Tag Archives: consumerism

The World-Ending Fire

Posted on January 3, 2023 by smellincoffee

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry© 2018 Wendell Berry and Paul Kingsnorth360 pages What a way to finish 2022, in reading this superb collection of Wendell Berry’s essays.  Berry has published no small amount of essay collections himself, and … Continue reading →

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How To Watch TV News

Posted on July 3, 2018 by smellincoffee

How to Watch TV New© 1992 Neil Postman, Steve Powers192 pages (2008 edition) Don’t. Well, that was easy.  From television insider Steve Powers and technological critic Neil Postman comes this slim book, How To Watch Television News, which explains how … Continue reading →

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Affluenza

Posted on February 13, 2017 by smellincoffee

Affluenza: the All-Consuming Epidemic© 2001, 2004, 2014  John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas Naylor288 pages In getting and spending, we lay waste to all our powers — so sayeth the poet. Originally published in 2001, Affluenza is a critique of consumerism, … Continue reading →

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The Call of the Mall

Posted on March 21, 2014 by smellincoffee

Call of the Mall: the Geography of Shopping© 2005 Paco Underbill240 pages Paco Underhill wants to take a little walk with you through the local mall, to see it with his eyes- the eyes of  a “retail anthropologist” and marketing … Continue reading →

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A Consumers’ Republic

Posted on November 9, 2013 by smellincoffee

A Consumers’ Republic© 2002 Lizbeth Cohen576 pages What is the meaning of citizenship? To the Romans, and to the early Americans, citizenship was an exclusive state of being that depended on owning land, and so a stake in society. In … Continue reading →

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Free to Choose, Born to Buy (and Left to Die)

Posted on September 24, 2013 by smellincoffee

In the past two weeks I’ve been reading a series of books which connected together despite being on disparate subjects. Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, published in the 1970s, argues for a completely free market — that is, one with … Continue reading →

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Satisfaction Guaranteed

Posted on September 12, 2013 by smellincoffee

Satisfaction Guaranteed: the Making of the American Mass Market© 2004 Susan Strasser348 pages America was born of the frontier, its citizens people who by necessity often manufactured their own household requirements.  This was the case throughout most of the 19th … Continue reading →

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