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Title: CLASS : A GUIDE THROUGH THE AMERICAN STATUS SYSTEM by Paul Fussell ISBN: 0-671-79225-3 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.24 (89 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: You'll Hate it or You'll Love it, but You'll Never Forget It
Comment: 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: 4
Summary: X-Man Lays Bare Seldom Seen Social Strata!
Comment: Paul Fussell's Class is an enlightening, and mercilessly funny, if somewhat dated unmasking of the realities of class in America. Fussell is not a social scientist, but a professor of English with a sharp eye and a pen to match. He spares us the doubtful and boring apparatus of the social sciences, offering instead his own unfettered observations supported by a wide reading. He delineates nine classes: top out-of-sight, upper, upper middle, middle, high proletarian, mid-prole, low-prole, destitute, bottom out-of-sight, and a special category he calls "X people". Fussell then fleshes out this taxonomy in chapters dealing with appearance, housing, buying habits, recreation, drinking, reading, education, and language.
Fussell is so acute and dead-on (with some lapses) that I cannot imagine anyone with the slightest degree of self-knowledge reading this book and not experiencing the dawn of recognition, sometimes painfully. He is especially hard on the middle and prole classes. Here I fault him, not for inaccuracy but for a lack of sympathy that would have taken him to a deeper level of understanding and somewhat softened the blows. Fussell, it seems certain, includes himself in the X category, a group of people outside the normal class system. This explains the coldness with which he regards those still caught on the wheel. That being said, the degree of enlightenment Fussell offers is worth the price of his supercilious gaze. While he is not the final word, reading him will greatly help anyone to understand better the reality of class in America. And he is after all, correct: the middle class is the bastion of "psychic insecurity" and envy, and the prole class are fat, gullible and tastelessly dressed. For lack of vision the people perish.
Rating: 4
Summary: Can Class become a classic?
Comment: 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.
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Title: Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America by Nelson W. Aldrich ISBN: 1880559641 Publisher: Allworth Press Pub. Date: October, 1996 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks ISBN: 0684853787 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 06 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Snobbery : The American Version by Joseph Epstein ISBN: 0618340734 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 07 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide by Richard Conniff ISBN: 0393324885 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Lapham's Rules of Influence : A Careerist's Guide to Success, Status, and Self-Congratulation by Lewis Lapham ISBN: 0812992342 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 18 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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