Ocean State Libraries

After a bestselling and acclaimed diversion into fiction, Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, returns to the form in which he's been spectacularly successful with a collection of essays about our consumption of pop culture and sports.
Q: What is this book about?

A: Well, that's difficult to say. I haven't read it yet—I've just picked it up and casually glanced at the back cover. There clearly...

"Spent" is Avis Cardella's timely, deeply personal and shockingly dramatic exploration of our cultural need to spend, and of what happens when someone like herself is consumed by the desire to consume.

"Understanding the post-crisis consumer In Spend Shift, John Gerzema, world-renowned expert on consumer values, and Pulitzer prizewinning author Michael D'Antonio document the rise of a vibrant, values-driven post-recession economy. To tell the story of this movement, the authors travel to large cities and small towns across eight bellwether states, to examine the value shifts sweeping the nation. Through in-depth observation, proprietary data from...

In America today, you can connect to your ethnic heritage in dozens of ways, or adopt an identity just for an evening. Our society is not a melting pot but a salad bar, a bazaar in which the purveyors of goods and services spend close to $2 billion a year marketing the foods, clothing, objects, vacations, and events that help people express their (and others') ethnic identities. This is a huge business, whose target groups are the "hyphenated Americans"--In...