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Rating: 
Summary: working class dreams in the consumer paradise
Review: Hurley offers an insightful, thought-provoking, and at times disturbing picture of three emblematic popular institutions of post-war America. While all came out of working class roots and emerged as popular features in the wider popular culture of the 1950s, each industry found different ways to negotiate its relationship with its working class roots and its aspiration for access to a wider mass market. Hurley shows how working class Americans, emerging from the economic trauma of poverty and the Great Depression, sought through consumer culture to redefine themselves as middle class, even as middle class Americans often created new kinds of fashion snobbery as a way of redefining the new aspiring working class/middle class as crass or vulgar. Hurley explores the emergence of the new mass market that emergence with relative working class affluence after the Second World War, while properly noting the limitations of that affluence. He also explores how this new mass consumer market, shaped by advertising constructs of domesticity and family togetherness, both limited, and even excluded women and minorities (especially African-Americans, who continued to be the target of the most vigorous economic discrimination and exclusion) through the 1960s and 1970s, even as the mass market ideal was crumbling under new challenges generated during the 1960s that sprang from many of the impulses unleased by American consumerism itself. This is a fascinating and indeed entertaining work. Yoy can learn a lot about the social and cultural history of diners, bowling alleys, and trailer parks, but beyond that, you can get a valuable insight into some of the larger forces that have shaped who we are as Americans, both for better and for worse.
Rating:
Summary: working class dreams in the consumer paradise
Review: Hurley offers an insightful, thought-provoking, and at times disturbing picture of three emblematic popular institutions of post-war America. While all came out of working class roots and emerged as popular features in the wider popular culture of the 1950s, each industry found different ways to negotiate its relationship with its working class roots and its aspiration for access to a wider mass market. Hurley shows how working class Americans, emerging from the economic trauma of poverty and the Great Depression, sought through consumer culture to redefine themselves as middle class, even as middle class Americans often created new kinds of fashion snobbery as a way of redefining the new aspiring working class/middle class as crass or vulgar. Hurley explores the emergence of the new mass market that emergence with relative working class affluence after the Second World War, while properly noting the limitations of that affluence. He also explores how this new mass consumer market, shaped by advertising constructs of domesticity and family togetherness, both limited, and even excluded women and minorities (especially African-Americans, who continued to be the target of the most vigorous economic discrimination and exclusion) through the 1960s and 1970s, even as the mass market ideal was crumbling under new challenges generated during the 1960s that sprang from many of the impulses unleased by American consumerism itself. This is a fascinating and indeed entertaining work. Yoy can learn a lot about the social and cultural history of diners, bowling alleys, and trailer parks, but beyond that, you can get a valuable insight into some of the larger forces that have shaped who we are as Americans, both for better and for worse.
Rating: 
Summary: Social history along the highway
Review: This is essentially a book of social history, although it brings together the disciplines of economic history, gender studies, architecture, and popular culture. Hurley discusses how diners, bowling alleys, and trailer parks reflected the social values of the 1950s and 1960s. The chapters on the three building types go into excruciating detail; for example, every nuance of diner design and operation is discussed and scrutinized for meaning. The book would have been improved if the author had covered more building types in the same number of pages. Hurley's overriding theme is laudable: On the outskirts of most towns, there is a region that constituted that community's "commercial strip" during the 1950s and 1960s, before America discovered fast food, shopping malls, and big-box stores. Most of us drive through these past-their-prime commercial strips every day, seeing nothing but obsolete buildings. Hurley points out that these obsolete commercial strips are the equivalent of archeological sites, speaking volumes about how family values have evolved during the past half-century.
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