Shopping Mall
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
The mall near Mat thew Newton's childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was one of the state's first enclosed shopping malls. Like all malls in their heyday, this one was a climate-controlled pleasuredome where strangers converged. It boasted waterfalls, fish ponds, an indoor ice skating rink larger than Rockefeller Center's, and a monolithic clock tower illuminated year-round beneath a canopy of interconnected skylights. It also became the backdrop for filmmaker George A. Romero's zombie opus Dawn of the Dead.
Part memoir and part case study, Shopping Mall examines the modern mythology of the mall and shows that, more than a collection of stores, it is a place of curiosity, ritual, and fantasy.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Debut author Newton's uneven entry in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series, which are billed as "short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things," provides some interesting insights into American culture, but mostly feels like a missed opportunity. Reading more like an overlong personal essay than a cohesive narrative, the book juxtaposes the history of the American shopping center, which Newton consistently makes interesting, against his own personal history, which he does not. Newton begins promisingly with a pilgrimage to the first indoor mall, Southdale Center in Edina, Minn., but quickly loses focus, indulging in stories of his teenage years that feel simultaneously too specific to be relatable and too generic to be resonant. The best passages are those about the actual idea of the mall, designed by figures such as the Viennese Victor Gruen as a new sort of civic space that could replace the lost town square in a post-WWII America reshaped by the rise of suburbia. Newton wraps up with evocative reflections on instances of violence in shopping malls and questions about a possible renewal for these spaces, the popularity of which has flagged since their heyday nearly 30 years ago. To put it into the vernacular, this book about the mall is at its best when it's, like, totally about the mall.
