Pop Goes America
About this book
Dust jacket blurb: POP. The author knows longer words than this. He also knows that any social critic writing about America today is under an almost sacred obligation to use longer words of a certain type, such as "ambience," "mystique," "continuum," "alienation," and "Marshall McLuhan" -- at least if he wants to be taken seriously.William Zinsser wants to be taken seriously, like every good humorist, but he still thinks that "pop" says it all -- that America has turned into a pop culture and will not be turning back.By "pop" he means more than just pop art. If pop art is the painting of a soup can rather than the soup itself, pop culture is the worship of form rather than substance -- homage to the superficial. And this is the new current that Mr. Zinsser sees running through American life.He sees it in many surprising places -- in the booming sale of men's cosmetics, "gift books" and Barbie dolls; in the worship of a person who doesn't exist (James Bond) and in the proclaiming of "Christianity without God", in the staging of non-events by towns trying to improve their image; in the coming up of Woody Allen and the coming down of Burma-Shave signs; the the Book-of-the-Month Club's discovery that the average (pop) American has almost wholly changed his reading tastes, and even in major league baseball, where some of the grass and many of the values are now synthetic. Only in Mr. Zinsser's portrait of Guy Lombardo is our past securely tied down for inspection as the present goes popping by.Pop Goes America is almost always funny and almost always serious. And if you don't think there can be such a dichotomy, if this is too ambivalent on the one hand or too simplistic on the other, too full of lacunae in describing the author's approach to the human condition, just see for yourself how the book is structured. In other words, take a look.Note: The author's name is given as William K. Zinsser.