Review by Choice Review
During the past few decades, advertising has been vilified by critics even as its influence expanded, bolstered by mass media. From Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders (1957) to E.D. Hirsh's Cultural Literacy (CH, Jul'87), advertising has been derided as the lowest form of rhetoric, puerile pap aimed at creating a cult of wide-eyed, witless consumers. Here Twitchell offers a refreshing rereading of advertising's power to amuse, entice, and potentially enhance--rather than destroy--modern culture. According to the author, not since the Roman Catholic church has there been an institution "so responsible for conveying not the best that has been thought and said but the most alluring, the most sensitive, and the most filled with human yearning." Twitchell raises advertising to the status of myth, its goal to satisfy a need as spiritual as it is materialistic. The advertising industry employs modern bards, who convey the truths of a culture as they cater to its cravings. Twitchell's thesis is provocative, his prose playful yet direct. Recommended for professional and academic audiences alike, although beware: Twitchell delights in dismissing the "balderdash of cloistered academics." Marxists lacking a sense of humor should avoid this book. P. D. Schultz Alfred University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
In his most recent previous book, Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America (1992), Twitchell decries the onslaught of vulgarity driven by the media, charging that bad taste has driven decorum, sensibility, and aesthetic appreciation out of U.S. culture. But now in ADCULT, he revels in advertising's triumph, failing to make any connection between this and his earlier concern. Here he offers a paean to jingles, slogans, commercials, brands, and advertising icons. Maddeningly, Twitchell seems unable to write a sentence without using some sort of ad slogan. He therein makes his point: advertising is infectious. It has taken over our language and it is our dominant cultural institution. Along the way he traces the growth of advertising and documents its increasing presence, successfully getting the reader to hum along. --David Rouse
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Advertising, argues Twitchell (Carnival Culture), has become the lingua franca of American culture, supplying a common bond that links all Americans. However, he maintains, advertising does not shape our desires, but rather simply reflects our inherent materialism, a view he fails to convincingly support. Twitchell examines the history of magazines, radio and TV in light of the increasing power and prevalence of advertisements, claiming that it is naïve not to expect advertisers to have a growing role in determining the content of the media they virtually subsidize. Twitchell only briefly discusses critics of advertising and mass culture, and while he takes issue with feminists' outrage at cosmetic advertising, he fails to substantially address the work of respected theorists of popular culture such as the Frankfurt School. In Twitchell's opinion, the role of advertising in our culture is comparable to that played by the church in Medieval Europe; and he also compares advertising's cultural centrality to that of art in the Italian Renaissance. While his portrayal of the power of advertising is persuasive, Twitchell fails in his self-consciously provocative attempt to claim that advertisements have a spiritual or aesthetic dimension remotely equivalent to that offered by religion or art. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Let others bray about the evils of commercialism and mourn its helpless victims, Twitchell (Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America, Columbia, 1992) exalts in the triumph of the culture of advertising: "We make our media. Our media makes us. Commercialism is not making us act against our better judgment. Commercialism is our better judgment." He compares advertising to religion, arguing that the investment of a sliver of bone with the spiritual authority of a saint is little different from the anointing of athletic shoes by a basketball star. Twitchell discusses the various strategies advertisers have used over the years to lure consumers to make a choice between products that are essentially the same, providing reproductions of hundreds of old advertisements that illuminate his arguments. At times his indifference to the effects of advertising and broadcasting deregulation is unsettling, particularly because the book assumes that there exists a dominant culture that all participate in equally and freely. But by and large this is a fresh, well-thought-out study that deserves a place in academic libraries.-Adam Mazmanian, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A virtuosic survey of advertising in America, this book is a romp through the land where you (and your wallet) are the most desirable, sought-after creature in the world. As a Zen understanding of life would have us all partaking equally of Buddha nature, so Twitchell (English/Univ. of Florida; Forbidden Partners, 1986, etc.) here casts advertising as the very air we breathe, the very life force of our culture. In versatile, caffeinated prose that mirrors perfectly the attention-getting high jinks of his subject, the author states his thesis--that advertising, ``Adcult,'' is culture--and then spends 250-plus pages illustrating it. It is not a sophisticated critique; Twitchell leaves moral and Marxist explorations to others. As a simple chronicler, however, he delivers. Adcult is best mined for its nifty facts: how mass production of soap made from vegetable oils changed the face of advertising; how Mother's Day began; when coffee became a morning rather than an evening drink; how the five- day work week evolved; how Saturday attained its tremendous significance to consumer and reveler. Especially entertaining are accounts of scary but real modern inventions: the Voxbox, which counts TV viewers at home by monitoring body heat and mass, and the Tachistoscope, an ultrafast strobe light that made possible the infamous ``subliminal advertising'' (``Eat popcorn!'') planted in movies in the 1950s. The book concludes by informing us that even the most popular commercials nowadays don't sell the product so much as themselves, that advertising's success and likability an sich has led it, ironically, to reduced effectiveness. For what is next, the authors says, we can only stay tuned. Like advertising's favorite medium, TV, Adcult rivets attention powerfully, even brilliantly, but edifies little. (181 illustrations, not seen) (Author tour)
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Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
