Chasing The American Dream In The Postwar Consumer Culture
221113: this is a world i have never known, a world that even predates my parents, a world i have only known in the abstract- as a cultural tourist. otherwise derided as 'slumming' when i went with a girlfriend to an actual 'truck stop'...
having grown up comfortably upper-middle class, in a suburb, then in an acreage community, where we might have had no indoor swimming pool but three neighbours would- this is a portrayal of another world. the first diner i ever visited is a renovated older one a few doors up the street from my usual coffeehouse, the only time bowling was as part of anthropology club at u, the only trailer i have visited that of a girlfriend's mother but on a small ranch with peacocks, in the mountains...
this is a world, a reality, far from my life, an urban life where people were blue collar, where they were aspiring to middle class respectability and this was so much in consumption of material wealth. this book is kind of a companion to another world, another world i do not know: see below. this makes me think of how much of present culture will be regarded through lenses of nostalgia, through the changes in society, in another sixty or seventy years. great book.[book:Moment of Grace: The American City in the 1950s|175495]