The Edwardian Murders: Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog, by Boris Akunin; Ambrose Bierce and the One-Eyed Jacks, by Oakley Hall; Seeing a Large Cat, by Elizabeth Peters
I thought his stories admirable, but read altogether they left a sour taste. Too many ended with bitter ironies and "twists"; too many ended with death; too many of the characters proved Bierce's reasons for despising the human race; and, as Bierce's friend and Editor Petey McEwen said of them, "No pretty girl ever appears."
--from Ambrose Bierce and the One-Eyed Jacks
"A scandal on a genuinely nationwide scale. To have wild pagans running riot is a disgrace for a European power, and the guilt lies fairly and squarely with the local authorities. It is a good thing that I happened to be here. You may be sure, ladies and gentlemen, that I shall investigate this incident with great thoroughness, seek out the guilty parties, and return the forest savages to the bosom of the church."
--from Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog
Oakley Hall's depiction of Bierce's San Francisco continues to be a great source of character and atmosphere, and not too shabby in the mystery department. Ambrose Bierce and the One-Eyed Jacks needs content notes for human trafficking and abuse of sex workers, but it spins a gripping tale of what has come to be a California cliche--the juxtaposition of amoral rich people with the slums of places like Chinatown.
Bookpost readers may remember Boris Akunin from last year's perusal of his other series involving the superspy Fandorin. Pelagia is a different kind of protagonist, brought out from a convent in the middle of nowhere to do battle in small villages at times when her bishop is desperate and no man can help.
Elizabeth peters is still awesome.
Odds are, he won't live to see tomorrow: The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
You know no doubt that most criminals at some time or other feel an irresistible need of confessing—of making a clean breast of it to somebody—to anybody. And they do it often to the police. In that Verloc whom Heat wished so much to screen I’ve found a man in that particular psychological state. The man, figuratively speaking, flung himself on my breast. It was enough on my part to whisper to him who I was and to add ‘I know that you are at the bottom of this affair.’ It must have seemed miraculous to him that we should know already, but he took it all in the stride. The wonderfulness of it never checked him for a moment. There remained for me only to put to him the two questions: Who put you up to it? and Who was the man who did it?
The book is mercifully brief. It is billed as the first "espionage" novel. The genre got better later on.
For once, Conrad isn't brooding in some far-off civilization-deprived jungle with outcasts from humanity. The Secret Agent is a pathetic small fry working for the Russians in the heart of London, as afraid of his terrorist bosses as he is of the constabulary, and taking out his frustrations by physically abusing his wife. And when he's ordered to just blow something up, it predictably goes wrong. Peter Lorre at his most sniveling should play him in the movie. Better yet, there shouldn't be a movie.
Economic Darwinism in America: The History of Standard Oil, by Ida Tarbell
According to the testimony of one of the firm given a few years later on the witness stand in Cleveland, the contract was signed at night at mr. Rockefeller's house on euclid Avenue in Cleveland, where he told the gentlemen that they must not tell even their wives about the new arrangement, that if they made money they must conceal it--they were not to drive fast horses, "put on style" or do anything to let people suspect there were unusual profits in oil refining. That would invite competition. They were told that all accounts were to be kept secret. Fictitious names were to be used in corresponding, and a special box at the post-office was employed for these fictitious characters. In fact, smugglers and house-breakers never surrounded their operations with more mystery.
Even in the 1890s, women as muckrakers were putting men to shame. See also, Nellie Bly and February's Helen Hunt Jackson.
If you've been watching the United States fall deeper into corporate feudalism every year and wondering why no one ever warned us that this might happen if corporations were allowed to bribe their way into owning the government--we were warned. The History of Standard Oil might as well have been written about the Kochs and Adelsons and Trumps as about the Rockefellers. Only the corporate details differ. Here's Rockefeller, single-mindedly consumed with greed, making deals with Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould to get railroads to crush oil producers into submission to his refinery monopoly. Here he is openly waging war on smaller competitors, having them sell out to his monopoly or be choked to death. And all of this was considered legal, because the government was run by Republicans. Thank God America has grown since then!
DID YOU KNOW?---General George MacClellan, either the Union's most incompetent Civil War general or a Confederate mole, was put in place by Rockefeller as a puppet to give the corporation the illusion of patriotism.
What Right Is Not: Principia Ethica, by George Edward Moore
A man’s character may be such that, when he habitually performs a particular duty, there is, in each case of his performance, present in his mind, a love of some intrinsically good consequence which he expects to produce by his action or a hatred of some intrinsically evil consequence which he hopes to prevent by it. In such a case this love or hatred will generally be part cause of his action, and we may then call it one of his motives. Where such a feeling as this is present habitually in the performance of duties, it cannot be denied that the state of the man’s mind, in performing it, contains something intrinsically good.
I tend to feel relieved when my philosophy of the month is ethics and not, say, metaphysics. Ethics tends to be practical and useful.
Moore's work is billed as a seminal work that changed 20th century thinking about right and wrong. If so, it says more about thought in previous eras that needed changing. Moore spends more effort telling us what right is NOT than what it is. He refutes the "naturalism" theory (which we see making a resurgence these days from Libertarians and other bigots: "If our Savannah ancestors did it, then it conforms to natural law and must be right"), and the pure hedonism theory (If it feels good, it is right), with many caveats to the effect that being painful doesn't make it right either. The most repeated idea is that "good" has so many meanings as to be inherently unknowable.
Data Mining: Connected, by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler
Like a worldwide nervous system, our networks allow us to send and receive messages to nearly every other person on the planet. As we become more hyperconnected, information circulates more efficiently, we interact more easily, and we manage more and different kinds of social connections every day. All of these changes make us, Homo Dictyous, even more like a superorganism that acts with a common purpose. The ability of networks to create and sustain our collective goals continues to strengthen. And everything that now spreads from person to person will soon spread farther and faster, prompting new features to emerge as the scale of interactions increases.
The book was published in 2009, and is already more dated than some of the 1890s works I reference elsewhere in this post. MySpace and World of Warcraft are cutting edge, and the book devotes a lot more space to Second Life than one might feel is warranted---though the psychology of it is interesting. They did experiments with people who were given taller or more attractive avatars than others, with predictable results as to the effects on self-confidence when playing in a virtual realm.
Both authors are PhDs, and their snapshot-in-time study on how people's interactions with their networks affect friends-of-friends and people they don't even know is fascinating. the chapters discuss crowd behavior in pandemics; butterfly effects from one's own attitude; ripples from social media posts initially read by only a few people; political groupings; and mate-seeking behavior online, with a generous helping of game theory in action on social media and in competitive reality TV shows.
I felt encouraged, as if my own little book post and other bloggings might actually make a difference in this world that is growing bigger and more ridiculous every day. Very high recommendations.
Zombie Reconstruction: Dread Nation Rise Up, by Justina Ireland
I'm sure nobody expected the dead to get up in the middle of a pitched battle and start eating people, which is what they did at the Battle of Little Round Top. And no one expected those dead boys to bite their buddies and turn them as well. But that's the way life goes most of the time: the thing you least count on comes along and ruins everything else you got planned. I figure it's much better to just be all-around prepared, since the best defense is a good offense. That's why I'm smuggling my six-shooter under my skirts.
It's Hugo Nomination season, and time for me to read the books nominated for Hugos. I intend to get the novels and YA novels mantioned in my bookposts for April, May and June, so that other nominators can see what I have to say before the deadline sometime in July.
Dread Nation is nominated in the YA category, and is the first one I'm reading. It is EXCELLENT. The basic premise is that the zombies rose up during the battle of Gettysburg and ended the war, and now the protagonist is a student at Miss Preston's School of Combat and Etiquette for Negro Girls, being trained to be a bodyguard/companion for some genteel white girl. They got rid of slavery, but forced the newly freed people "for the good of themselves and the nation" into schools like this. And of course the former secessionists are doing all sorts of nasty things and asserting lies out of whole cloth as excuses.
An early seen in the book involves a white doctor having a POC man bitten by zombies to test whether the vaccine he's developed works. Similarly cruels scenes are throughout the book. If you can stand to read such things, the book is incredible. It has my highest recommendations.
The Notorious James Brothers: The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James;A Pluralistic Universe & Essays on Empiricism, by William James
He was afraid of her and presently told her so. "When you look at me in a certain way my knees knock together, my faculties desert me; I'm filled with trepidation and I ask only for strength to execute your commands. You've an address that I've never encountered in any woman."
"Well," Henrietta replied good-humouredly, "If I had not known before that you were trying somehow to abash me, I should know it now."
--from The Portrait of a Lady
It is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had from philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritualistically minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle; and whether these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat they were at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of inner structure. As compared with all these rationalizing pictures, the pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry appearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility. Those of you who are accustomed to the classical constructions of reality may be excused if your first reaction upon it be absolute contempt—a shrug of the shoulders as if such ideas were unworthy of explicit refutation. But one must have lived some time with a system to appreciate its merits. Perhaps a little more familiarity may mitigate your first surprise at such a programme as I offer.
--from A Pluralistic Universe
And here I bid farewell to the Notorious James Brothers, still marveling that I found William the philosopher to be more readable than Henry the novelist.
I saved Portrait of a Lady as my last Henry James novel, because it's widely considered his best. And, at least, I did not find it annoyingly dull. It did piss me off about men in general, as most things since 11/9 have done.
Here we have Isabel Archer, presented to us as The Strong Modern Woman of the late 19th Century, because she has her high stat in intelligence (but perhaps her dump stat in wisdom), come from America to Europe to show people what's what. She isn't sure what she wants to do, but she is determined to be a free spirit, by golly. But then, as soon as she inherits enough money to allow her to be free, she agrees to marry a feckless dipshit.
And the suitors she refuses in favor of this nice prince of a man aren't much better. There's a Strong American Man who, though he stops short of taking Isabel by force, frequently postures as being just on the verge of doing so for her own good, and there are upsetting implications in the text that his stopping short of rape makes him a fool, and that if he had only brushed aside her agency as nonsense, they might have been happy together. There's an English Lord whose title supposedly makes him a good catch despite its being his one redeeming feature. And there's the young romantic man with a debilitating disease, the one who pines so much for Isabel that he almost tells her...but instead sacrifices himself nobly by remaining silent and persuading his father to leave her a large part of the fortune he was to inherit. This is supposed to make him romantic like Cyrano, right down to the tearful deathbed scene. I'm like, he should have talked to her.
The last offerings from William James continue and nicely wrap up the threads from his more famous works, the defense of intellectual religious faith and the pragmatic acceptance of what works for one in one's life, without the need for proof. Pluralistic Universe, which sets up a conflict between Bergson and Bradley (both of whom I've read recently, which makes things so much easier to follow) is maybe the first book I've read that makes "the conflict between the one and the many" seem both relevant and interesting to me.
Monster Hunter: Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse
I look down at Kai, still sitting with his tie over his shoulder, face curious like clan powers are an intellectual exercise. Or maybe cool superpowers that don't make people distrust you, don't get you treated like you're diseased or a step away from being one of the monsters yourself. That they don't make your mentor turn from you in disgust, your bloodlust so terrible that even he, a warrior of legend, cannot fathom what drives you. Tah may think them a blessing, and Kai too, but I know better.
This is my first read from the six novels nominated for the Best Novel Hugo this year, and I liked it. It is both relevant to the here and now, and fantastical, dealing with life on what was once a Navajo reservation, protected by a 50 foot wall from the floodwaters that global climate change inflicted on Earth...and with the clan powers of some of the survivors, that can protect or harm the remnants of humanity.
Maggie is a monster hunter who has been mentored and betrayed by a legendary warrior and by a coyote trickster. I kept trying to predict which of them she would end up killing. I also kept thinking of her world as the background for an RPG in which characters rolled stats and chose clan powers and beasts within. High recommendations.
The Steaks of Wrath: The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
This jail was a Noah's ark of the city's crime—there were murderers, “hold-up men” and burglars, embezzlers, counterfeiters and forgers, bigamists, “shoplifters,”“confidence men,” petty thieves and pickpockets, gamblers and procurers, brawlers, beggars, tramps and drunkards; they were black and white, old and young, Americans and natives of every nation under the sun. There were hardened criminals and innocent men too poor to give bail; old men, and boys literally not yet in their teens. They were the drainage of the great festering ulcer of society; they were hideous to look upon, sickening to talk to. All life had turned to rottenness and stench in them—love was a beastliness, joy was a snare, and God was an imprecation. They strolled here and there about the courtyard, and Jurgis listened to them. He was ignorant and they were wise; they had been everywhere and tried everything. They could tell the whole hateful story of it, set forth the inner soul of a city in which justice and honor, women's bodies and men's souls, were for sale in the marketplace, and human beings writhed and fought and fell upon each other like wolves in a pit; in which lusts were raging fires, and men were fuel, and humanity was festering and stewing and wallowing in its own corruption. Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.
The era I'm reading about this year was a big one for reform novels--books pointing out the squalid poverty of the working class and calling for something to be done. The Jungle was one of the most famous. Sinclair used the story of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who comes to Chicago seeking opportunity, with his family of 12---ominous, because as with The Grapes of Wrath, you know the family has to be a big one so that we can see how many ways there are for all of them to die from industrial "accident", untreated illness, starvation, crime, being disappeared by politicians owned by the rich. Many of the scenes are graphic and need content warnings.
Also, if you've eaten mass-produced sausage or cooked with lard, you have probably eaten human flesh. This is what defunding the FDA so that rich people can have tax cuts has returned America to.
The story also takes the reader through a cross-section of 1900s Chicago, from the slums and stockyards of Packingtown to the saloons, the jails, the surrounding farms, the mansions of the rich, the offices of the political ward heelers, and the corrupt courts and jails. Jurgis may well have been a model for George Orwell's workhorse, Boxer. He begins the novel as a veritable Hercules, proud of his strength and energy, overjoyed to have a job, and meeting all financial setbacks with a grin and a vow to solve his difficulties by working harder. His journey begins with going into debt just to have a decent--not lavish--wedding; continues with his victimization by predatory lenders and realtors, the death of most of his family, and his imprisonment for clobbering the boss who rapes his wife; his adventures with unions, ward heelers; temporary successes and inevitable shovings back into the sewer--and eventually, to his embrace of Socialism.
I kept wondering what his surviving descendants would say today. Would they respond to the gut-wrenching appeal for them to have a shot at the American dream? Or would they spit at it and call the descriptions of their own plight Fake Muckraking and vote Republican, taking any indignity so long as they could be sure the black people and brown immigrants had it worse?
Sidhe Who Must Be Resisted: The Invasion, by Peadar O'Gullin
The big man looms over her. "Vanessa Doherty," he says, his voice stiff with loathing, "you couldn't have escaped the Sidhe. You can't even beat this little child. I am placing you under arrest for treason." She feels handcuffs on her wrists and can't understand what's happening. What about Anto? She needs to see him! "The Nation will survive," he says. "I doubt you'll be so lucky."
This is the second of the Hugo nominated YA books I have read, and while I didn't enjoy it as much as Dread Nation, it's still a good offering, ans especially appropriate for consideration during an Irish Worldcon.
I didn't realize until after I checked the book out that it was the second in a series, and it's my own fault that I missed some of the backstory at first. But I figured it out pretty soon. Anto and Nessa are the YA protagonists in a dystopian future Ireland that is cut off from the rest of Earth and put in proximity to the "Grey Land" where the Sidhe are plotting like elder gods to break through portals and establish a kingdom over the mortals. Teens are"called" to the Grey Land to survive a Wild Hunt/become changelings/get killed/other nasty things, and "Schools of Survival" are set up to protect the ever rarer human resource of children. It's as grim and mocking as one might expect.
Naked, and Unprepared for the Test: The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud
It is no harder to uncover the wish fulfillment in some other dreams that I have gathered from healthy people. A friend who knows my dream theory and shared it with his wife tells me one day, "I should tell you about my wife, that yesterday she dreamed that she had got the period. You'll know what that means. "Of course I know; if the young woman has dreamed that she has the period, then the period has failed. I can imagine that she would have liked to enjoy her freedom for some time before the symptoms of motherliness begin. It was a clever way to make the announcement of her first pregnancy. Another friend writes that his wife recently dreamed that she noticed milk stains on her shirt breast. This is also a gravidity display, but not from the first time; the young mother wishes to have more food for the second child than at the time.
This is the longest, and maybe the most influential and widely read, of the Freud works in the Great Books volume. The good news is that a lot of the dreams analyzed are Freud's own dreams, and so they are mostly interpreted as reflections on Freud's desire for professional status and admiration and not single-mindedly about sex.
The most pointed thesis of the work is that all dreams are wish-fulfillment. To defend this thesis, there are many examples of nightmares, psychoanalyzed to find a way that suffering is really wish-fulfillment. Losing a limb means becoming free of the responsibility of doing unpleasant work. Pain means gaining the sympathy of others. And being eaten by a monster, of course, means having sex with someone who fascinates and frightens you. Because of course.
Again and again I find Freud's interpretations to have as much scientific validity as reading the tarot (which I have done for money at street fairs). You look at symbols, put them together in a nice-sounding wrapper that feeds the client's biases (as well as your own), and persuade them and yourself that you have cleverly solved a riddle. Sometimes Freud makes suggestions that the described details of the dream were really different details, for the purpose of wrapping it all up. Still, a fascinating book of suggestions at any rate.
People different From Us: The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen
None the less, while manners have this intrinsic utility, in the apprehension of the performer and the beholder alike, this sense of the intrinsic rightness of decorum is only the proximate ground of the vogue of manners and breeding. Their ulterior, economic ground is to be sought in the honorific character of that leisure or non-productive employment of time and effort without which good manners are not acquired. The knowledge and habit of good form come only by long-continued use. Refined tastes, manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and expense, and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are taken up with work. A knowledge of good form is prima facie evidence that that portion of the well-bred person's life which is not spent under the observation of the spectator has been worthily spent in acquiring accomplishments that are of no lucrative effect. In the last analysis the value of manners lies in the fact that they are the voucher of a life of leisure. Therefore, conversely, since leisure is the conventional means of pecuniary repute, the acquisition of some proficiency in decorum is incumbent on all who aspire to a modicum of pecuniary decency.
Veblen's short book takes a lot of unpacking, especially in this (very relevant to him) day and age. The introduction defines "veblenesque" as the pointing out of economic truths that are obvious to everyone except scholarly professional economists--such as the truth that capitalism as practiced by the very rich is the opposite of what regular people do, and the opposite of virtuous. On the one hand, the book's central thesis is easy to understand. On the other hand, the style of writing and use of heavy academic vocabulary puts parts of the book out of reach for many.
There is an interesting transition from traditional societies in which warrior and religious leaders were honored as people who did useful work protecting the community from foreign armies and angry gods, to their assertion of dominance over their own people as shown by their physical might, to their displays of sedentary uselessness and displays of (stolen) wealth as assertions of dominance in themselves. Veblen coined the terms "conspicuous consumption", "conspicuous leisure", and "conspicuous waste" to highlight the ostentatious ways in which the richest show off their wealth (and thereby power) by throwing it away on giant houses, fruitless estates, liveried servants who do little work themselves, corsets and bound feet and other costumes that hinder "their women" from useful activity; studies in dead languages and other archaic subjects; and sports (defined here as fox hunting, hawking, and other expensive pursuits requiring little actual athletic training--I wondered what Veblen would say about modern American sports which require intense training to produce a physique capable of much useful activity, and which, far from being limited to millionaires, is one vehicle by which those poor who have a gift may attain wealth in the big leagues).
The book's emphasis on what the rich show off shows how trends change. It seems to me that the conspicuous leisure of 100 years ago, where people showed off high status by being very fat and indolent, has come to be replaced with showing off "conspicuous busyness", in which rich men in suits pride themselves on not having read any book since Who Moved My Cheese, and greet any invitation to join in common leisure activities by putting you down for having time to do them.
Similarly, conspicuous displays of manners and breeding ("I'm better than you because I can identify proper place settings and lordly titles, because I studied etiquette esoterica instead of laboring") has been replaced with conspicuous displays of classlessness and bad manners ("I'm better than you and will prove it by flashing garish gold jewelry and loudly belching and yelling Fuck You, and what are you gonna do about it, loser!")
I mostly found myself cheering Veblen on---mostly. At times he ruins it all by seemingly preserving his academic neutrality, denying that there's anything "invidious" about leisure class predatory behavior, and even approving their nerve. So too, his misogyny emerges. Many descriptions of women as trophy-chattels owned by predatory men seem at first like an acknowledgement that patriarchy exists. But then, late in the book, Veblen produces the only attack on the very idea of women's suffrage that I've actually read in any Dead White Guy book--and his attempt is as wretched as what you'd find from a modern libertarian, complete with vague assertions about "common sense" and "how society has always been." He defines the main unit of society as "the home", and further defines a "home" as a household with a male head, and further denounces women as being ungrateful to the protectors and providers who supposedly pet them and give them whatever they want. Goddamit, Thorstein. Can't take you anywhere.
Bookish: The professor's House, by Willa Cather
She was only six, but he found her a square-dealing, dependable little creature. They worked out a satisfactory plan of life together. She was to play in the garden all morning, and was not on any account to disturb him in his study. After lunch, he would take her to the lake or the woods, or he would read to her at home. She took pride in keeping her part of the contract. One day when he came out of his study at noon, he found her sitting on the third floor stairs, just outside his door, with the arnica bottle in one hand and the fingers of the other puffed up like wee pink sausages. A bee had stung her in the garden, and she had waited half the morning for sympathy. She was very independent, and would tug at her leggings or overshoes a great while before she asked for help.
Unlike the other Cather stories I’ve read this year, it’s hard to say what this one is about. We go from a wholesome midwestern family having difficulties between the blood relatives and various in-laws to a long digression about an old family friend’s adventures discovering and exploring an extinct indian culture on a Southwestern mesa, and then back to the professor, brooding about the changes in his life.
I’m starting to see themes in Cather. Stories about people winning by being true to their own values are giving way to stories about people losing to unscrupulous sharks by having too much integrity to stick up for themselves in unseemly business deals. That saddens me.
Harvard Classics: Voyages and Travels
The “Germany” treatise is a document of the greatest interest and importance, since it gives us by far the most detailed account of the state of culture among the tribes that are the ancestors of the modern Teutonic nations, at the time when they first came into contact with the civilization of the Mediterranean.
The Harvard Classics set is problematic compared to other collections of "Great Western Canon books". There are 50 volumes. The ones dedicated to a single work by one author, like Homer, Virgil, Plutarch, Dante, Cervantes, Adam Smith and Darwin--and even the odd choices, like Richard Henry Dana and Alessandro Manzoni--are well enough. But when The Eccentric Doctor Elliot realized he didn't have enough room on a five-foot shelf to include everything, he got a little weird. The books that cram together representative works by many people under a broad heading are like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates.
Case in point: the book of "Voyages and Travels." the book starts with Herodotus's chapter on Egypt and Tacitus's "Germanica", neither of which is about travel so much as a study narrated from home about what was, to the author, a foreign culture. It was a way to include Herodotus and Tacitus in the Harvard Classics without having to dedicate entire volumes to their longer and better known works.
The remainder of the work chronicles exploits of Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh and Humphrey Gilbert during the great age of exploration (the voyages and explorations of the New World are addressed in a separate book of "American Historical Documents"). Considering that we're looking at the South American Jungle, the Spanish Armada, and long trips in wooden vessels to places white people had never before seen, it amazes me how snoozeworthy the accounts are.
Veblen Follow-up: The Harried Leisure Class, by Staffan B. Linder
As the volume of consumption goods increases, requirements for the care and maintenance of these goods also tends to increase. We get bigger houses to clean, bigger gardens to look after, a car to wash, a boat to put up for the winter, and a television set to repair, and have to make more decisions on spending. In the case of bodily maintenance, economic growth cannot have the same direct effect. It is possible, however, that higher incomes can lead indirectly to greater demands for personal care. The growing strains of a more hectic life can increase the requirement for "human servicing". The technological advances that permit economic growth can also mean an increase in life expectancy and a greater demand for care of the aged.
Yeah...this one was on the shelf near The Theory of the Leisure Class, and so I picked it up on impulse.
Turns out it was written in 1970. And the "leisure class" referred to is not the same "leisure class" that Veblen meant. Linder's harried leisure class is the middle to upper-middle class of suburban bedroom communities, definitely "making it" but not on the top of the heap, and thoroughly caught up in the corporate rat race. the general idea is that they were promised more leisure time through the development of household labor saving devices and increased workplace productivity, but the profits from said productivity have been going to their corporate superiors, and they themselves are being driven by increasing overtime requirements and the need to keep up with the Joneses, to spend more and more time at work for less value per dollar earned, and even their time away from work is spent on necessary drudgery.
It does have this in common with Veblen: It tells us what everyone already knows except professional scholarly economists.