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This book absolutely blew me away. I got it on a whim from an offhand comment I read somewhere online (had to request it from a library in another city, even). I wasn't expecting much, and honestly thought I'd just be reading a bunch of antiquated anthropological ideas from 1980, but I couldn't have been more wrong!

The ideas presented in this book share a web of events in post-WWII United States that led to what Harris describes as a somewhat broken society. His arguments were well thought out and researched (extensive citations are provided). The way he combines business consolidation/conglomeration, the feminist movement, the gay right movement, cults, and a lot of other ideas into one cohesive argument for why things were the way they were in 1980 was eye opening.

The most impressive part of all of it was how relevant his observations are here in 2023! 40 years later and we've not learned enough (or maybe, more to the unstated point of the book, things haven't gotten bad enough yet) for us to make large changes to the way our society operates.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone that wants a bit of a history lesson on why we seem to be stuck spinning our wheels in society today.

This book wasn't really for me.

I quite enjoyed the first story, "In Camera," and thought that I would breeze through the rest of the book (which I ultimately did, but not as I expected).

While deciding on reading this, I'd read that Gass can be a "challenging read" but I was not prepared for the second "story" called "Charity" (I use quotes around the word story here because it was somewhat of a story, but very hard to follow and get through). "Charity" was more of a stream of conscious rant/diatriabe/something about the nature of charity and giving and why people seem to give. The protagonist (if it can be said there's one at all) is depicted at different times in their lives, sometimes in the same sentence. There wasn't much structure to it, and I gave up on this one about half way through. (It was the longest piece in the book, I think).

The rest of the stories were better, but Charity left a kind of bad taste in my mouth so I felt like I wasn't as invested in them.

"Soliloquy for a Chair” was an amusing story told from the perspecive of a metal folding chair at a barber shop (there's even an included photograph of the chairs in the story).

The story called "Don't Even Try, Sam" was similar in that it was told from the perspective of someone interviewing a prop piano, specifically the one used in Casablanca.

I appreciate that these stories are well written and at least inventive, but overall just not my thing.