Books
September, 1981
John Brooks in Showing Off in America (Little, Brown) applies Thorstein Veblen's 1899 theory of the leisure class in America to today's society. (Veblen's great discovery? That "snobbery and social pretense play not a peripheral but a central, even dominant, role in shaping the life of a socially democratic society.") Brooks examines the U.S.A. in the Eighties—the way we eat, talk, play games, work, drink, dress, find friends, worship, love—through the Veblen focus and finds that class...
