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tdgor's review against another edition
3.0
Snarky but intriguing. Had he just thought a little bit more about his data, oh, what an interesting book this could have been.
daniell's review against another edition
3.0
This book is about the American dream. Most talk on that idea starts with the thesis “there is an American Dream” and then moves to specific examples. OPD is unique in that it starts in the fray of reality and poses questions like, “does America’s vast prosperity denote an inner deficiency?” and “is there something more than bald materialism going on in the growth of sub and ex urban America?”
He’s sneaky to proceed inductively like this. As I read his examples of wealth and prosperity in middle class America I could not help but feel dizzy and confused. Can anything really be said about wealth that goes beyond description? The pursuit of the aesthetic for the sake of the aesthetic is the accurate way of describing middle class life in America, right?
After presenting all the senseless opulence that can be found in McMansion communities and other New Edens, he goes on to suggest (from whence we get this book’s subtitle) that the impulse to accrue wealth is driven by a deeper impulse to idealize reality, to actuate one’s innate capacity to yield abundance. This is the essence of what he calls the American dream, which serves to present the same old idea in a new fresh way, that the American dream is about more than Better Homes and Gardens and Living Victorian and Martha Stewart and O Magazine and Cigar Aficionado and Motor Trend and Cosmopolitan and other the other Pornography at which Americans will often drool. It more than that. It’s about dreaming for the ideal. This manifests itself in many different ways, but it chiefly takes form in the idea that individuals ought to have the freedom to grasp this opportunity.
He quotes David Potter at one point for an insight that he made in his book “People of Plenty,” “…that everything in America turns into an area for advancement. He pointed out that in the United States, the word “liberty” really means the freedom to grasp opportunity, and the word “equality” also means the freedom to grasp opportunity. He needn’t have stopped there. In the United States, education means opportunity, welfare means opportunity, happiness means opportunity, fairness means opportunity, fairness means opportunity, morality means opportunity, and civil rights means opportunity” (272). And with this opportunity fetish comes the occurrance of an outlier—the country where there is lots of possibility, but where it is also “more miserable to be poor.”
OPD doesn’t really say anything that I didn’t hear in American History, but on the other hand it says a few old ideas in a new, funny way. His depictions of people at colleges, malls and designer __-urban communities are the fruit of his eye for satiric detail. In most ways this is like Bobos In Paradise revisited, applied to the American Dream and its various iterations in modern America.
6.2/10, more if I hadn’t read Brooks before. He does a few things really well and you get most of them in this book.
He’s sneaky to proceed inductively like this. As I read his examples of wealth and prosperity in middle class America I could not help but feel dizzy and confused. Can anything really be said about wealth that goes beyond description? The pursuit of the aesthetic for the sake of the aesthetic is the accurate way of describing middle class life in America, right?
After presenting all the senseless opulence that can be found in McMansion communities and other New Edens, he goes on to suggest (from whence we get this book’s subtitle) that the impulse to accrue wealth is driven by a deeper impulse to idealize reality, to actuate one’s innate capacity to yield abundance. This is the essence of what he calls the American dream, which serves to present the same old idea in a new fresh way, that the American dream is about more than Better Homes and Gardens and Living Victorian and Martha Stewart and O Magazine and Cigar Aficionado and Motor Trend and Cosmopolitan and other the other Pornography at which Americans will often drool. It more than that. It’s about dreaming for the ideal. This manifests itself in many different ways, but it chiefly takes form in the idea that individuals ought to have the freedom to grasp this opportunity.
He quotes David Potter at one point for an insight that he made in his book “People of Plenty,” “…that everything in America turns into an area for advancement. He pointed out that in the United States, the word “liberty” really means the freedom to grasp opportunity, and the word “equality” also means the freedom to grasp opportunity. He needn’t have stopped there. In the United States, education means opportunity, welfare means opportunity, happiness means opportunity, fairness means opportunity, fairness means opportunity, morality means opportunity, and civil rights means opportunity” (272). And with this opportunity fetish comes the occurrance of an outlier—the country where there is lots of possibility, but where it is also “more miserable to be poor.”
OPD doesn’t really say anything that I didn’t hear in American History, but on the other hand it says a few old ideas in a new, funny way. His depictions of people at colleges, malls and designer __-urban communities are the fruit of his eye for satiric detail. In most ways this is like Bobos In Paradise revisited, applied to the American Dream and its various iterations in modern America.
6.2/10, more if I hadn’t read Brooks before. He does a few things really well and you get most of them in this book.
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