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Rating: 
Summary: Nuclear custard.
Review: I saw this title on the publisher's website and it seemed just my kind of book, a strong visual history/nostalgia survey of the white middle-class suburbs in the fifties.
Now, having looked through it several times I find it rather disappointing, it is a very superficial look at the Fifties home. Each room in the house has a chapter plus one each for, Outdoors maintenance and Backyard recreation. The chapters start with a few hundred words introduction then the following pages are ad illustrations and short bits of text that strangely don't really relate to the images on the page. A lot of the illustrations have been cropped from ads and in many cases could have been a lot bigger than they appear.
This publisher's books generally have colored backgrounds to the pages and in this title the background motif are colored strips, on many pages these get as much space as the illustrations which I feel is rather unnecessary, especially where an ad has been reduced too much in size and the text is not readable.
I recently bought a similar book, 'Going Home to the Fifties' by Bill Yenne (IBN 0867195657) which also used illustrations from ads for each room in the house. Like 'Atomic Home' it was a rather generalised view of the times but of the two books I think it is the better one and it certainly has a lot more text. For a better look at homes of the period I can really recommend 'Inspiring 1950 Interiors' by Eugene Moore (ISBN 0764304585), this has hundreds of photos of room sets, created for Armstrong Flooring ads that ran in the big consumer magazines of the period. These rooms reflected a middle-class life style and nicely, the flooring in the photos does not overpower the rest of the room. The other book that covers the period beautifully is 'All-American Ads 50s' by Jim Heimann (ISBN 3822811580) an amazing 960 pages of ads, all beautifully reproduced, and the chapters on the home (Consumer Products and Interiors) have 218 ad pages.
'Atomic Home' is sort of a fun book but unfortunately doesn't come up to expectations so I am still waiting for the coffee-table title about life in the fifties suburbs.
Rating:
Summary: Nuclear custard.
Review: I saw this title on the publisher's website and it seemed just my kind of book, a strong visual history/nostalgia survey of the white middle-class suburbs in the fifties. Now, having looked through it several times I find it very disappointing, it is a very superficial look at the Fifties home. Each room in the house has a chapter plus one each for, Outdoors maintenance and Backyard recreation. The chapters start with a few hundred words introduction then the following pages are ad illustrations and short bits of text that strangely don't really relate to the images on the page. A lot of the illustrations have been cropped from ads and in many cases could have been a lot bigger than they appear. This publisher's books generally have colored backgrounds to the pages and in this title the background motif are colored strips, on many pages these get as much space as the illustrations which I feel is rather unnecessary, especially where an ad has been reduced too much in size and the text is not readable. I recently bought a similar book, 'Going Home to the Fifties' by Bill Yenne (IBN 0867195657) which also used illustrations from ads for each room in the house. Like 'Atomic Home' it was a rather generalised view of the times but of the two books I think it is the better one and it certainly has a lot more text. For a better look at homes of the period I can really recommend 'Inspiring 1950 Interiors' by Eugene Moore (ISBN 0764304585), this has hundreds of photos of room sets, created for Armstrong Flooring ads that ran in the big consumer magazines of the period. These rooms reflected a middle-class life style and nicely, the flooring in the photos does not overpower the rest of the room. The other book that covers the period beautifully is 'All-American Ads 50s' by Jim Heimann (ISBN 3822811580) an amazing 960 pages of ads, all beautifully reproduced, and the chapters on the home (Consumer Products and Interiors) have 218 ad pages. 'Atomic Home' is sort of a fun book but unfortunately doesn't come up to expectations so I am still waiting for the coffee-table title about life in the fifties suburbs.
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