The Conquest of Cool, by Thomas Frank
published 1997 - read 2005

Not-bad cultural history of the advertising and (to a severely less-developed extent) menswear industries in the 1950's and 1960's, with an eye towards challenging some commonly-held conceptions about the general sweep of American society in that period.  Shortly put, Frank takes on the traditional narrative of the 1960s concerning big business - the storyline in which business is a staid, gray monolith that the counterculture threatens to shake up, until the stodgy old business types respond by co-opting the counterculture and suckering the hippies into buying Pepsi, etc.  Frank argues that things weren't that simple - that business itself was undergoing profound changes in this period, in certain ways embracing change before the popular- and counter-cultures.  Advertisers, having gone through their own "Creative Revolution" in the early 1960s, saw the counterculture as a kindred force; moreover, ads trying to co-opt the counterculture to sell to the hipsters were swamped by ads targeted at fogeys and squares.  Advertising, both in its own offices and in its creations, was obsessed with images of youth and new-ness - which may present a cynical marketing scheme, but it's not exactly the sort of cynical marketing scheme traditionally looked for in the 1960s.

When he's laying out these ideas, and other interesting theses (the assertion that the way business saw "Generation X" was almost identical to the way it saw the counterculture is fascinating, for example), Frank sounds clear and insightful.  Unfortunately, the bulk of the book is dedicated to telling and re-telling and re-re-re-telling the saga of the advertising Creative Revolution, with each chapter seemingly starting over and tackling the same period again with different ads and different admen.  The repetitive, badly-edited text obscures the strength of the arguments - heck, even the introduction is overlong and riddled with tangents and redundant examples.  Thus, the book itself is pretty much impossible to recommend, even though some of its key passages would probably be very handy for other writers dealing with this material.

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