Description:
All the world is not a stage, anymore - the world is a supermarket. This book relates one man's struggle to go 'working the aisles'.
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Brief description: Robert Appelbaum is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author of Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge UP, 2002), Dishing It Out (Reaktion, 2011), Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption (Zero, 2014) and Terrorism Before the Letter: the Mythography of Political Violence in England, Scotland and France (Oxford UP, 2015).
Review Quotes: This exploration of our desires, commercial and otherwise, and how we are manipulated by them and how we manipulate, reaches far beyond the shopping mall critique: Mr Appelbaum ranges from the highly intellectual social psychology and literary deconstruction to a highly personal narrative, with dramatic scenes of arrest and odd love encounters and vivid details from the United States, England, and France. Covering roughly 50 years, from 1960 till a few years ago, Working the Aisles paints a telling picture of the astounding economic and social changes of the half century. This is a very entertaining and at the same time melancholy and thoughtful novel-like trip into our ever-growing appetites. It should satisfy reading appetites of nearly everybody: rigorous scholars and those looking for a good and fresh story. Mr Appelbaum will keep you lively company for a couple of nights. You might even want to light a pipe.
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--Josip Novakovich, finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, author of April Fool's Day and Shopping for a Better Country