False Advertising

JACKSON Lears’s Fables of Abundance claims in its subtitle that it is “A Cultural History of Advertising in America.” The author does indeed attempt to write such a history, but along the way he has more misadventures than Bunyan’s Pilgrim. The warning signs that the reader is about to be led into various curious sloughs come early on—as when, for instance, we are introduced to the medieval European legend of the Land of Cockaigne, where everything is reversed, told of the psychological differences between Roman Catholic and Protestant rituals, and lectured on the horror of the nineteenth-century slaughter of the Passenger Pigeon. The author, furthermore, is either unable or unwilling to define exactly what “advertising” is. For a book intended to trace the craft’s history, this is a rather serious matter.

Mr. Lowe is gallery director at the New York School of Interior Design.

DL

About the Author

David Garrard Lowe

JACKSON Lears’s Fables of Abundance claims in its subtitle that it is “A Cultural History of Advertising in America.” The author does indeed attempt to write such a history, but along the way he has more misadventures than Bunyan’s Pilgrim. The warning signs that the reader is about to be led into various curious sloughs come early on—as when, for instance, we are introduced to the medieval European legend of the Land of Cockaigne, where everything is reversed, told of the psychological differences between Roman Catholic and Protestant rituals, and lectured on the horror of the nineteenth-century slaughter of the Passenger Pigeon. The author, furthermore, is either unable or unwilling to define exactly what “advertising” is. For a book intended to trace the craft’s history, this is a rather serious matter.

Mr. Lowe is gallery director at the New York School of Interior Design.