Rating: 
Summary: an american class system?
Review: Though a bit dated, this is a wonderful book (i have the 1989 paperback edition, so i don't know if he has updated the book). I love the tongue-in-cheek humor that Fussell uses throughout the book. Especially dealing with the middle class. You'll find yourself laughing out loud. And the book is surprisingly relevant. You'd think that a 20 year old book about class in America wouldn't be relevant, but there is a lot to be taken from this book. Like I said, it is a bit dated, but any intelligent person (which most of you reading this book are) can make the changes. And after reading most of the book, and you can't seem to figure out which class you belong to, Fussell introduces, in the final chapter, the "X" people. Those that don't belong to any class, or create a category of their own. Yeah, not all "X" people fit all the criteria of Fussell's, but then part of being an "X" person is that individuality, and not necessarily filling every 'criteria.' This is a great book, if not for Fussell's social statement on America, at least for the humor he uses.
Rating:
Summary: A modern classic.......
Review: I am staring at my beaten up copy of "Class" as I write my review, and after eight years, I'm still laughing. I have lost count of how many times I have read it and how many copies I have passed on. I am English, living in Australia, but the same class distinctions seem to exist in most modern day societies......I went bowling once and couldn't stop thinking about this book, I was in stitches.........I am hopelessly middle class, regardless of money and Mr Fussell delivers a reality check in such a way that I enjoyed the slap accross the chops "wake up" call... More please Paul when you're ready
Rating: 
Summary: Can Class become a classic?
Review: Class is a studied, hilarious, yet tongue-in-cheek dissection of the American social class system. It exposes such fundamentally American (and hence, germane) misconceptions on class as the truistic acceptance of class as a purely economical distinction (for the 2 lower classes, anyway). Using an 8 or 9-class structure (by my count), Fussell spares no target from incisive scrutiny. The middle class with its safe, boring, and envious ways is Fussell's central target, but in the course of his attack, he takes working class slobs and upper class snobs prisoner as well. While very funny, readable, and entertaining (check out the illustrations!), Class does, contrary to some overzealous reviewers' desire to bestow overarching approval on the book, feel a bit dated for a younger generation of readers. Although many of its keen observations will stand the test of time, an updated edition, as in any great textbook, is warranted.
Rating:
Summary: You'll Hate it or You'll Love it, but You'll Never Forget It
Review: Bitingly witty and embarassingly well focused look at the main classes within American society. Yes, there is an American aristocracy, but they aren't driving around in Ferraris or living in Beverly Hills. There is even a sort of aristocracy amongst the working class people whom Fussell generally refers to as proles. Fussell's sharp eye has found and catalogued an amazing array of signs that indicate class in America. Try to spot these signs at your next social gathering, or even subject your own living room to the survey at the end of the book (frighteningly accurate way to determine one's class)! This is a book based on pigeon-holing people, and that is probably what most annoyed readers can't stand about Fussell. But class distinctions do exist, like 'em or not. The middle class hope to rise in class by sending their kids to Harvard or Yale, the Proles hope to do the same by getting more money. Lucky "X Class" people don't give a hoot about such climbing, and fortunately more of us are just veering sideways into that final category which Fussell charts as a kind of class alternative. Actually, the book could also be a helpful guide to those with a need to temporarily masquerade as a member of a given class... Unfortunate but true that you will get better service at a jeweler's or other tony shop if you dress not so much "up" but into the highest class you can accurately manage. And if you want to blend in at the truck stop, there are plenty of hot tips to be gleaned from this book. Yes, yes, we should best judge each other only by virtues like honesty and willingness to help, but the book is about class, that dazzling (and now not so mysterious) thing. Not without the odd mistake (I argue that books piled around the living room are not so much a sign of the upper class as an intellect), it is an excellent, juicy little book that will make you either laugh or curse at Fussell and his incisive wit.
Rating: 
Summary: Moderately entertaining, but sloppy and sophomoric
Review: If you're looking for a bitchy and entertaining book that lets you feel superior to the proles, this is it. If you're looking for a book that confuses incessantly quoting _The Official Preppy Handbook_ with research, this is also it, but shouldn't you read the original instead? If you're looking for genuine insight or actual research, keep looking. So many authors in this genre give in to the temptation to equate their personal tastes with signs of social standing, and Fussell is no exception. He heaps praise on the "X people," who sound to me like those hopeless bobos who want to be nonconformists like everybody else. On the other hand, he tips his hand by identifying gays and non-Anglo-Saxons with proles. In places, Fussell does what he accuses the middle class of doing, namely, tripping over his own pretenses. For example, he takes every opportunity to denigrate science and technology and to show his ignorance on those topics (slide rules as late as 1983?). Also, he loves to use French and Latin, but he is less enamored of getting those languages right. Fussell can't even be consistent. For example, whether displaying _Smithsonian_ magazine raises or lowers status depends on the part of the book that one chooses to believe. Finally, where is this Consolata University that he so confidently predicted?
Rating:
Summary: The Hidden Language of American Society...
Review: Reading this book in my mid-20s -- after surviving college and my first few experiments with employment -- I felt as though I had stumbled upon a Rosetta stone of sorts: a complete schema of the underlying language of American society. Fussell's meticulous, razor-sharp, and frequently hilarious dissection of American class distinctions (and the tortured ways in which we all struggle with those distinctions) brought into focus what had previously been -- to my eyes -- a hidden language, or, perhaps, an invisible hierarchy. Although slightly dated in its references, I can't recommend this book more highly. Remember when you were a kid, how crazy the adult world seemed? How myopic and insane grown-ups were? How strange and inpenetrable their customs and culture? Did you ever wish someone would just sit down and explain to you what the heck was going on? Here's a book that explains it all -- with insight, humor, and an acid-tipped sense of irony. Fussell is no snob -- if anything, he skewers the upper classes as gleefully as he mocks the lumpen bourgeoisie. He also provides an escape hatch from the claustrophobic world of status accumulation -- his newly minted X-Class (the inspiration, btw, for Douglas Coupland's Generation X). Very few books change the way you see the world, or, perhaps, allow you to see the world more clearly. This -- for me -- was one.
Rating: 
Summary: Intelligent, but unpalatably nasty
Review: The greatest irony of this admittedly meanspirited but smart little satirical study might seem initially that, in the intervening twenty years since it was published, it has become literally a social climbing guide for status-seeking readers. Many upper-class aspirants still religiously look to it to learn how, for example, to have their suits tailored (no "prole gap" between jacket and neck!) or decorate their living rooms. But perhaps this irony isn't so great after all. Despite the often brilliant (although now dated) observations Fussell makes, the loathing he feels for the middle classes and mockery he shows towards the "proles" really isn't balanced by any similar feelings for the upper classes, or for what Fussell designates as his own class ("class X"). Just as he describes the wealthiest of the wealthy as "out of sight," so is any pointed satire aimed towards them. Worst of all, his argument (like Freudian psychoanalysis or Marxism) is neatly unfalsifiable: any criticism you might make of his argument is neatly explained away on his terms as symptomatic of your own class insecurity, which functions as a kind of false consciousness. It's an exceptionally intelligent book, but too mean-spirited and blind to its own prejudices ultimately to be as trenchant as it means to be.
Rating:
Summary: funny, cruel
Review: Fussell himself admitted that this book was possibly too mean-spirited, and his title points out that it really isn't about class but status. So, he's using the word "class" in the sense of "that dame ain't got no class." And, for that reason, the book is really pernicious, making us think that status is something that actually matters. Fussell may feel that his superior education gives him the right to look down on fat women in stretch pants, but Dick Cheney, with his prole's jutting jaw and crummy degree, still decides the energy policy of the US and gets us into a stupid war, a war incidentally that the likes of Paul Fussell would have been forced to fight in before he got that superior degree.
Rating:
Summary: High Giggle Factor
Review: Author Paul Fussell swings from contempt to sympathy as he observes the behavior of different classes. He writes with a distinctive style as he takes a mostly subjective witty look at what makes a person part of a certain class. One complaint I have is that he does not tell us how he came by his information about different classes. Did he go visit people of different classes for several days and find out about them? Most of the time people stay in their own class and that is the only class they really know without stereotyping. That's why I just view this book as merely his opinion of what sets off one class from another. A reader can read this book and figure out what class he is in. Maybe you will see yourself all over the map as far as class goes, such as having mostly middle class tendencies with a little redneck sneaking out from time to time. I suppose I'm either high prole or middle class with some bohemian pretensions. I fell between the cracks--too educated to be high prole but not professional enough to be middle class. Some things Fussell mentions seem petty as as a class marker. Who really cares what kind of ice cream a person buys as far as a class marker? Some things I wouldn't have guessed about the upper classes such as the point he makes about not praising their furniture or food because it should already be assumed that is the best of the best. Fussell doesn't like the middle classes because they are insecure euphemizing fakes that try to act like they are classier than they really are and they keep pronouncing foreign words wrong, but use them anyway. Fussell is also worried about "prole drift" in which everything in society begins to gravitate towards the tastes of the proles, mentioning the problem of ugly, functional-looking architecture that surrounds us. Fussell mentions a class called "X" which is somewhat similar to bohemians. I think he thinks he is a part of this class and he likes this class because it is the category for people who are trying to escape the class jail. I thought it was a glorified description since escaping a class may just be an illusion and I think bohemians live on its margins of society as social outcasts. Bohos are often so idiosyncratic that can't get along with others in their category--so it's a lonely life.
Rating:
Summary: On the money
Review: Yes. Buy and read this book. Yes, it is over 20 years old, but it remains maddeningly correct, indeed the blueprint for Brooks's Bobos. The terms are somewhat dated but that should not deter the reader. A clever reader may substitute what ever labels she likes; a rose by any other name . . .
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