism
Dean Grodzins. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2002.
Theodore Parker (18101860) was known in his
day as one of the nations leading social reformers
and abolitionists. Today, however, he is primarily
remembered as a Transcendentalist, though his
actual relationship with them was at arms length.
This study restores him to prominence and puts
him center stage, his rich mind blazing and his
elegant prose undimmed.
Born in 1810 in Lexington, Massachusetts,
Parker was a prodigy. Widely known as a brilliant
student at Harvard Divinity School in the mid-
1830s, his professors asked him to teach in their
absence. After ordination in 1837, Parker found a
position in the small town of West Roxbury,
Massachusetts.
At the core of this book is the acrimonious
dispute between Parker and the rest of the
Unitarian clergy of Boston, a quarrel that
included the charge that the young man was a
Deist, not a Christian in belief. As Parker began
his career, scholars were beginning to debate the
issue of Biblical veracity. German theologians in
particular questioned the accuracy of the Biblical
narrative. In their view, the Bible contained
errors, myths, and reports of events that could
not be veried. Parker agreed with them. He
argued for Absolute Religion based on the truth
of the words of the Bible and of Jesus rather than
faith or miracles. By 1845, he was an outcast
among the Unitarian clergy in Boston, but his
reputation was so high that his friends and
admirers created a new church, the Twenty-eighth
Congregational Society, and lled the Music Hall
in Boston every Sunday to hear Parker speak.
Parkers connection with the Transcendental-
istsBronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and
Margaret Fullerprovided an additional chal-
lenge to conventional thinking. Emersons Divi-
nity School Address in 1838 was one of Parkers
dening moments, and Parker saw Emerson as
one of his intellectual mentors. Parker was also an
intellectual supporter and a nancial contributor
to Brook Farm, the Transcendentalist commune
in West Roxbury, though he never lived there.
Parkers situation was made more difcult by
his personal life. His marriage was a near-tragic
relationship in part because of his wifes maiden
aunt. Parker believed she hated him as much as he
disliked her. Only when Theodore and Lydia
traveled in Europe on a sabbatical trip in 1843
1844, away from Aunt Lucy, did their marriage
reach a point of equilibrium. But Parkers journal
226 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
suggests a connection between his ery public
persona and his imprisoned private life.
Dean Grodzins brings all of this history to life.
Based on his Nevins Prize-winning dissertation,
American Heretic takes the reader through
Parkers early life and thought, including copious
quotations from his journal, letters, sermons, and
many publications. Grodzins reveals the brilliant
and stubborn young man ghting for his beliefs
against William Ellery Channing and other
established ministers. The volume ends with
Parkers departure from Roxbury in 1846. In the
coming years, he turned his mind and heart to the
wider world, transforming himself into a major
force in Americas pre-Civil War culture.
Because the author explores the development
of one of Americas greatest minds, this book will
be useful to all scholars who are interested in mid-
nineteenth century American culture, especially
American intellectual historians. Parker is ripe for
revival as a seminal gure in American history,
and this volume starts the process. We eagerly
anticipate the second volume.
Fred Isaac
Berkeley, California
TheAudience in Everyday Life:
Living in a MediaWorld
S. Elizabeth Bird. New York and London:
Routledge, 2003.
Cultural anthropologist S. Elizabeth Bird is
conversant with the British cultural studies
emphasis on creative reception. She distinctively
extends that orientation by using ethnographic
methods to participate, or to devise participations
for others, in the popular media cultures that she
describes and theorizes. Eschewing the scholar-
fan stance, she is not eager to bring reports of
hidden, transgressive resistances. Rather, she sees
audiences, cultural models, and her own meth-
odologies dispassionately and makes differen-
tiated value judgments about each. When she
nds a sallow-skinned, overweight, media-ad-
dicted couch potato in one of her eld studies,
thats just what she calls him. She also quotes
illuminating, well-written commentaries from the
fan groups she observes.
This book, mostly a collection of revised
journal articles, builds on the principles of her
earlier work, For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural
Study of Supermarket Tabloids (1992). There she
immersed herself in the tabloid world by ex-
tensive reading of the product, interviewing
editors and writers, and corresponding and
conversing with readers from whom she sought
discriminations about the credibility of the
amazing tales. In this more widely ranging work
on ethnographic methods for media audiences,
she reects constantly on styles of analysis. She
appropriately includes a philosophically self-
conscious rst chapter, Beyond the Audience,
covering the text/audience demarcation, the state
of reception studies, and ethnographys internal
debate about what it ought to be. She favors a
triadic model of media culture with a circular ow
of inuences that accounts for multiple interac-
tions among producers, texts, and audiences in
ways that acknowledge James Careys under-
standing of communication as ritual. Her nal
chapter, Media Ethnography, maps an inter-
disciplinary model, her own case studies offering
excellent examples. Nonanthropologists may nd
these methodological chapters overly quotey and
too laced with stitchery, but they will quickly
forgive these marks of tradecraft when Bird
displays her ingenuity in discovering how audi-
ences take public texts into their lives and
construct personal meanings. Scholars who gen-
eralize about these subjects will feel enlightened
and perhaps regretful at encountering such in-
sights later rather than sooner.
Because The Audience is a collection, I will list
the remaining territories here serially.
2. Media Scandal Meets Everyday Life
examines media-borne scandal (as in Ollie
North, Jim Bakker, O. J. Simpson, Joey
227 Book Reviews
Buttafuco and Amy Fisher, and Bill n
Monica), along with the equally prevalent
academic tradition of scolding audiences
for the shallowness of their melodramatic,
celebrity-driven fascinations. Just give us
public issues, information, and policy
analysis rather than personalities is a
standard prescription. Bird looks deeper
into the scandal-laden stories to nd out
what consumers are actually doing with
them. She investigated her subjects (22
respondents) by providing taped seg-
ments of Current Affair (TV tabloid),
Unsolved Mysteries, and an episode of
ABCs News With Peter Jennings. Parti-
cipants watched, carried on conversations
that were audiotaped, and then did a
telephone interview with Bird. Even
when respondents expressed contempt
for tabloid-style information, they
showed more accurate memory of the
issues raised and discussed them with
more animation. They also conceded
elements of relativity in their perspectives
and engaged in what moralists call casu-
istry, making careful judgments about
intent, circumstances, and consequences.
Bird accounts for the popularity of the
sensational through the factor of story
memorability: the human tendency to
retain narratives that exhibit closure.
3. Piecing a Cyber-Quilt: Media Fans in an
Electronic Community describes the life
of a listserv discussion group (DQMW-L)
focused on the historically anachronistic
and oft-scorned Dr. Quinn, Medicine
Woman. Bird aims to become more
precise about how middle-brow fans
experience texts and to offer empirical
appraisal for judgments that pathologize
fans and denounce listerv participants as
persons who have erased their own
identities by talking with otherwise un-
known persons. Bird signed up for the
list, announced her purpose, sometimes
lurking and sometimes participating in
the discussion. What she found (and her
transcription of the discussions is espe-
cially effective) was a community radi-
cally different from the early Trekkies
whom William Shatner urged to get a
life. The fans are discriminating about
the quality of the Dr. Quinn scripts, are
interested in the history of the West and
its literature, and created a nurturing
community for some list members who
experienced their rst opportunities for
public expression; others went through
personal crises and found consolation in
the lists sympathetic companionship.
Bird concedes that the lists largely female
membership gave it a special character,
but that is just the point. Generalizations
about what happens in cyberspace fail
when confronted with actual groups in
the electronic community.
4. Imagining Indians: Negotiating Identity
in a Media World took advantage of
Birds teaching position in northern Min-
nesota, where Native Americans could
become part of her project, to determine
how White audiences respond to repre-
sentations of Indians and how Indians
respond to and imagine representations of
themselves (88). Using a modest nan-
cial inducement for participation, she
enlisted several small groups of variable
mix (Native American and White men
and women) for the task of producing a
ctional television series they would want
to watch regularly (92). Stipulations were
to develop a series outline and a rst
program for characters including a White
person, an American Indian, and a wo-
man, completing the task in two hours.
Each session was audiotaped. There is not
space here to suggest the remarkable
range of scripts produced. Discussions
by participants revealed Indian alienation
from favorable Hollywood stereotypes of
themselves and casual acceptance of those
same stereotypes by Whites, who seemed
very unknowing and uninterested in the
lives of their contemporaries. This sort of
228 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
experiment in creative text production
was not only revelatory for Birds pur-
poses but also could easily be adapted
to classroom discussion in which the
purpose is exploration of stereotypes.
Transcriptions of conversations from the
work sessions are well chosen and pro-
vocative.
5. A Popular Aesthetic? Exploring Taste
Through Viewer Ethnography takes up
the perennial topic of value judgments
about the quality of popular media.
Indicating the range of interpretation,
Bird calls attention to S. Moores, who
sees powerful audiences who function as
guerilla ghters making their raids on
places of power (119), while Douglas
Kellner berates the middlebrow for
neatly packaged narratives with generic
conventions . . . devoid of controversy or
complexity (121). Birds ethnographic
space for exploring viewer aesthetic judg-
ments are the Dr. Quinn listserv group
and another for the soap opera One Life
to Live. Quoting extensively from her
groups, she noticed that both lists talk
about traditional aesthetic qualities such
as character development and continuity,
plot plausibility, expressiveness in acting,
and so on. Interestingly, Bird nds that
judgments about One Life tended to nd
more of its norms in soap operas generic
conventions, while the DQ group spoke
within a framework more resembling that
of traditional literary criticism.
6. CJs Revenge: A Case Study of News as
Cultural Narrative takes a brief detour
from ethnography to identify the folklo-
ric/urban legend aspects of a sensational
story originating in Dallas in 1991. The
CJ character wrote to Ebony magazine,
claiming both to have AIDS and to have
had sex with dozens of bar pickups. The
point was to get revenge for having
contracted AIDS and to punish the
unfaithful married. Moral panic ensued
in Dallas. The story became a national
sensation, and several seemingly sober
witnesses stepped forward to lend cred-
ibility to the story. It turned out that CJ
was a 15-year-old girl who didnt have
AIDS but felt a mission to scare others
into greater sexual responsibility. In her
analysis, Bird revives the analysis tradi-
tion of Helen McGill Hughes (News
and the Human Interest Story, 1940) and
Robert Darnton (Writing News and
Telling Stories, 1975), which reminds us
of the folkloric news archetypes (lost
child, family murder, miraculous rescue,
secret revenge, and so on). These perpe-
tually beckoning plots stand waiting for
activation when events with plausible
resemblances come along.
This book certainly belongs in every academic
library.
John Shelton Lawrence
Morningside College
Close Harmony: AHistoryof
Southern Gospel
James R. Goff, Jr. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2002.
An overlooked segment of American culture is
illustrated in the preface as the author describes a
conversation he had with a northern neighbor
who had relocated to the South and was asking
him about the subject matter of his next book.
When he replied, gospel music, specically white
gospel music, the neighbors response was thats
going to require an awful lot of research isnt it? I
wonder if youll be able to nd anything.
Goff goes on to explain that that particular
genre had a large following, including well-
known personalities, TV shows, record compa-
nies, family legacies, distribution systems, radio
229 Book Reviews
stations programming the genre exclusively, an
association, and even a hall of fame and museum.
This is nothing new to either the author or me.
Both of us grew up in a culture in which
thousands of people would go to see a concert
by the Happy Goodmans, Blackwood Brothers,
or Stamps Quartet.
A chronological narrative of the development
of Southern Gospel Music is described in this
readable account of the personalities and move-
ments behind a genre that has been followed by
thousands of fans for more than one hundred
years.
Although church music has existed since its
founding by Jesus, shape note music was a
demarcation point that helped lay the ground-
work for Southern Gospel. Singing schools were
organized and traveling music teachers used them
to their advantage in escaping from the difcult
and unpredictable world of southern agriculture,
Goff notes.
There was a certain amount of prestige
associated with attending a singing school, and
well-known singing schoolteachers were granted
celebrity status. For example, Edith Covington
(the reviewers mother) attended a singing school
taught by Doyle Blackwood at the Monroe
(Louisiana) Church of God. Eventually, various
levels of singing schools were formed at the local,
regional, and national levels.
Professional quartets were created as a means
of marketing the songbooks manufactured by the
companies, which sponsored the singing schools.
Although the singing schools aimed for audience
participation, the quartets gradually made the
transition to audience observation. Gospel music
inuenced the broader culture in America. Goff
writes, singing a well-known gospel favorite
could help even a secular singer establish rapport
with an audience and reinforce the tremendous
impact that evangelical Protestantism had on
American culture throughout the nineteenth
century.
There are some factual errors in the book, such
as the following: 1) Les Beasley came to the
Florida Boys from the McManus Trio from
Louisiana, not the state mentioned in the book,
and 2) Vesphew B. Vep Ellis was a Church of
God minister, not Assembly of God as reported
by Goff.
Overall, this work includes numerous anec-
dotes, statistics, and facts that will cause a wider
audience to be aware of a genre that has not
received as much visibility as others. Goff says
that in the early 1990s, a total of 446 groups who
derived one hundred percent of their income were
part of the genre. Added to that were 938 part-
time quartets. Goff cites data that put Southern
Gospel music at 6.8 percent of the total music
market, ahead of metal, jazz, classical, Latin, and
new age.
William G. Covington, Jr.
Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
ColdWar, Cool Medium:
Television, McCarthyism, and
American Culture
Thomas Doherty. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003.
Senator Joseph McCarthy achieved national
power from 1950 to 1954. Hundreds of books
about McCarthys minds and methods followed.
Do we need another? Fortunately, Thomas
Dohertys Cold War, Cool Medium earns its
place as a subtle new map of Americas politics
during televisions toddler years. It offers ne-
grained images for televisions political pontica-
tion and purications from the late 1940s to mid-
1950s. Set against the conventional belief that
televisual politics only emerged during the Ken-
nedy-Nixon presidential debates of 1960, his
interpretation advances our knowledge signi-
cantly.
Dohertys spotlight falls on Senator McCarthy
and gures like broadcaster Edward R. Murrow
and attorney Joseph N. Welch, who converged in
230 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
halting McCarthys public hunt for Communists.
We also get sketches of some individual actors and
of the less prominent broadcaster John Henry
Faulk, who effectively killed blacklisting with a
libel lawsuit. Especially valuable is Dohertys
focus on anticommunist pressure groups and their
collaborating agencies inside the television indus-
try that granted outsiders vetos over careers in
acting, writing, or directing.
At a time when the term McCarthyism is
still widely usedoften as nothing more than a
cultural cuss wordthis book reminds us that
Senator McCarthy was hardly the leading person-
ality of this era. McCarthyism, seen as the drive to
nd subversion and to punish it extrajudicially,
was preceded and followed by several related
enterprises: Trumans loyalty oaths for federal
employees (1947), the House Un-American Ac-
tivities Committee (HUAC) investigations of
Hollywood (1947), the blacklisting of Hollywood
performers by publications like Red Channels
(1950), and Eisenhowers dismissal of 1,427
federal employees at one whack through Execu-
tive Order 10450 (1953). Complicating the picture
is that even conservative anticommunists like J.
Edgar Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower helped
undermine McCarthy.
Doherty made many sacrices for his readers,
studying the periods painfully fuzzy kinescopes
(lmed images of television screens) and dusting
off heaps of trade periodicals and union records,
foundation reports, congressional documents,
FBI investigations, and political pamphlets. Un-
bowed by so much stoop labor, Doherty delivers
his narrative through energetic, ironic prose. I
list somewhat impressionistically a few provocative
sections.
Chapter 3, Controversial Personalities, ar-
gues that blacklisting dealt with people and their
suspected political histories rather than vetting
program content. Doherty writes, The antic-
ommunist blacklisters targeted artists for their
associations and opinions, arguing less that tele-
vision purveyed communism than that the ush
paychecks of television performers helped ll
Communist Party coffers. Yet there was quirki-
ness in punishment. Doherty interestingly pairs
an artist who crashed (Philip Loeb) with one who
soared (Lucile Ball). He shows how the program
contracts and advertising revenue riding on I
Love Lucy 19511956) quickly saved her from
retaliation after the outing of her earlier Popular
Front politics and her documented registration to
vote with the Communist Party in 1936.
Chapter 4, Hypersensitivity, deals with
censorship codes: Faye Emersons plunging neck-
line and the early health consciousness about
smoking, with resulting attempts by tobacco
advertisers to delete anything unfavorable. Doh-
erty uses Amos n Andy (19511953) to illustrate
the rise of television as a preferred site for
political shadowboxing. The NAACP saw the
programs stereotypes as a demeaning move
backward, while southern television stations
resented the presence of black faces in their
homes. Chapter 6, Roman Circuses and Spanish
Inquisitions, recounts congressional efforts to
exploit live television for public education and
constituency building. Detailed are the HUACs
investigation of subversion in television (1951),
Senator Estes Kefauvers Crime Committee Hear-
ings (1951), and the McCarthy Committees Voice
of America Hearings (1953). Results were un-
predictable. Senator Kefauver (D-TN) became a
folk hero by interrogating hometown mobsters in
local venues, winning an Emmy for his perfor-
mances, although the questionable legality of his
procedure compelled the camera to hide the faces
of some he questioned.
Chapter 7, Country and God, encompasses
the Hoover FBIs efforts to use television
principally through I Led Three Lives (1953
1956)derived from Herbert Philbricks bestsel-
ling book. Doherty renders this series, based upon
an FBI undercover agents penetration of the
Communist Party, as a Freudian psychodrama of
the id, ego, and superego. He writes, The voice
of the FBI murmurs in Philbricks head as the
monitor of ofcial morality, while the siren call of
the CPUSA is the unspeakable desire of the
subversive subconscious. Speaking to the divine
theme, Doherty describes Bishop Fulton Sheens
Life Is Worth Living (19521957), sponsored by
Admiral appliances and enhanced by a product-
231 Book Reviews
hawking angel named Skippy (whose name
eventually transmogries into Admiral):
Again and again, the homilies conate Christ
and country in a kind of transubstantiation
of the savior with the body politic. Both are
incarnations of faithone of the word of
God the Father, the other the words of the
Founding Fathersand both come to bring
hope to all mankind. According to the Cold
War Gospel preached by Bishop Sheen, the
things rendered unto America and the things
rendered unto God can be one and the same.
Doherty sees Sheens popular series as the cool,
serene, conciliatory coming out for Catholic
presence in American life, sharply contrasted with
Father Coughlins hot, angry, divisive antise-
mitism and ultranationalism in the 1930s.
Chapter 8, Edward R. Murrow Slays the
Dragon of Joseph McCarthy, is likely the books
most important historical interpretation. Both
popular and scholarly accounts of the contre-
temps mention a single Murrow See It Now
program titled A Report on Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy (March 9, 1954). As Doherty de-
scribes, It was network televisions rst un-
inching assault on the senator: a video expose
that stripped McCarthy down to bare essentials,
hanging him out to dry on his own words and
demeanor as he browbeat witnesses, snorted snide
asides, and smirked like a vulture. Doherty sees
here two central truths about American culture
in the age of television: rst, reporters are
receiving rough parity with politicians, and
second, television depended upon the very free-
dom of expression and access that McCarthy
sought to shut down. But Doherty nds a
signicant context in a much subtler campaign
of programs that prepared for this nal attack.
Murrow commanded several different platforms
at CBS: Edward R. Murrow with the News, See It
Now, and Person to Person. He deployed each,
alternately sniping at McCarthy directly or
indirectly by lifting up his victims for favorable
display. See It Now honored George C. Marshall,
recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1953a
man publicly accused by McCarthy of a
conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is
nally exposed, its principals shall be forever
deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.
When the nal program in Murrows campaign
appeared, many Americans were prepared to
acclaim the good sense of its eloquent anti-
McCarthy polemic, though it was hardly objec-
tive reporting. To enhance the sense of its artice,
Doherty even scans the Shakespearean cadences
of Murrows scathing free verse.
McCarthy stumbled on after this poetic
assassination, but further declined self-destruc-
tively during the televised Army-McCarthy
Hearings of 1954. This televised episode turned
in large measure on the attempts to secure
preferential treatment in the army for G. David
Schine, a voluntary counsel to McCarthys com-
mittee. Doherty draws our attention to the
theatricality of the Armys counsel, Joseph N.
Welch, an Iowan who projected an aw-shucks
simplicity belying his sophisticated role in a
Boston legal rm.
In Chapter 10, Pixies: Homosexuality, Antic-
ommunism, and Television, Doherty analyzes the
sexual subtexts with Cohn, Schine, and McCarthy
that seemed to advertise Cohns smitten attentions
for Schine. An irony was that this publicly
homoerotic trio threatened to expose sexual
perversion at a military base. We also encounter
the gender defector George W./Christine Jor-
genson, who acquired TV celebrity in 1953 after
surgery in Sweden. Another sexual boundary
transgressor was Liberace, whose popularity
deed reigning pressures for gender conformity.
In these ways, television inadvertently advanced
the growing openness about sexuality.
In Chapter 12, Exhuming McCarthyism: The
Paranoid Style in American Television, Doherty
expresses a standard liberal viewpoint: that the
anticommunist crusade emerges as an irrational
and inexplicable outbreak, yet he wants to give
liberals their due. He is irritated by the self-
pitying stories that milk so many tears from the
McCarthy period: At once posthumous revenge
and self-serving exculpation, a proliferation of
solemn melodramas and McCarthy-themed doc-
umentaries depicted a reign of terror that sucked
the lifeblood from Americas most precious
232 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
recreational source: the entertainment industry.
He names dramas depicting the blacklist era:
Fellow Traveler (1989) and Guilty by Suspicion
(1991), Class Action (1991), and biopic Tail
Gunner Joe (1977), for example. The character
conventions of this genre feature the angelic
victim and courageous ghter . . . set against the
demon of McCarthyism. Doherty is irritated by
the self-righteousness of a Lillian Hellman, who
showily deed HUAC in 1952, but who never
scrupled to tailor her opinions to the Communist
party line in the 1930s and 1940s. Her reward for
the faithful Stalinism is to be beatied as the Joan
of Arc of civil liberties.
Dohertys interpretations will inspire debate
about their fairness, in addition to the usual
arguments about evidential adequacy. For the study
of this awkward period in Americas television
culture, it is hard to imagine a better text for
discussions with students. Colleagues who lived in
that era will read it with pained appreciation.
John Shelton Lawrence
Emeritus, Morningside College
The Columbia Companion to
American Historyon Film
Peter C. Rollins, Editor. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003.
Historical lms are like animated historical
artifacts except that they are more generally
informative and therefore more subject to leading
or misleading the viewer, because each person
handling the material has his or her individual
reaction to the events pictured on the screen. The
events are, in fact, more complex than the society
pictured because the culture is interpreted by
someones bias and ulterior motive. The movie
house is therefore a theater of mirrors, all focusing
the attitudes of the viewers run through the
camera of the producer/director, and reecting
back on the viewer. We enter a movie house with
an attitude that probably will be strengthened or
otherwise modied for good or bad by the
retelling. So, we should view with a certain degree
of skepticism, though perhaps not as much as that
voiced by Santayanas cynical observation, that
historical movies can be characterized as a pack
of lies about events that never happened told by
people who werent there. So, of course, are
books and folklore and all records of the events of
yesterday and yesteryear. But they are the best we
have, and they help us avoid the trap of not
knowing about history and therefore having to
relive it. Editor Rollins is perhaps nearer the bone
of truth in his observation, Each essay in this
collection should both illuminate and complicate
the subject matter examined by motion pictures;
the result should be both a better understanding
of both history and lmnot to mention the
process by which history is interpretedand not
to mention, further, ourselves and our culture.
This opportunity to understand our past is
presented in eight approaches: (1) Eras, (2) Wars
and Other Major Events, (3) Notable People,
(4) Groups, (5) Institutions and Movements,
(6) Places, (7) Themes and Topics, and (8) Myths
and Heroes. Each cluster of studies represents
some group or movement. In our age of uid
culture, the section marked Groups is especially
interesting, as is Places, because it is, in many
ways, least stable and therefore open to different
interpretations. Myths and Heroes, the last
group in the collection, stretches through one of
the most stable themes in American culture,
providing a major platform on which American
culture develops and depends.
In preparing this collection of essays, Rollins
worked tirelessly, as he always does in such
efforts, choosing carefully the authors to write the
pieces and then working with them until the
papers were honed into informative and lasting
works. He is to be praised for his splendid
accomplishment, and each reader of the essays
will congratulate himself or herself for having
found the collection.
Ray B. Browne
Bowling Green, Ohio
233 Book Reviews
Deadly Dozen: Twelve Forgotten
Gunghters of the OldWest
Robert K. DeArment. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2003.
The settlement of the West from 1850 to the
end of the century, as we all know, was ablaze
with lawlessness and gunre. The role of the
people who toted the guns is somewhat ambig-
uous. There were, as DeArment says, thousands
of grassroots gunghters [who] straddled both
sides of the law without hesitation, at one time
being lawless killers and then, because of their
reputations, being asked to enforce the law. Most
of those people, except for the big names, have
been forgotten. Here, DeArment has searched
through virtually every record and given us
complete accounts of John Bull, Pat Desmond,
Mart Duggan, Milt Yarberry, Dan Tucker, George
Goodell, Bill Standifer, Charley Perry, Barney
Riggs, Dan Bogan, Dave Kemp, and Jeff Kidder.
Many of these ghters were drifters who wound
up in the West, sometimes just ahead of the law
and sometimes because they wanted to make
their reputations outside the law or live outside
its restrictions. Many petty killers never reached
the West, but did their murdering in their home
states and communities, where they are being
forgotten.
Why bother, one may ask, to read the lives and
bones of these people? Why not let their deeds
bury the dead? Two answers immediately inform
us. DeArment tells us that Their stories provide
additional threads in the vast, rich tapestry of the
eternally fascinating history of the American
West. More important, however, is the broader
picture of what happens when individuals try to
take justice into their own hands and see that their
attitudes prevail. In the West, this justice pre-
vailed at the smoking end of a pistol. Today, it
often prevails in the courtroom in the legal
maneuverings of smart lawyers. It always pays
to know what the participants in legal actions are
out to accomplish. DeArments splendid account
gives us another thorough example.
Ray B. Browne
Bowling Green, Ohio
Emotional Design: WhyWe Love
(or Hate) EverydayThings
Donald A. Norman. New York: Basic Books,
2004.
This is a delightfully off-beat, surprising book.
The title suggests this, and the prologue, Three
Teapots, adds further proof. This is how it
begins:
I have a collection of teapots. One is
completely unusable, made for masochists;
one is fat and chubby; the third is not
practical, made for tilting.
Why does the author value them? Because they
are sculptural artwork. They lighten up his day.
They are visceral, behavioral, and reective.
We have dozens of books that discuss the
production and sales of products, but this one is
unique. It centers on the personality of products.
Norman puts forth this argument: the personal-
ities of products, companies, and brands need as
much tending to as the products themselves.
Attractive things do work better. They create
positive emotions causing mental processes to be
more attractive, more tolerant of minor difcul-
ties. In this sense, the Coke bottle IS the real
thing. When we grip it in our hands and see the
name engraved on the curvaceous bottle, we have
an emotional response.
Why must information be presented (as it
usually is) in a dull, dreary fashion? We dont need
actual numbers, many of which are misleading.
Why not display the information in a colorful
manner, in a way that delights rather than
distracts? Imagine colorful pinwheels spinning
above your head, enjoyable to contemplate.
234 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
Spinning pinwheels? Why not? Why not have
information displayed in a pleasant, comfortable
way?
How can we maintain excitement, interest, and
aesthetic pleasure for a lifetime? By studying the
things that stand the test of time: music, literature,
and art. All of these, alas, have been pushed aside
by computer skills, technical training for small
slots (in industry and business), and jobs that
come and go with the market. No wonder so
many college graduates cant nd jobs that satisfy
or even retain them.
Classical music, for example, interleaves multi-
ple themes and variations. Each new listening
focuses on a different aspect of music. Music is
never boring because it is never the same. There is
similar richness for all experiences that last:
popular music, art, and literature. Folk tales,
music, and dances bear this out.
If something is to give lifelong pleasure, two
things are necessary: the skill of the designer in
providing a powerful, rich experience, and the
skill of the perceiver.
The secret is seduction, which gives rise to a
rich and compelling experience that lasts over
time. The real trick is in maintaining the relation-
ship after the initial burst of enthusiasm. This is
always a danger with the popular. The attrac-
tion can change like the weather, when the next
wave of popularity sets in. Ill never forget old
whats his name . . . How many gadgets and
once essential bits of technology are relegated
to the attic?
What about the intrusive nature of todays
beeping, buzzing, ringing electronic equipment?
And the ring of the telemerchant on the phone?
This is noise pollution gone rampant. All of this
has given sound a bad name. Must we live with a
cacophony of jarring beeps?
Sound can be playful, informative, fun, and
emotionally inspiring, but it must be designed as
carefully as any other aspect of design. Today,
little thought is given to this aspect of design.
Why do computers frustrate us so? They lose
les and they crash, often for no apparent reason.
They express no shame, no blame. They dont
apologize. Worse, they blame us, poor unwitting
users. Who are they? Why does it matter? We
are angered, and rightly so. Most of our technol-
ogy does a poor job of gathering trust. Trust is the
essence of good design and a happy life.
So we must live in an untrustworthy world. We
are exploited by crooks, thieves, computer card
scams, and terrorists who manipulate our trust
and good nature. Theyre experts at exploiting the
willingness of people to help one another. All of
this danger has crept into the political process. No
wonder people are so scornful of politicians and
legislators. They seem to have one goal: to be re-
elected.
We are in a new era. Machines are smart and
getting smarter. All technology is a two-edged
sword combining potential benets with potential
decits. But there is no reason that we cant
control our technology. The future, after all, is up
to us. We are all designers, selecting what we own
and use. We control what we select and just how,
where, and when they are to be used. Norman
closes his provocative book with this quote from
William Morris:
If you want a golden rule that will t
everybody, have nothing in your houses that
you do not know to be useful, or believe to
be beautiful.
Marshall Fishwick
Virginia Tech
Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins
Joseph Epstein. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003.
We are all fascinated with age-old sins,
especially the Seven Deadlies (envy, pride, glut-
tony, greed, anger, sloth, and lust). We both
struggle against them and celebrate with them.
They never go away. Joseph Epstein tells us why.
His fascinating, thought-provoking book cen-
ters on what might be the most pervasive of the
235 Book Reviews
seven sins: envy. It invades the other six, and
much of our lives, only envy is no fun at all. To
err may be human, but to envy is undoubtedly so.
The origins of envy, like those of wisdom, are a
mystery. A ne historian and essayist, Epstein
points out that the Seven Deadly Sins didnt
originate in the Bible. They rst appear in the
fourth-century work of Evagrius of Pontus and
John of Cassius. In the sixth century, Pope
Gregory the Great formulated the traditional
seven. A word for envy exists in all languages
and places. Is it a feeling, emotion, sin? All of
these. Its one of the few words left in the English
language that retains the power to scandalize.
Epstein shows us the many faces of envy,
drawing from what psychologists, moralists,
journalists, and philosophers have said. For
example, Schopenhaur thought that envy was a
by-product of mans basic bitterness. We feel
unhappy because we cant stand the sight of
people who think that they are happy. Kant
viewed envy as a great waste of mental energy.
And we get Epsteins own autobiographical
experiences with envy. No one is immune.
Whole industries, such as the advertising
industry, can be viewed as vast and intricate
envy-producing machines. Playing up all the
deluxe and specialin clothes, cars, jewelry, and
all the rest of itsuggests that ones desires are
easily within reach. They arent, of course, but
even if they were, your envy would not be
allowed to sleep. Further advertising would see
that. Just take out your credit card and buy, buy,
buy! Your neighbor across the street does it. Is she
trying to put you down?
As you read on, you realize that the book is
shamefully entertaining. Its strangely comforting
to be reassured that you are just like many others
in being such a petty SOB.
When ills befall us, we ask, Why me? For the
envious person seeing someone get ahead, the
question is Why? I can testify that academia is a
eld heavily laden with the landmines of envy.
Why not me? Why was I left out? The envious
tend to be injustice collectors, and they never rest.
At the center of envy is the act of coveting.
Why does my neighbor, my friend, even my
brother, have something I dont have? The
envious feel a fundamental unfairness. Why
should someone have a better job or house or
future than I have? Obviously he or she should
not. Hello, envy.
The book, not encumbered by long-learned
references or footnotes, delights in humor and
whimsy. A number of cartoons from the New
Yorker help out. In one of them, Mr. Lima Bean,
trudging off shoulder-bent to work with his
briefcase, sees in his imagination Mr. Peanut,
shouting with joy in his top hat and swinging his
gold-topped cane.
In another, while on vacation, a wife sees her
husband scowling at wealthy friends in their sail
boats. Do I detect a new resentment? she asks.
There are fourteen chapters with such intri-
guing titles as Is Beauty Friendless?, Under
Capitalism Man Envies Man: Under Socialism,
Vice Versa, Resentment by Any Other Name,
and Is Envying Human Nature?
But my favorite (and here I betray both my
envy and my age) is entitled The Young, God
Damn Them. Epstein notes that of all the things
in the world that judge envy, the one near
universal is youth. The most important cards of
life, the years, are stacked in their favor. The
moving nger writes, and we grow old.
The young dont envy youth. They envy
wealth, position, fame, and power. They usually
have health, energy, ambition, and very little idea
that life has a nish line. The poet Dick Allen
summed it up in a couplet:
The pretty young bring to the coarsely old
Rechaffe dishes, but the sauce is cold.
The young, damn them, still have a shot at it
all, while ones own gunpower has been spent at
delectable animals, pheasants long disappeared
into the brush, that may never really have been
there anyway.
Why is youth wasted on the young, as, of
course, it is? We have the physical gifts when we
dont know how to husband them, and we know
how only when these gifts have departed. Epstein
calls this the comedy of all comedies. God, we
must sadly but nally conclude, loves a joke.
236 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
Here, Epstein echoes the thought of the
nineteenth-century English wit John Gay, who
wrote My Own Epitaph:
Life is a jest; and all things show it.
I thought so once; but now I know it.
Joseph Epstein has written a well-wrought
book that might make you envious but also
grateful. His material comes from living in the
world and looking around, from gazing into his
own heart, which never, alas, is entirely envy free.
Marshall Fishwick
Virginia Tech
Globalization and Multicultural
Societies: SomeViews fromEurope
Marina Ricciardelli, Sabine Urban, and Kostas
Nanopoulos, Editors. Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.
This is a book with a thesis and a mandate:
The globalization process is a major catalyst for
transforming society, so lets get on with it. The
book, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts:
(1) an analysis of the evolution toward globaliza-
tion, (2) the restructuring of the systems that
produce and distribute goods around the world,
and (3) the effects of globalization on culture.
The result is a snapshot, from the liberal-
intellectual perspective, of todays European
consciousness and the state of the European
Union. The essays were written in 2000. More
recent events (such as the G-7 meetings) have
thrown the Union into disarray, and disunity does
not get into the snapshot.
That the world is increasingly interconnected
is obvious. What is not so clear is who benets
and who suffers. As many sociologists have noted,
the rich are getting richer, the poor, poorer. Wars
large and small ourish everywhere, and much of
Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are in deep
recession, oppression, and chaos. Should another
book be assembled? Iraq dees a solution. With a
title like The Rise and Fall of a Utopian Dream:
Globalization?
An American reader or reviewer can hardly fail
to note a myopic approach at work here: the
emphasis on Europe and its glorious past, that
Europe has been a constant major player in
world history for almost three millennia. Yes,
Europe has been a society of learning for many
years, but it was also the promulgator of an
imperialism that turned much of the world into
European colonies, markets, and servants. Sabine
Urbans claim that Europe is civilization fo-
cused, not dominated by the golden calf, the
cult of money, is hardly supported by the facts.
That it remains dominant in the new millennium
is questionable.
It might be another sign of American hubris to
point out that only one superpower remains: the
United States. But this is true, and American
policy often challenges and even rejects European
notions of Europe-led globalization. This must be
taken into account.
That Europe, on the other hand, rejects
Americas new power is equally obvious. It is
summed up by Ernst-Moritz Lipp, writing from a
Germany that gave us the Third Reich and the
Holocaust: Opposition and a critical stance
toward the hegemonic role of America is very
evident. We have American hegemony without
consensus (62)more so in Germany, one might
add, than in Britain, Spain, and much of Eastern
Europe.
Much of the material in Parts 1 and 2 is
monographic and specialized, long the hallmark
of European scholarship. I found the most helpful
portion of this book in Part 3, View and
Testimonies. Marina Ricciardelli, a professor at
the University of Rome, looks for the basic
assumptions in the various essays. Among them
are the Concept of Time, the Concept of Science,
the Control of Scientic Results, and The
Thoughts of Economic Science. One who deals
with global history and culture sees how very
European these essays really are. But Ricciar-
delli makes a major point that hardly gets a
mention in the other essays. Many of the real
237 Book Reviews
global problems, which affect billions of people
(tribal warfare, pollution, hunger, disease, exces-
sive exploitation of scarce natural resources, and
so on) are generated by the very technological
progress that is the theme song of this book.
Travel in central Asia or Africa in 2003 and see for
yourself.
Is the future a given? Hardly. For me, the most
important line in this book was written by Ilya
Prigogine, a Nobel laureate in chemistry: We are
living uncertainly in a particularly intense manner
at the beginning of this new century. The
uncertainty introduced by globalization is inevi-
table (16).
I recall an ancient Hindu proverb that said this
many centuries earlier: Everything is possible,
nothing is certain. That certainly sounds true as
we plunge into the twenty-rst century.
Marshall Fishwick
Virginia Tech
Hemingway in Cuba
Hilary Hemingway and Carlene Brennan.
New York: Rugged Land Press, 2003.
Much has been written about the life of Ernest
Hemingway (18891961), with a great deal of
attention to the obvious links between his life and
his ction. It is generally accepted that much of
what Hemingway wrote are thinly veiled versions
of his own larger-than-life exploits. However,
relatively little attention has been given to
Hemingways life in Cuba; on the surface, this is
surprising, given that he lived there longer than
any other single locale.
With Hemingway in Cuba, Hemingways
niece Hilary Hemingway and Hemingway scho-
lar Carlene Brennen attempt to address this
biographical inattention. Two obstacles have
blocked scholars attempts to dig into this largely
unexplored period of Hemingways life: the
Hemingway familys distrust of prying academics
and the Cuban governments restrictions on
outside scholarly research at the Finca Viga,
Hemingways home in Cuba. That a Hemingway
coauthors this text eliminates the rst problem,
while recent agreements between scholars and the
Cuban government mark a beginning of progress
in addressing the second.
Hemingway in Cuba relates many wonderful
anecdotes of Ernest Hemingways shing, writ-
ing, and womanizing in Cuba (as well as in Key
West and Bimini). These well-told and exciting
stories include a mistress on a fth-story window
ledge, shing for giant tuna and marlin in the gulf
stream, and hunting for Nazi U-boats during
World War II. The tales are interspersed with
passages from his ction showing how he used his
own life as inspiration for his stories. Some of
these connections seem incontrovertible, while
others appear speculative at best. I must admit
that the copper-colored ink used for the passages
from Hemingways ction annoyed me; though
beautiful, this shiny ink rendered Hemingways
words difcult to read.
The ow and unity of the book seems a bit
fractured in the closing chapters, which present
information about the state of ongoing research
into Hemingways Finca Viga papers, Hemi-
ngways relationship with and attitude toward
Fidel Castro, and Cuba today. These chapters
might be better included as appendixes rather than
as part of the text proper. Ironically, it was the
nuggets of information in these chapters that I
found most exciting as a Hemingway researcher:
portions of a speech Castro gave last year at the
Finca Viga, details of Hemingways personal
marginalia, Hemingways dabbling in Santeria.
This book presents much valuable information,
and it does so in an entertaining fashion. I found
this book to be better written than Hilary
Hemingways previous foray into the Hemi-
ngway mythos, Hunting With Hemingway.
This is a handsome volume, worthy of proud
display on a coffee table, and one of interest
to the Hemingway scholar or enthusiast. Perhaps
the greatest treasures within these pages are the
160 sepia-toned photographs, many previously
238 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
unpublished. This wealth of photographic materi-
al alone easily makes this book a valuable addition
to any Hemingway library. I do wish that the
photos of some of Hemingways letters and notes
were presented large enough to actually read;
instead, they seem to merely decorate the
margins. As with the aforementioned copper-
colored ink, the beautiful presentation of this text
sometimes comes at the expense of readability.
Minor quibbles asideand they are minorthis
is a book that popular culture scholars and fans of
Papa will enjoy.
Marc Seals
University of South Florida
Hillbilly: ACultural Historyof an
American Icon
Anthony Harkins. New York: Oxford, 2003.
People outside the United States, unless they
carry the same necessity, might wonder why, from
the earliest diverse settlement in the New World,
the South was claimed to be divided into two
classes: the wealthy, educated landowners and the
ignorant, poor white trash who came to be
known by various names, the most lasting of
which is hillbilly. Through the decades, the
term, originally carrying with it embarrassment
and resentment, has come to be, at the same time,
still exasperating, infuriating, and amusing.
Harkins, a professor of history, has worked on
this icon for years, from the earliest manifesta-
tions to the latest threat of its use on TV. His book
stirs many memories in those of us who
remember the pleasure we got from Simon Suggs,
Sut Lovingood, The Arkansaw Traveler, Barney
Google, Snuffy Smith, Lil Abner, and on through
country music, early radio shows, and movies,
down to what some people are calling the nest
series ever produced on television, The Beverly
Hillbillies. The question with the last-named
representation of the gullible but wealthy moun-
taineers is, Who was being satirized, Hollywood
and the residents pretensions, or the honest,
gullible, but always triumphant people from the
mountains? Some index might be drawn from the
sadness that rose from the announcement that
Irene Ryan was dead of cancer. But perhaps art is
art only after it has been proved to be such, for
CBSs proposal (based on MTVs success with
The Osbournes) to bring back a TV series called
The Real Beverly Hillbillies met with such
organized opposition from congressmen and
across the board that the whole idea had to be
scrapped like a mountain liquor still minutes
before revenuers arrive. Perhaps the series would
have proved again that one icon in America can
and should be kept alive. In a society where
everybody would rather be rich and famous than
iconic and loved, perhaps the hillbilly should not
be paraded forever, but as regionalism and pride
in section of origin grow in importance in
America, the concept of the iconic nature of the
hillbilly will not fade away. Harkinss book is a
balanced and prideful revelation of the role of this
icon in America, and really makes us delighted to
have been and to continue to be a part of it.
Ray B. Browne
Bowling Green, Ohio
Horror at the Drive-In:
Essays in PopularAmericana
Gary Rhodes, Editor. Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2003.
The drive-in theater, during its heyday, which
lasted from the late 1940s through the 1970s,
exemplies the American spirit of independence.
Although many of the corporate theaters were
hurting for business during the 1950s because of
the popularity of television, the drive-ins always
did brisk business. They were usually indepen-
239 Book Reviews
dently owned and not part of the corporate
theater structure. Drive-in theaters during the
1980s and early 1990s all but died out, but
recently there has been a nostalgic resurgence of
the drive-in with new ones opening up all across
America. Editor Gary Rhodess recent volume,
Horror at the Drive-In: Essays in Popular
Americana, is a timely addition to lm scholar-
ship. (Rhodes also wrote the denitive study of
the Bela Lugosi lm White Zombie [1932]). The
book contains eighteen varied essays looking at all
aspects of drive-in horror movies from their
beginnings and brings to light several obscure
and often overlooked lms.
Rock Colvatios essay looks at how horror-
movie rhetoric in the trailers often enticed people
to come to low-budget monster icks like
Reptilicus and I Bury the Living, usually putting
all of the best scenes in the trailers themselves.
Recently, a fan culture has risen that, in addition
to watching the lms, watches the trailers.
(Several popular DVDs have been released con-
taining just trailers from early drive-in horrors.)
Editor Rhodes documents the rst showing of the
independently released Hideous Sun Demon. This
unique lm directed by and starring Robert
Clarke was rst shown in Amarillo, Texas, in
August 1958. Its an amazing story, and Rhodess
documentation of the event includes a transcript
of a radio interview with Clarke. Michael
Lee compares the ideology behind the British
Curse of the Demon (1957) with the American I
Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958).
Although one lm deals with a form of Satanism
and the other is an alien invasion story typical of
the 1950s lms, they both have interesting parallel
themes.
Two of the most brutal drive-in lms from the
1970s are Wes Cravens Last House on the Left
(1972) and Tobe Hoopers Texas Chainsaw
Massacre (1973). The lms are examined in detail
in two separate essays. Both lms were must
sees for teenagers in the 1970s and were still
being shown at drive-ins through the early 1980s.
Both lms have had a profound impact on
popular culture, with Last House on the Left
being called a rite of passage for a whole
generation of teenagers. The remake of Texas
Chainsaw Massacre was released in 2003.
Obscure independent lms like Dementia
(Daughter of Horror) (1953) are also given in-
depth examination. Dementia was originally an
experiment in lm noir and was silent, with just
the images and soundtrack. The producers rere-
leased the lm as Daughter of Horror by adding
narration by Ed McMahon and marketing it as a
horror movie in 1956. The author argues that the
lm may not be a document of feminist ideology,
but it is rather a work of art that addresses certain
truths about insanity and deserves a wider view-
ership.
The most detailed article is Karolas essay on
Italian director Mario Bavas lms. Today, Italian
horror lms are almost never shown in theaters
and usually go straight to video. However, during
the 1960s, Italian horror lms like Bavas Kill
Baby Kill (1966) and Blood and Black Lace (1964)
were typical fodder for American drive-ins (albeit
usually in cut form). Karolas piece brings
respectability and scholarly reevaluation to this
often overlooked director.
No book on drive-in horrors would be
complete with some discussion of director
Herschell Gordon Lewis (also known as the
Godfather of Gore or the Father of the Splatter
Film). Although there have been two academic
book-length studies recently published, there is
always room for more discussion of his lms.
Lewis, whose lm Blood Feast started the Gore
Revolution in 1963, was a perennial favorite
across drive-in theaters in the South throughout
the 1960s and 1970s. Lewis never intended to
make high art or anything other than money. His
lms, while shocking for the 1960s, nowadays are
enjoyable for their humor and bad acting rather
than the gore. Editor Rhodes writes a philoso-
phical piece about Lewiss lm Wizard of Gore
and its use of nonlinear time (or metaphysical
time). Anyone studying the philosophy of lm
will nd a great deal to ponder in Rhodess essay.
Lewiss lm 2000 Maniacs (1964), which is
currently being remade for 2004 release, is
discussed alongside Attack of the Giant Leeches
(1959) in another essay by Stephen Budney. The
240 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
author looks at how both of these lms fared in
the South and represent Southern American
culture to a large extent.
Other lms discussed in this volume include I
Drink Your Blood (1970), Creature Walks Among
Us (1956), Ed Woods famous transvestite com-
mentary Glen or Glenda (1953), The Brain That
Wouldnt Die (1962), and Cat Women of the
Moon (1953), among others. One article discusses
the social impact for posters of horror movies
featuring woman as the prominent monster such
as The She Demons (1958) and Devil Girl from
Mars (1955), among others. Additional essay
topics include the inuence of American drive-
in culture on Austrian drive-ins and horror lms
made in Mexico but shown in American drive-ins.
Examples include Samson Versus the Vampire
Women (1962) and La Momia Azteca (1957). The
Mexican wrestler El Santo was featured in many
lms ghting a monster of some sort. His lms
are currently experiencing resurgence due to
rereleases on DVD.
Horror at the Drive-In is a ne collection and
deserves a wide readership. Each essay is well
researched and highly readable for both the
layperson and the lm scholar. This book would
certainly be a good textbook for lm classes,
sociology classes, or even history classes. All of
the essays taken together provide a glimpse into
this unique form of American culture. Recom-
mended for both public and academic libraries.
Robert G. Weiner
Lubbock, Texas
In Praise of Nepotism:
ANatural History
Adam Bellow. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Nepotism has negative overtones. The dic-
tionary calls it favoritism shown to a relative,
often undeserved. The term nepotismo was coined
in the fteenth century to describe the corrupt
practice of appointing papal relatives, usually
illegitimate, to papal ofces. Today it often
implies hiring one who is grossly incompetent.
This violates our sense of fairness, a way for the
rich to warehouse their unemployable relatives. It
leads to class domination.
That was the old nepotism. The new nepotism
of our generation thinks of nepotism as creating
elites that are a practical necessity for any society.
But what kind of elite should we have? Should it
be closed and exclusive, or open to the bright
upstarts? Should you inherit power or grab it?
Was the Bush-Gore campaign in 2000 the tip of a
dynastic iceberg in American politics?
Think of the many things that now negate the
old nepotistic formula: abortion, divorce, single
parenthood, cloning, gay marriage, day care,
interracial adoption, fosteringthe list goes on
and on. Having stumbled onto this large but
untreated subject, Bellow tries to do it justice.
There are twelve chapters, starting with Were
All Good Fellas Now and ending with The Art
of Nepotism, as well as a postscript on Amer-
ican Nepotism Today. We read of Nepotism in
the Christian West, and the Golden Age of
Nepotism, the period between the sixteenth and
nineteenth centuries in Europe. The chapter
centers on three families that rose to the heights
of European nobility: Borgia, Bonaparte, and
Rothschild. They practiced nepotism with un-
bridled zest.
Crossing the Atlantic to America, we deal with
the Nepotism of the Founders; the Roosevelts,
heading up the middle-class revolt against nepo-
tism; and heirs apparent such as John F. Kennedy.
Will we end up with a Bush dynasty in the
twenty-rst century?
Bellow believes in what he calls The Art of
Nepotism. Instead of hating it, we should bring it
out into the open and subject it to the highest
possible standards. There are three obligations: to
give, to receive, and to repay. Our society is a riot
of old and new kinship forms, a nepotistic petri
dish in which new answers must be found. We
have a duty to be nepotistic. If we fail to put our
241 Book Reviews
families rst, we may destroy the very sources of
altruism on which society depends.
The ultimate solution to the American pro-
blem of race is not to declare war on nepotism but
to expand our denition of the national family.
We would all be better off if we reected more
consistently and deeply not only on our debt to
our ancestors but also on what we owe to our
descendants.
Thoughtful, provocative, and well documen-
ted, In Praise of Nepotism is an important new
interpretation of the world in which we live.
Marshall Fishwick
Virginia Tech
Justice Denoted: The Legal Thriller
in American, British, and
Continental Courtroom
Literature
Terry White, Editor. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
Some books are so heavy with coverage and
detail that they simply break the mind. This
is such a book. With 1,842 books named and
outlined, a lawyers lexicon, and interviews with
several authors, this book simply turns the air
blue and crackling with plots and details. With the
average reader, though not with us addicts, the
question might well be, Why are so many ne
authors spending their time writing legal thrillers?
Not for the money, says one, but for the art. Legal
thrillers differ so much from real court life that
they make lawyering tolerable. On paper, the
lawyers have control of the scene and can shape it
as they please, whereas in the courtroom, as we all
know, practices and verdicts are chancy and
depend on the undependable: uneducated jurors,
judges, and lawyers who have things on their
minds other than justice, indigestion, and wife
affairs. Little wonder that much of the thinking
about people on trial, as has been demonstrated
many times, is electrocute them rst and try
them later. Many lawyers do little reading of
ction, some much. Little wonder that the three
most admired lawyer books are Dickenss Bleak
House, Scott Turows Presumed Innocent, and
Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird. This book
cost the editor ve years of searching and reading.
This reviewer hopes that he maintained his sanity
during the many years of work, for he has done a
Herculean job of saving time for us and providing
us with countless hours of directed reading and
thinking. In fact, he has to a certain degree
justied the existence of lawyers.
Ray B. Browne
Bowling Green, Ohio
MarkTwain &Company:
Six Literary Relations
Leland Krauth. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2003.
American literature may not have begun
with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as Ernest
Hemingway proclaimed, but Mark Twain satu-
rated the Gilded Age and its literary thinking and
efforts as perhaps no other writer of the time, and
he continues to almost monopolize contemporary
scholarship. Mark Twains personality may have
been driven by two major insecuritieshis feeling
of insecurity at being born on the pioneer frontier
and his subsequent hunger to be allowed into
the halls of the eastern establishment, and his
desire to become wealthy. To try to fulll his
two ambitions, he apparently read everything he
could, knew or knew of nearly all of the con-
temporary authors, and wrote on every subject
that presented him an opportunity to join a new
genre or make money. For example, when A.
Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes stories began to
be published in the United States after 1887,
Twain thought he could do as well or better and
get rich in the process. Unfortunately, he failed in
242 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
this effort as he did in many others. But Twain,
in success or failure, continues to intrigue and
fascinate us.
Though the Mark Twain factory is situated in
the Bancroft Library at the University of Cali-
fornia at Berkeley, others continue to work the
rich MT lode. This volume is an excellent case in
point. Though Twain was a man of the literary
world and could have been paired with any
number of authors he liked, helped, hated, or
otherwise associated with, Krauth has chosen
six pairs: MT and Bret Harte, MT and William
Dean Howells, MT and Harriett Beecher Stowe,
MT and Matthew Arnold, MT and Robert Louis
Stevenson, and MT and Rudyard Kipling. He has
examined the ligature of sentimentality tying the
rst pair, humor the second pair, protest the third
pair, nationalism and Anglophobia the fourth, the
growth from youth to manhood the fth, and
opposing views of imperialism the sixth.
This volume is valuable in casting new light on
Twain, the other authors, and the relationships
between the pairsor in the case of Matthew
Arnold, the very thin line of relationship. The
line, except in the case of Howells, was usually
tenuous and subject to strain and break. It is a
commonplace about Twain that perhaps, with the
sole exception of Howells, it was dangerous to be
a friend of his. Twain was not a safe friend of
himself. This volume helps to demonstrate how
and why. As Krauth says, Pairing Twain with
one fellow writer after another hasperhaps
unsurprisinglysignaled the multiple dimensions
of his creative genius. It has also revealed the
multiple veins of literary strength and weaknesses
in the Gilded Age. Krauths is a revealing and
useful book.
Ray B. Browne
Bowling Green, Ohio
MarkTwain and Medicine:
Any MummeryWill Cure
K. Patrick Ober. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2003.
Mark Twain in his lifetime was an encyclo-
pedia of folk and contemporary human illnesses
and cures; after death, he has become a museum of
human complaints and remedies. In both capa-
cities, he has become a storehouse of humor and
information. His life began in frailness. He was a
sickly child until he was something like seven
years old, and his youth was awash in the
countless home remedies and patent remedies
that preyed on a society that was always close to
sickness and infection. Twain also kept a close
association with doctors (for whom he had no
tolerance and respect because of the continued
illnesses of his wife, Livy, and his daughters Susy
and Jane). He devoted much of his life to chasing
cures for his favorite people and to hatred of the
medical profession, himself, and humanity in
general for not providing the help he needed.
Ober outlines these characteristics of Mark
Twain in thorough detail. In addition, he studies
and analyzes the medical practices of Twains
time, both legitimate and quackish, and the world
of medical needs and medicines ability to provide
them.
But any book about Mark Twain is bound to
be overwhelmed by his personality. So is this one.
Though its subject is nominally Mark Twain and
medicine, it really is about the humor that Twain
used in dealing with medicine and doctors. The
book is therefore a two-strike triumph. It gives us
Twain and his world of medicine. But perhaps in
an unintended success, the book is a hilarious
recapitulation of Twains life in, against, and
humorous treatment of, illness. On this, it is so
successful that one might well have to consult a
physician to cure him or her of the laughter pains.
The pain will be acute, but the pleasure of the
experience will well be worth cost. This book is a
243 Book Reviews
very successful visit to the Mark Twain doctors
ofce.
Ray B. Browne
Bowling Green, Ohio
Marshall McLuhan:
Understanding Me
Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, Editors.
Toronto, Ontario: Toronto Press, 2003.
This collection of eighteen of Marshall Mc-
Luhans lectures and interviews presented chron-
ologically is meant to round out the life and
thought of this remarkable man who was a
leading communication theorist, seer, and phrase-
maker. Edited by his diligent and talented
daughter Stephanie, and David Staines, professor
of English at the University of Ottawa, it will
bring McLuhanism (a term invented by the
French) to the fore once more.
Thirty years ago, Americas phrasemaker, Tom
Wolfe, asked, Suppose he is what he sounds
likethe greatest thinker since Darwin or New-
ton? Wolfe is back in 2003, with a brilliant essay
and prediction. No new communications theorist
will be able to proceed without contending with
McLuhan.
Understanding Me reafrms what many of us
have long known: McLuhan is our Prince of Pop
Think, our electric shocker.
Like most academics, he scorned the new
electronic culture when he was a student and
young professor. The breakthrough came on May
19, 1953, when he was awarded a Ford Foundation
grant to study and demystify the new medium.
From this came his idea of the Global Village and a
new experimental magazine called Explorations. It
helped produce a McLuhan cult. He implied that
he might outgrow the world of print. He never did.
Now, in 2004, we have another McLuhan book.
Students of popular culture will nd the
second selection, entitled mass/popular culture,
of special interest. Its the transcript of a speech
McLuhan gave on October 28, 1960, but it is fresh
and relevant today. He is unabashably optimistic
about the new media, and what would be his most
successful decade. He predicts wholly new
patterns of political power and personal associa-
tion, and having a global scale for the patterns of
tribal life. That style would later get the tag
Global Village. Another memorable line: Be-
gin with the solution of the problem, and then
nd out what steps actually lead to the solution.
Two years later, McLuhan published The
Gutenberg Galaxy, and two years after that,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
These two books brought him international
acclaim.
The fth selection in the book, The Medium
is the Message, nds him, in 1966, punning on
another pithy platitude, the medium is the
message. He imagines the new media involving
the audience as workforce, as with electric
toasters, razors, or electric anything. We are
leapfrogging out of prehistory into posthistory.
McLuhans uncanny ability was (and still is) to
reconceive history as a pageant whose inner
meaning is our metamorphosis through media.
Credit cards replace money. Photographs were
brothels without walls. Movies were the reel
world. Now all information could be shared
simultaneously by everyone. The ancient walls
between people, nations, art, and thought would
come tumbling down. It was his special version of
the Brave New World.
But he never lost his sense of humor. His
ofces at the University of Toronto had green
wall-to-wall carpeting and an orange sign reading:
Inform All the Troops
That Communication Has
Completely Broken Down!
He was a devoted Marx Brothers fan. He liked
to imitate Groucho, whose picture was on his
wall. Suspended from the ceiling was a Latin
inscription:
Causae Ad Invicem Cassae Sunt
(Causes of disputes are decided by the
courts)
244 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
As he grew older, he was drawn more to
religion and the world soul. He had been
converted in his early twenties to Roman Cath-
olicism and the ideas of G. K. Chesterton. They
became ever more important to him as years
passed. He scorned the doom-and-gloom-school
intellectuals Herbert Marcuse, George Orwell,
and Normal O. Brown. McLuhan preferred a
medieval mystic who believed that all would be
well, and all manner of things would be well.
He never sought popularity, but it followed
him. Even disc jockeys on radio liked to say,
Whatcha doin, Marshall McLuhan? He was the
in oracle of new media, pop daddy, message
man, the gee-golly guru.
The last article in Understanding Me, his last
taped lecture, was delivered at York University in
1979. Having praised technology, he warns that
we are completely unequipped to cope with its
destructive consequences. He offers a new survi-
val approach to understanding any new technol-
ogy, which he calls Laws of the Media. These are
observations on the operation and effects of
human artifacts on humans and society. He says
he is not offering any solutions.
On September 26, 1979, McLuhan suffered a
massive stroke. He regained physical mobility,
but never his ability to read and write. On the last
day of 1980, he died peacefully in his bed. What
his new status and inuence will be in the new
century we must wait to see. Tom Wolfe may have
asked just the right question after all: What if he
was right?
Marshall Fishwick
Virginia Tech
Mirror Mirror: AHistoryof the
Human LoveAair with Reection
Mark Pendergrast. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
Poor Narcissus, that legendary beautiful Greek
youth who fell in love with his own image in the
water, pined away, and died. But he lives on as
narcissism: self-love and sexual excitement
through admiration of oneself. And we have
millions or mirrors that have taken the place of
water.
Mark Pendergrasts interesting book explores
this, claiming that the history of mirrors is really
the history of lookingwhat we imagine, how we
think, and what we yearn for. He traces the
centuries-long history of people since prehistoric
times peering into the attering glass. They all
say, Is that really me?
The overarching theme of his story is that as
human beings, we use mirrors to reect our
contradictory nature. On one hand, we want to
see things as they really are, but on the other
hand, we want the mysteries to remain mysteries.
While yearning for the whole ungarnished truth,
we also revel in imagination, illusion, and magic.
Thats why mirrors are so essential and irresistible.
J. K. Rowling, in her Harry Potter novels,
gives us the Mirror, or Erised, which shows us
the deepest, most desperate desires of our
hearts. Thats what mirrors are all about. What
are we seeking in the mirror? The great poet
William Butler Yeats gave us an apt answer: Im
looking for the face I had/Before the world was
made.
Pendergrast has spent considerable time and
effort on the history of mirrors. Early articial
mirrors date from 6200 BC, and primitive
Egyptian mirrors from 4500 BC. Bronze, made
by mixing copper and tin, brought the bronze
sword, efcient warfare, and improved mirrors.
By 1000 BC, humans were making mirrors all
over the world. Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and
Aztecs were especially successful in creating
them.
Sex keeps turning up in the history of mirrors.
Hostius Quadra, for example, a decadent Roman,
built a giant metallic concave mirror in which his
orgies were magnied. As for animals, dolphins
recognize themselves in mirrors and will engage
in sex play for hours in front of them. If they
drift out of view, they break off and reposition
themselves so that they can view their own sexual
activities.
245 Book Reviews
The rst ancient opticians were priest-shamans
who were highly revered for their magic. Leonardo
da Vinci was devoted to mirrors and wrote, The
mirrorabove all, the mirror is our teacher. He
used at mirrors to critique his paintings rather
than to create them. The mind of the painter, he
wrote in his notebook, should be like a mirror.
Magic and science nally split in the Renais-
sance, but not entirely; both remain central to
both subjects right up to our own day. We love to
look into the mirror and to dream.
A great breakthrough came under Isaac New-
ton, who ground the mirror to make the rst
reecting telescope, dissecting light to create
modern optics. In 1671, Newton allowed Isaac
Barrow to show his telescope to the Royal
Society, where it caused a sensation and opened
a whole new optical era.
The nineteenth century was the century of
light. It was studied, divided, redened, reected,
and expandedall of this so it could help explain
Albert Einsteins relativistic universe.
The book moves quickly into the history of
astronomy, which is the story of larger and more
elaborate mirrors. We also deal with X-ray
astronomyusing mirrors that look like tubes
astrophysics, and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Touted as the worlds nest for years, it was
proved defective, but opticians were able to
design small mirrors that recorrected the errors,
and now Hubble is working well as we look even
deeper into outer space.
By the time one nishes Pendergrasts book, it
begins to sound like the history of civilization. He
spent years researching and traveled around the
world gathering data. He encountered the Biami
tribe in New Guinea, who had never seen a mirror
before 1975, yet within days, they were using
mirrors to groom themselves. There is a message
here. Mirrors are magic.
How have mirrors changed society? They
have made us too vain, too self-conscious, and at
the same time, made us forget how magical
mirrors really are, Pendergrast concludes.
I hope my book proves a bit of corrective.
Indeed it does. And it lets me rethink what role
mirrors play in my life and those of my friends
and family. Our houses and walls are bedecked
with mirrors. We look into them every day. How
do I look? Too much make-up? Am I wearing the
right clothes? Mark Pendergrasts witty and lively
history also prompts me to recall an anonymous
French proverb:
The World is full of fools, and he who
would not see it should live alone and smash
his mirror.
Marshall Fishwick
Virginia Tech
Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy,
and the Marriage Crisis
David R. Shumway. New York: New York
University Press, 2003.
We swim in a warm oozy sea of Romantic
Love. All you need is loveThe Beatles. Love
Me TenderElvis. Love makes the World Go
RoundEvery new pop hit. The Ants in My
PantsCole Porters sad admission.
David Shumway, a professor at Carnegie
Mellon University, plunges into that oozy sea to
give us a dialectical analysis of the modern
discourses on love and intimacy. He draws from
literature, movies, pop music, self-help books, and
other texts, ending up arguing that there is a
modern crisis in the meaning and experience of
marriage. That we already knew. Unfortunately, he
gives us the diagnosis but offers no real solution.
How do we learn about love? About how to
love and be loved? He gives us new insights into
these puzzling questions. Love seems to be a
never-ending game of musical chairs, with no
solution. Why is Mr. Right just out of sight? Are
you just screwing? Can real love really have a
chance? Dr. Shumway seems to question it. In our
time, intimacy has become the most signicant
refuge from the social fragmentation of late
capitalism, but it is a purely private refuge, and
thus no solution to the degradation of society.
246 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
Although he never asks the question, it is well
worth raising: What part has popular culture
played in all of this? Has our new overmediated
age turned love itself into a kind of ready-made
commodity? Has love become another victim of
overkill, slapstick, and hype?
Romantic ction usually ends with the mar-
riage. This was true for generations. In the 1930s,
a new Hollywood genre emerged in which the
action often takes place after marriage. This the
author called the screwball comedy, chock full
of fast talk, zany situations, and a romantic plot.
These comedies might be called comedies of
remarriage. They are described in Chapter 3
under the heading Marriage as Adultery.
An example is The Philadelphia Story, in
which Katharine Hepburn loses her metaphorical
virginity to Jimmy Stewart. Screwball comedies
take the struggle for power within courtship as a
comic premise; they reach a zenith in Casablanca
and Gone with the Wind. We all remember how
Rhett (Clark Gable) nally gets so exasperated
with Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) that he dismisses her:
Frankly, I dont give a damn.
Then along came the soap operas. They are
televisions versions of the womens picture,
counseling courage in the face of loss rather than
the hope that Hollywood romance had usually
engendered. They gave us a steady stream of
courtship, marriage, adultery, and breakup. Many
tears were shed.
While he refuses to buy the easy solutions that
many romantic stories favor, Shumway con-
cludes that, despite the commodication of
romance, there remain spaces in which the market
does not hold sway. What is needed now, he
concludes, is to translate the high value that
intimacy places on relatedness beyond the in-
timate sphere to relations in communities and
society at large (232).
Well documented and footnoted, Modern Love
will be both amusing and provide information
to anyone who thinks about relationships. Dont
we all?
Marshall Fishwick
Virginia Tech
Neil GaimansThe Sandman and
Joseph Campbell: In Search of the
Modern Myth
Stephen Rauch. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press,
2003.
People live by the mythology of their time.
Myths describe and illustrate deep structures of
reality. They use dreams and imagery to express
the eternal in terms of the temporal. Whenever we
reach the point at which rationalizations can go
no further, myths take over. This short but
provocative book proves this, showing how
popular culture is delving ever deeper into
American culture and the modern psyche.
The Sandman is a series of graphic novels by
Neil Gaiman, most of which were written in the
1990s and published in New York by DC Comics.
The Sandman is the story of Morpheus, the King
of Dreams, also called Dreams. He is one of the
Endless, a set of seven beings who rule the
universe: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction,
twins Desire and Despair, and Delirium, who was
once Delight.
They are the reason that we have gods, because
they serve as the constituents of consciousness. In
Gaimans world, the gods come from dreams. The
seventy-six issues of The Sandman all describe
Dreams journey to become human. The entire
run of The Sandman is collected in ten volumes,
plus an eleventh book that was not in the original
run.
In that journey, many of the old labels (fairy
tales, sagas, romances, ballards) are renamed, but
not the old yearnings and hungers that they
embody. Old terms are molded into new images
and creeds. Clearly, Neil Gaiman is updating the
basic truths in Platos Ideas, Kants Categories,
Jungs Archetypes, and McLuhans Media. Thus
has the idea of the few been put into general
currency, even into popular culture? Our mythol-
ogy in the new millennium may be nearer to
enduring old truths than we realize.
247 Book Reviews
The goal of Rausch in this rst book-length
examination of the parallel work of Neil Gaiman
and Joseph Campbell is to open new windows of
understanding. Professor Campbell died in 1987,
just when The Sandman was getting off the ground.
Campbells masterpiece on the Mythic Dimension
was published in 1967. At that time, Campbell was
a world authority in myth-dream study, as he has
remained ever since. What in Gaimans work is
derived from the deceased Campbell?
Primarily, Campbell believes that there are
Four functions of mythologythe mystical,
cosmological, sociological, and the psychologi-
cal. Gaiman has crafted a myth in which the
Endless are the main characters, all of whom work
in dialogue with Campbells four functions. The
body of Rauchs book examines how The Sand-
man serves as a modern myth in a time of despair
and alienation. The greatest lesson of The Sand-
man is that no matter what happens, hope will
continue to exist. This thought comes directly
from Campbell.
They both stress the importance of the artist and
storytelling. The great function of the artist,
Campbell writes, is the mythologization of the
environment and the world. Match this with a Neil
Gaiman quotation: We have the right and obliga-
tion to tell the old stories in our own ways, because
they are true stories, and they must still be told.
Gaiman afrms this kinship by resetting the
series in dreams and making Dream, the central
character, the embodiment of dreams. At the same
time, he relates his work to Carl Jungs idea of the
collective unconscious, from which both myth and
dreams spring. Gods and heroes exist nowhere
except in the soul of man. The psyche contains all
of the images that have ever given rise to myth.
Rauch has given us a bold and original book,
attempting to open a new way to study American
culture: comparing the popular and elite, the
comics and the classics. It is not entirely convin-
cing. There are gaps in the argument and compar-
isons that one questions. Much more work remains.
But the idea that the way has been lost in the
modern (and postmodern) world is valid. And if
Rauch is right when he asserts that The Sandman
may suggest how we can reclaim our emotion in
an emotionless age, the Age of Anxiety, by
simultaneously addressing the heart, mind, and
soul, this book itself might become a classic.
Marshall Fishwick
Virginia Tech
The Persistence of Medievalism:
NarrativeAdventures in
Contemporary Culture
Angela Jane Weisl. New York: Palgrave, 2003.
In both concept and development, this study is
an eye-opener. It brings the dark shadow of
medievalism with a little new sunshine into our
world, and it ties contemporary society to the past
in a way that we might not like. If we believe that
we have learned enough from history not to be
forced to relive it, we will be surprised to discover
that in the curve of history, we never left home.
Medievalism, as we all know, was a literature in
which, as one wag has said, there was just one
damn thing after another. So repeats Weisl. Her
thesis is that there was very little division between
so-called elite and everyday culture, though the
only records we have come from the comments of
the elitethose who could writeeven though
the various kinds of commercial and folk singers
plied their music. And, as Weisl asserts, elite and
popular culture, sharing the same experiences and
artifacts, began to mix and counterbalance each
other. She throws in another element: In the
Middle Ages, both halves of each pair [high and
low cultures] are in interaction with each other;
just as the cultural elite participates in popular
culture and popular culture inuences high
culture, so, too, do oral and written cultures
interact within the body of medieval literature.
She introduces her study of present-day culture
with the reading of it: If the real Middle Ages are
divided from us by time, distance, and language,
popular culture provides us a contemporary
Middle Ages from which we are not separated,
248 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
to which we respond in all the immediacy of the
present. Thus The New Middle Ages may not be
what or how we study, but where we live.
She reads the moss of the Middle Ages,
hanging most conspicuously on such important
aspects of our cultures as sports and movies:
icons, legends, myths, heroes and hero worship.
In icons, we are all too familiar: baseballs that
broke records, gloves that caught baseballs that
set records, the clothes that we touch in an effort
to benet from contagious magic, any fragment of
Marilyn Monroes wardrobe, and on and on. In
Star Trek and Star Wars, Weisl sees the Medieval
Romanceand so on in present-day reenactments
of the phenomena of life and how we face and
deal with them, though some of us (in fact, most
of us) might well get our modern backs up over
her conclusion that Star Wars offers up a debased
version of the perpetuity of the Arthurian story
for our own time. Readers of the Arthurian stuff
will remember some mighty debased versions in
Medieval times.
Nevertheless, although we might disagree with
some of the authors evaluations, we will greatly
appreciate the new insights that she has raised
about the continuity of cultures and our ties to the
past. Although we might not remember history
and be forced to repeat it, past literature is the
marrow in our bones, and we cannot forget it.
Weisl examines that marrow very thoroughly.
Ray B. Browne
Bowling Green, Ohio
Reconstructing Dixie:
Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in
the Imagined South
Tara McPherson. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003.
This is a sad book because it pokes into so
many cracks of human nature. Fortunately,
however, it allows the truth to gush out. As Lord
Acton, among many others, observed a century
and a half ago, power, as it grows, tends
correspondingly to grow in corruption. So does
privilege, and this book, though nominally about
the role of women in the reconstruction of the
South, is really the tale of how human nature, this
time US culture from the earliest days, kept the
remembered joys of the past banked against the
chill of the present. Of course, as Shirley Abbot in
Womenfolks (1983) observed, Everybody must
learn this lesson somewhere: that it costs some-
thing to be what you areand to keep from
sliding back down the slippery slope into former
misfortune.
This study is an account of the complex subject
of women in any society and how they conceive
of themselves and how men treat them. Like
men, they take every opportunity to capitalize on
their possibilities. As Nina Baum observed and
McPherson agrees, they are southern culture.
As McPherson treats them, Reconstructing Dixie
repeatedly returns to the southern lady as a
central player in the aggrandizement of Dixie, a
gure who, along with her younger counterpart,
the belle, served as a linchpin of nineteenth-
century revisionist versions of the Old South, in
which the Lost Cause ideology of southern
nationalism conveniently fused the gure of the
southern lady onto a celebration of the rebirth of
a nation defeated. Much of the lifeblood of this
concept of genteel America, ironically, was the
popular culture that was fed by a fallen and
depressed elite, bewitched by the falsity of the
pleasures of living in the good old ways or serving
those who did.
Perhaps McPherson too easily overlooks the
surges of democracy that were effecting the return
to gentility, but evidence points to a gargantuan
ght between the mighty forces. McPherson sees
pictures of the assumed reality and the interpreta-
tion of that reality in which she calls the
linticularthat is, the presence of the photo of
reality superimposed on the picture of the
imagined. Sometimes the two make for extra-
ordinary interpretations. The complex study
demonstrates well how a nation is shaken when
249 Book Reviews
two equal forces battle for control. We think we
know the outcome, but sometimes McPherson
throws our certainty into some doubt.
Pat Browne
Bowling Green, Ohio
The Reconstruction of theWhite
SouthernWomanhood,1865--1895
Jane Turner Censer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2003.
Although virtually every rock in Civil War
history has been turned face up to reveal the
cultures underneath it, some investigations still
have not examined closely enough the details of
the complexities hidden there. Some, like this very
close examination of the daily dreams and lives of
the so-called elite ladies of that traumatic period
just after the Civil War, add much compelling
reality to the changes in the lifestyles of the
period.
Censer goes more deeply and exhaustively
than most other predecessors into the diaries,
letters, daybooks and other records. There she
nds old and new women looking backwards
and sometimes reluctantly forward to what life
will mean when they are no longer elite and
privileged but relying upon their own resources.
Censer divides her study into six sections dealing
with: (1) the new consciousness of womanhood
by women; (2) the emerging domesticity forced
by the war; (3) property ownership; (4) womens
dealings with the inherited property and dreams
of the old plantation; (5) women emerging into
the workplace, mainly as schoolteachers; and (6)
the growing number of women writers, some
looking back at the good old days and some
seeing reality around them. For those of us with
literary bones, the chapter on the old literature
uncovered is perhaps the most informative, for it
opens a book that, for one reason or another, has
remained closed except for the specialist.
Censer should perhaps have named her book
the Democratization of White Womanhood, for
the Reconstruction washed away the privileges of
those who thought themselves elite and brought
those people into the river of the growing middle
class. As Censer says, The kind of activities that
involved women from the old elite can be further
interpreted as having played a crucial role in the
forging of a new white southern middle class and
in enunciating its ideals. But the growing middle
class has not only a leading edge but also a drag
edge, and the transformed white southern middle
class also participated in the development of
another attitude in the South: In the 1890s,
southern women of all classes became more
thoroughly enmeshed in the racial tragedy that
came to characterize the twentieth-century
South, she concludes. Her conclusions and the
evidence on which they are based are solid and
emerge from a capital work on more details of the
Civil War.
Pat Browne
Bowling Green, Ohio
Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex,
Science, and U.S. Imperialismin
Puerto Rico
Laura Briggs. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002.
Following anthropologist Ann Stolers sugges-
tion that discourses of sexuality be understood as
tools of empire, Laura Briggss Reproducing
Empire integrates aspects of postcolonial theory
and subaltern studies into a study of an interesting
aspect of American history. In this interesting and
accessible book, Briggs explores how discourses
of sexuality and reproductionprostitution, birth
control, eugenics, sterilization, and overpopu-
250 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
lationbecame the battlegroundsymbolic and
realfor the meaning of the U.S. presence in
Puerto Rico (51).
Briggs lays out her case chronologically, rst
surveying the global history of imperialist sex
before proceeding to examine the different
discourses prominent in Puerto Rico at different
times. She examines in turn the politics of
prostitution, early birth control, the development
of the birth control pill, and sterilization in Puerto
Rico, before nishing with an examination of
post-World War II discourses of the immigrant
Puerto Rican family in the United States. Briggs
argues that these varied discourses are connected
in complicated and mutually constructive ways.
For example, sterilization in Puerto Rico is
explored as intimately tied both to these other
discourses and to Puerto Rican poverty, econom-
ics, nationality, and the contested meanings of US
intervention.
Throughout Reproducing Empire, Briggs in-
sists on the agency of Puerto Rican women,
leading to perhaps her most provocative claim:
that sterilization in Puerto Rico was distinctly
different from that on the mainland. According to
Briggs, there is no evidence that there was a
repressive campaign to force sterilization upon
Puerto Rican women, and that some mainland
feminists reiterated the colonialist move via the
inappropriate projection of mainland experience
upon Puerto Rico (159).
Although Briggs has been tremendously inu-
enced by the work of Gayatri Spivak and Homi
Bhabha, Reproducing Empire is much more
accessible than some other works inuenced by
postcolonialism (herein unnamed). One warning
is merited, however: some readers may nd the
textual results of her focus on discourse frustrat-
ing, for although Briggs draws upon the same
sources as more traditional history, her approach
is a rhetorical analysis of the authors rather than
facts. Readers who, for example, insist on
knowing if Salvarsan (a treatment for syphilis)
was effective will have to read a different book.
Some readers may nd Reproducing Empire more
rewarding if they read her methodological notes
in the epilogue rst.
The inevitable detritus of her methodology
aside, Reproducing Empire is a ne book. How-
ever, I do feel that Briggss nal chapter could
have been stronger. In this section, Briggs argues
that discourses of pathologized Puerto Rican
families inuenced mainland understandings of
both Puerto Rican migrants and African Amer-
icans. Here, however, her carefully nuanced
readings of the discourses surrounding Puerto
Rican womens sexuality give way to a less
convincing examination of the Moynihan Report
and Oscar Lewiss La Vida: A Puerto Rican
Family in the Culture of Poverty. Perhaps Briggs
will expand and elaborate on the ideas that she
describes in this chapter in a later work.
Despite these criticisms, Reproducing Empire
is well-written, accessible, sophisticatedly theo-
rized, and worth a place on many scholars
shelves. Laura Briggs has written much more
than a history of birth control and reproduction
in Puerto Rico (though it is that), and her book
should also be of interest to scholars working on
US imperialism, at theoretical intersections of
postcolonialism and history, on discourses of
sexuality and reproduction, and in the histories
of public health, technology, science, and medi-
cine.
Eric A. Anderson
Bowling Green State University
Searching for Jim:
Slavery in Sam ClemenssWorld
Terrell Dempsey. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2003.
Those of us who continue to ll empty spots
about the world Mark Twain grew up in will nd
this book immensely rewarding. Mark Twain, as
we all know, was a troubled adult and author,
worried by the society in Hannibal, Missouri,
where he grew up, his fathers part in perpetuating
251 Book Reviews
it, and his own acceptance of it as a child. As an
adult, he made many efforts in his works and
personal life to justify his youthful acceptance, to
explain it away, and to try to lay the blame on the
society at large. He did not quite succeed, but he
worked hard at it.
This book goes into great detail about why he
did not succeed in cleansing himself of his past.
His father, successful at nothing in life except
defending his past, was a small slave owner.
Hannibal and Missouri were strongly proslavery.
Because of economic circumstances at times
hardly better than those of black people, Sam
sometimes saw them as inferior beings, sometimes
fellow human beings. When he went to New
York and thereafter to the West, and in so
doing escaped the slave world and became a
member of a larger community that held slavery
as unmitigated evil, Sam wrote about it with great
knowledge and understanding in a language that
made the slaves world exceedingly real because
he had known it since childhood, and in fact
treasured it as the language of a people and
culture.
Dempsey thinks he has pictured the real world:
This book is the story of the real world where
Sam Clemens grew up. His was no Tom Sawyer
childhood. This is the true story of his role and
experiences with slavery that I discovered while
searching for Jim. Here, in the story of Hannibal
slavery, lie the very roots of Mark Twain. In
nding the true Mark Twain, Dempsey searched
through many documents not seen by former
Mark Twain scholars such as Charles Neider,
Dixon Wecter, Louis Budd, and others. For
example, he quotes at great length many of the
popular presss nasty characterizations of black
people in joke and story, which scholars, for one
reason or another, have failed to bring back to our
attention. They help to bring to life the sordid
details of the period. Dempsey nds many
disappointments and some surprises, but his faith
in the real Mark Twain does not waver. He is
especially appreciative of the subtlety of Twains
psychology. At a time when most white people
thought African Americans werent quite as
human as they, he says in summing up the book,
he knew better. This ne book is living proof
that Twain did in fact know better.
Ray B. Browne
Bowling Green, Ohio
Shameless: TheVisionary Life of
Mary Gove Nichols
Jean L. Silver-Isenstadt. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Jean Silver-Isenstadts Shameless: The Vision-
ary Life of Mary Gove Nichols is a meticulously
researched and well-written biography of this
prominent nineteenth-century reformer and her
husband, Thomas Low Nichols.
Nicholss notoriety in the nineteenth century
stemmed in part from her association with the
free love movement, and scholarship that
mentions her in passing generally refers to this
association. Her work in water cure is also well
known and the subject of a number of scholarly
articles. Until now, however, there has not been a
published book-length biography of the woman
whose professional and personal experiences
touched many of the major social issues of
antebellum America.
Silver-Isenstadts book follows Nichols from
her childhood with difcult but supportive
parents, through her rst abusive marriage with
a Quaker, and to the blossoming of her profes-
sional, social, and spiritual life during the period
in which she was married to her second husband,
Thomas Low Nichols. The books early chapters
about Nicholss childhood come largely from her
1855 autobiography Mary Lyndon, or Revelations
of a Life: An Autobiography. In her note on
sources, the author notes the standard academic
resistance to reliance on revised, carefully con-
templated retrospective accounts, but contests
the traditional academic position that auto-
biographies are not reliable as primary sources
252 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
without collaboration of facts from external
sources: Yet, the story one tells of ones own
life may be more useful to understanding the
individual than anything else: it is, at worst, the
imagined and thus wished-for self. If not entirely
trusted as fact, it should at the very least be
included for consideration. In fact, Silver-
Isenstadt has been quite careful to search out
additional source material to round out the
picture that Nichols created of herself, and she
has included information from later works by
Thomas Low Nichols and others that offer some
conrmation of facts, if not the typical unpub-
lished manuscriptsletters and diaries that histor-
ians prefer to use (30910).
Yet, not long after detailing these early years,
the biography takes off in a whirl of an
exhaustively researched and painstakingly docu-
mented retelling of the life of an extraordinary
woman. Silver-Isenstadt interweaves rich detail of
the cultural history into the narrative, pausing
periodically to offer several paragraphs of infor-
mation such as the history of water cure or a brief
biography of other prominent gures like Sylve-
ster Graham or Margaret Fuller, making clear
Nicholss central position in the social, cultural,
and intellectual interests of her era.
The early chapters of the book occasionally
read as if the writer were making a few too many
educated guesses at the motivations of Nichols
and reactions of those around her to the things she
was doing. For example, in the discussion of
Nicholss acquaintance with writer and editor
Alonzo Lewis and her attempts to begin her own
school, Silver-Isenstadt indicates that Lewis may
have encouraged Marys desire to start her own
school, and regarding his children, perhaps they
attended Marys school (italics added). Such
speculations provide an interesting contemplation
about further connections among nineteenth-
century gures, but seem unnecessary and out
of the blue.
Once the book reaches the point at which
Mary falls in love with and marries Thomas Low
Nichols, it becomes a biography of the couples
life and work together. Indeed, at times, Marys
voice seems to be overshadowed by her hus-
bands. Although the two wrote, edited, and
published both together and separately, Thomas
was more prolic in nonction article and book
writing, and Silver-Isenstadt tends to rely more
heavily on his publications than Marys for
articulation of their positions. Occasionally, this
weighs down the second half of the book, and the
reader wonders when we might get back to
the life of the title character, or in fact, whether
the book would have been more accurately titled
for both Mary and Thomas.
In short, this biography of two important and
infamous reformers of the nineteenth century
makes a rich contribution to the study of
American history and culture.
Annemarie Hamlin
La Sierra University
TelevisionWomen fromLucy to
Friends: FiftyYears of Sitcoms and
Feminism
Lynn C. Spangler. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
Lynn Spangler has written a thorough, well-
researched, and lively account of how women
have been portrayed in television situation come-
dies over the past fty years in her new book,
Television Women From Lucy to Friends: Fifty
Years of Sitcoms and Feminism. Offering a
decade-by-decade analysis of different television
shows that prominently featured women in their
weekly plots, Spangler demonstrates how situa-
tion comedies both reected and responded to
womens changing social roles. The virtues of this
book are many. Spanglers writing is clear and
accessible, oftentimes funny and poignant as she
describes the conicting roles that female char-
acters have played in situation comedies over the
past ve decades. Second, Spangler is unabashedly
enthusiastic about the subject of women in
popular culture and is able to convey her sense
253 Book Reviews
of enthusiasm to the reader. This is not to say that
she does not realize that some may consider this
subject matter to be somehow trivial, especially in
light of 9/11. She reectively writes, While
situation comedies and our relatively privileged
lives in watching them may seem trivial in light of
9/11 and the distress around the world, they are a
part of who and what we are, and we need not
apologize. Reecting on who and what we are and
how we got here is important and what this book,
in its own way, is about. Thus, while acknowl-
edging how the analysis of situation comedy
might not be considered a serious area for
reection, Spangler makes an excellent case that
analyzing these cultural artifacts can precisely
tell us a great deal about who we are, and
perhaps even more critically, how others around
the world have perceived us through the images
that these shows promulgated.
After outlining the various theoretical perspec-
tives that scholars have adopted to explore the
nature of humor and the role of the media in our
lives, Spangler settles on adopting a cultural and
feminist perspective to understand how situation
comedies reected changing norms about women.
For Spangler, a feminist cultural analysis consists
of both attending to the larger political and social
events of the time and trying to understand how
womens roles on television reected these social
changes. This kind of analysis is achieved through
a discussion of the plots of these shows and a
character analysis of the women characters
especially.
What Spangler nds is that there is indeed a
relationship between the larger sociopolitical
events of the period and the humorous portrayal
of women and womens life situations in the
situation comedies studied. Although she does not
try to do a kind of one-to-one mapping of large-
scale events onto individual portrayals of women,
she is able to tease out the manifest and the
latent meanings that underlay these shows,
meanings that suggest that situation comedy was
in fact used as a kind of arena to play out the
larger social struggles occurring during these
periods. Her strategy is thus to do a kind of
content analysis of specic shows of each period
and to look at how the female characters
embodied the tensions of that period with respect
to womens changing roles.
Although Spangler does not engage in her own
audience study of how actual women responded
to particular shows, she does arguably provide the
groundwork for others to do so by rst mapping
out the relationship of the shows to larger social
transformations occurring for women. Further-
more, she helps to demystify the process of
analyzing media by inviting her readers to use
these texts as a means to engage in a kind of self-
analysis as historical subjects who are them-
selves arguably living through transitional periods
for women. She describes the purpose of her
book:
The following chapters are not meant as a
denitive interpretation of women in situa-
tion comedy over the past half century, but
as an invitation to reminisce, to think about
your own interpretations and how such
characters have inuenced your life, to talk
about them with others, and perhaps more
important, to reect on where we should go
from here.
It is within this self-reexive turn that Span-
glers work may be of most value to its readers,
for Spangler does not shy away from asking why
it is that women can love images of themselves
(often fantastic and unreal images) that may be
considered regressive, particularly in hindsight.
Spangler asks herself this question, both explicitly
and implicitly throughout the book, and it reaches
its most vocal level in her early discussion of I
Love Lucy, in which she describes in detail the
occasional scenes of domestic violence and the
pervasive image of Lucy as housewife in the
program. Spangler resolves this dilemma only
provisionally by exhorting her readers to engage
in their own self-analyses of why these texts are
so pleasurable to us, even fty years later:
Should we hate I Love Lucy because it
prescribes the role of housewife for women,
or should we love it because Lucy continu-
ously resists that narrow denition of who
she should be? The answer could be both or
neither. What is important is that we explore
254 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
these characters and their stories, and reect
on their impact in our lives. We can also
laugh and enjoy the carnival of images.
Spangler is on strongest ground when she is
raising these kinds of self-reective questions and
when she focuses on her own readings of the
television shows themselves. Her arguments are
somewhat less steady when they reach too far into
outlining specic historical events in order to
make the broader sociological point that televi-
sion occurs within larger social events of the era,
or that television serves as a kind of escape from
these larger social problems. For example, Span-
gler writes in her conclusion, In the 1990s and
into the early twenty-rst century, we have
witnessed a lot of violence with Operation Desert
Storm, war in Iraq, school mass killings, and
terrorism. Sitcoms have been a bright spot,
however. Home Improvement introduces fem-
inist Jill Taylor, married to Tim, the Tool Man.
Tim is the grunting wild man that Jill has to tame
(or at least bring back to civilization in one
piece). In this quote, there is a big jump from a
description of a troubled decade to a brief
description of a television show, to the point that
the program served as a bright spot. By
comparison, in books such as Where the Girls
Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media
(1995), author Susan Douglas makes a more
conscious effort to connect these larger social
phenomena to specic media texts, helping the
reader to understand better the relationship of
these texts to the cultural politics of the era. This
brief criticism aside, Spanglers book is effective in
offering a chronicle of how situation comedies,
through precisely their sense of carnival and
upending of social mores, served as a reection
of womens roles during these different periods
and may have themselves played a cultural role in
subverting these very roles.
Margaret J. Tally
Empire State College
Wedding Dress Across Cultures
Helen Bradley Foster and Donald Clay Johnson,
Editors. New York: New York University Press,
2003.
How a culture acts out the wedding ceremony,
portraying the deep connection and respect for its
inheritance and its faith in the future, is told in a
compelling variety of observations in Wedding
Dress Across Cultures. As I read this collection of
essays by various scholars sharing their experience
and knowledge of wedding rituals practiced by
societies around the world, I was intrigued by the
similarities underlying the different traditions and
how weddings articulate the ways in which a
society is interconnected to its past and present.
Each of the fourteen essays speaks of a
communitys story and its creativity and determi-
nation to represent itselfsometimes even recre-
ate itselfin a rapidly changing world, linking
back to a heritage that may or may not be
remembered accurately. In their essay, Lombuso
S. Khoza and Laura Kidd tell about the Swazi
culture in southeastern Africa and the absence of
written records: Oral transmission of cultural
history and traditions has, along the way, been
tweaked and customized to accommodate social
changes. They later add, Traditions within a
culture are never static because circumstances or
events cause them to change. The wedding
dressencompassing all its accoutrementsnot
only tells the story of uniting a couple in marriage
but also acts as a distinct barometer of a cultures
history.
The many intricate relationships of a culture
are expressed in the bridal costume and can be a
source of pride and status for a family and
community. In the books essay, Marriage and
Dowry Customs of the Rabari of Kutch: Evolving
Traditions, Eiluned Edwards states, The occa-
sion of a wedding provides a showcase for the
womens artistic prowess and vividly illustrates
the communitys coherent sense of aesthetics. But
these textiles constitute far more than the simple
255 Book Reviews
material assets of the Rabari, they also embody
the spirit and substance of the community.
Symbolism through costumetechniques for a
community to declare its valuesis part of the
inherent nature of weddings and shows up in
each essay. Donald Clay Johnson speaks of the
wedding traditions in Gujarati, a state on
the western coast of India, and the custom for
the bride to wear two different saris within the
wedding ceremony to symbolically portray the
transition of the bride from her natal home to her
husbands family. The rst one worn is con-
sidered the last garment she receives from her
parents. Then, during the ceremony, her mother-
in-law gives her a sari which serves as a visible
symbol that her new family will always take care
of her.
A theme that moves through all weddings,
from a state of subtle innuendo to that of
preoccupation, is the wish for fertility and how
the wedding represents the continuity of life and
the connection to lifes cycle in nature. This is
shown in the elaborate embroideries of the Rabari
of Kutch, which cover the blouse of the newly
married woman with phallic and oral symbols
blessing and encouraging a womans latent
fecundity. Implicit in the styling and decoration
of her blouse is a womans future role as a
mother.
The masquerade quality of the wedding
ceremony and the transforming nature of bridal
rituals are seen in ancient and modern versions.
The pageantry of the wedding can be a time to act
out our fundamental desires through costume and
movement. In Theresa M. Winge and Joanne B.
Eichers essay, they observe the trend in some
parts of American culture of having theme
weddings, offering a freedom of expression
perhaps not available in what the couple may
view as formula weddings or those that society
would consider traditional or the norm.
The book is rich in observations of the
interaction of communities in diverse parts of
the world and how they grapple with the
juxtaposition of ancient and current customs:
how to honor the past and not alienate the new
generation, and how to express freely the integrity
of their heritage within a world encroaching on
that delicate sensibility. Cyd Martin explores the
ways that Northern Alaskan Inupiag brides are
asserting claims to tradition and ethnicity by
constructing wedding atikluks, blending what
would appear as incongruent ingredients. It is the
current wedding fashion for these nineteenth-
century indigenous atikluksa parka-style dress
or jacketto be made out of Euroamerican
inuenced fabrics such as satin and lace, yet worn
with caribou and sealskin boot-like kamiks. As a
culture courageously holds on to the life-afrm-
ing rites of passage that deepen their relationship
with each other and their sense of community and
the distinctions that make it unique, they develop
creative ways to adapt.
Wedding Dress Across Cultures shows that the
wedding ritual illuminates more nuances of hu-
man nature than any other rite of passage. In her
essay Gender, Identity and Moroccan Wed-
dings, Cynthia Becker says, Although the
everyday dress of the various groups in the
Talalet is becoming more and more similar,
weddings serve as occasions when the Ait
Khabbash Berbers publicly express their ethnic
identity through dress. And Elyse Demaray and
Melody Keim-Shenk observe in their essay about
a group from southeast Asia with a long history of
migration, Identifying the changes that have
taken place in the use of textiles and dress in
wedding rituals, we show how the Tai Dam have
had to negotiate their expression of ethnic identity
in relation to the cultures where they lived.
The focus of the womens story and the act of
women attending women is woven throughout
the book. In the Moroccan wedding tradition,
after the bride is carefully dressed in a ceremony
the night before the actual wedding, a group of
women sit in a circle surrounding the bride, which
serves as a ritual of protection and provides the
bride with emotional support. Helen Bradley
Foster writes of the past and present Athenian
customs in Greece: Three days before the
wedding, female relatives of the bride made up
the marital bed with the linens hand-embroidered
especially for this purpose. Other essays in the
book speak of women singing special songs to the
256 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
bride, or ritualistically preparing her hair in
elaborate styles, or in the Slavic traditions,
performing the capping ceremonies as Patricia
Williams explains. All are customs that show the
tender and supportive nature of women tending
to women. The role and costume of men is not
ignored in the book, but the essays show that the
occasion of the wedding ceremony is sometimes a
rare moment for a woman to receive her commu-
nitys nurturing attention.
The ceremonial celebration of the bride and
the wedding pageantry that accompany her
denote a process that magnies life, revealing
the intricacy of detail in the costume and
preparations, the intimacy of relating, and the
connection to our true inner selves. Weddings
have the honored position as the community
members grandest declaration of who they are by
showing where they came from, thereby justify-
ing such pomp and circumstance. The act of
returning home many times serves as a means
for the modern generation to reconnect with its
heritage. Donald Clay Johnson says that the
family members who return from abroad to
Gujarati for weddings overwhelmingly dress in
traditional rather than non-Indian or western
clothing for most, if not all, of the wedding
events.
Research has shown that one way people
mark ethnic boundaries and create community is
through distinctive forms of dress and use of
textiles (Eicher and Sumberg 1995; Graburn
1979). The essays in Wedding Dress Across
Cultures eloquently support the premise that
costume for weddings is the most profound and
exquisite way that a society distinguishes itself in
the language of dress. In any part of the world,
wedding ceremonial dress holds a bit of legend,
providing a textual study of human life, revealing
a historical portrayal, and accounting for a
communitys lineage.
Cornelia Powell
Former Owner, Especially for Brides
Bridal Art-to-Wear Shop, Atlanta
cpowell@CorneliaPowell.com
TheWest Wing: TheAmerican
Presidency asTelevision Drama
P. C. Rollins and John E. OConnor, Editors.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003.
The presidency of the United States and its seat
in the Oval Ofce, like any overwhelming power,
is a charge powerful enough to save or destroy the
country and the world. An effort to understand
the White House, its power room, its personnel,
and the president was the 2002 NBC special
entitled The Real West Wing, hosted by Tom
Brokaw. Depending on your politics and perhaps
your knowledge of the politics of Washington,
those in the know called the production truthful
insight or a whitewash.
That conict of opinions continues today and
needs academic analysis and reection, both of
which it gets in this enlightened and knowledge-
able coverage of both angles of the cameras and
producers. The essays ash in four ways: focusing
on issues; language and structure; perceptions of
the documentary; and critical responses. All sides
in some way add light to the documentary. The
cynics among us may nd the most amusing and
most infuriating essays to be those in the last
section. The documentary, for its own purposes,
and reporters and critics, likewise for their
purposes, ing arrows at those in power. Such is
the case here, but not to worry. Power is most
impressive when it is not used. But in a
democracy, it must be used and tested and all
sides heard, though we in the middle ground
always wish for more truth or reason in the
arrows but expect none. A less abused and more
informed public would strengthen, not weaken,
the real West Wing.
The two editors of this volume recognize this
truth and have given four needed approaches.
They stand in the middle, looking and hearing
both ways. In an insightful and comprehensive
introduction, they give a history of the documen-
tary and the furor it raised. They recognize the
257 Book Reviews
human dimensionsfrailties and nastinessof all
participants. Yet, through all the din, their voices
and those of most of the rest of us Americans ring
clear. There is much to be learned if we approach
such issue-laden television as The West Wing in a
thoughtful manner, informed by both historical
scholarship and media analysis that translates the
politics of visual language, they aver. This
collection of essays and the documentary itself
may, as the editors say, reect Americas best
image of itself. If not, that only comments on
human nature. Both are commendable and neces-
sary in an effort to achieve democracy through
our popular culture. We must remember the
words of the nineteenth-century English poet
Robert Browning: Ones reach should exceed
ones grasp or whats a heaven for? In this
splendid effort, the editors grasp almost touches
their reach.
Ray B. Browne
Bowling Green, Ohio
Women in Pants: Manly Maidens,
Cowgirls, and Other Renegades
Catherine Smith and Cynthia Greig. New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 2003
It would seem that no matter what women
wear, their clothes form, shape, and delineate
societys vision of them. Women are bound,
belted, circumscribed, and ultimately judged by
their choice of costume. In the nineteenth century,
womens clothing almost directly paralleled their
role and function in society, weighted down as
they were by as much fabric and constricted by as
much whalebone as they were encumbered by the
moral weight of the Cult of True Womanhood
and bound by the constraints of the home as their
proper sphere of activity. Yet, while Catherine
Smith and Cynthia Greigs Women in Pants
begins with an acknowledgment that most women
participated (more or less) willingly in the nine-
teenth-century social construct of the conven-
tional woman, the rest of the book demonstrates
beyond a doubt that there were also many women
who did not.
Women in Pants is a refreshing and original
examination of the reasons that many women
from the mid-Victorian age to the 1920s broke out
of their stays and donned pants, the clothes of
men. The history of women wearing pants is often
overlooked or ignored in costume history, except
as a highly unusual odditymostly, I would
imagine, for lack of documentation of the wide-
spread appeal of pants for nineteenth-century
women. Smith and Greig set the record straight in
a most compelling and entertaining way by
publishing an enormous and fascinating collection
of early photographs and nineteenth-century
quotations of and about women in pants. The
text works seamlessly with the quotations and
images; it argues that womens transgression of
the social norms in clothing ranged from the
marginally acceptable (as in actresses playing
coveted breeches roles on stage) to the totally
outrageous (as in women who served actively in
the military).
Women in Pants reveals a complex and multi-
layered fabric of opportunities for women to
adopt what Smith and Greig term bifurcated
garments. Smith and Greig trace the history of
women in pants from the false start of dress
reform in the form of bloomers to women
wearing mens clothes to pose as men to earn a
decent living in order to achieve freedom from the
drudgery of pinwork or houseworkor even the
necessity of prostitution. They describe how
many working women and early women athletes
wore pants as functional clothing for hard
physical activity, while others simply made do
with cumbersome and often dangerous womens
garments. But the authors also show how many
women dressed as men just for fun to partici-
pate in events such as mock weddings and
elaborate womens college performances, or to
be photographed with the female objects of their
romantic feelings.
Two insights distinguish this book from the
literature on womens roles in the nineteenth
258 The Journal of American Culture Theme Issue Volume 27, Number 2 June 2004
century. First, the women in pants photographed
posed for a photographer to record a moment in
which they resisted stereotypical female identi-
ties, which indicated either a desire or a need to
preserve their act(s) of transgression for private or
public memory. Second, many of these women
appear to be having so much fun in their rule/role
breaking. They are seen aunting cheeky ges-
tures and atypical behavior as they smoked,
drank, or horsed around. They appear either
happily freed from their restrictive skirts or from
their societal/self-imposed good womanly beha-
vior. Obviously, the bad behavior, imagined wild
freedoms, and societal authority enjoyed by men
was a forbidden fruit for many of these women,
one that was made so much more delicious
exactly because it was forbidden.
The authors make clear that women dressing in
pants might have passed as (marginally) accepta-
ble in certain (mostly) all-female and private
settings, but that women wearing pants in public
places was frowned upon by society at large. The
manly maiden or the third sex was decried by
polite society. Moreover, physical or even in-
tellectual overactivity was thought by many to be
the cause of female madness or neurasthenia, or
even absolute or relative infertility, thus render-
ing a woman lost to her womanly tasks of
caretaking and childbearing. Women in Pants
makes a signicant contribution to the scholar-
ship on the history of the ght for womens rights,
which included a ght for our clothes.
Women in Pants is a serious, well-researched
book. Smith and Greig present a subtle yet precise
analysis of the ways in which various women
wore various kinds of pants for various reasons,
contributing to an already rich debate on womens
roles in the nineteenth century. The book also has
very high production values. It is printed on good
stock in a stunning sepia tone that sets the feel of
the book. The multitudes of rare and fascinating
photographs are placed on pages elegantly de-
signed to resemble the nineteenth century photo
albums from which many of these photographs
were originally taken. The text has a light,
sometimes ironic, and often humorous touch that
invites readers to return to the smiling faces of all
of these women in pants again and again.
Joy Sperling
Denison University
259 Book Reviews