Customer Reviews

Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (FOCI)

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This is a terrific book. If you believe in Platonic essences and you want to touch the essence of cool, then read this book. If you do not believe in Platonic essences, reading this book may change your mind.

Whether looking at music, drugs, work, consumption, politics, aesthetics or relations, Pountain and RObins identify Cool as the dominant attitude of the age. Combining obsessive aversion to authority, ironic detachment, hedonism and narcissism, Cool rules indeed. But, it no longer stands for rebellion, at least not a rebellion which threatens directly market-led consumerism. On the contrary, Cool discovers in rebellion a style, an attitude of mind which can easily be satisfied by fashion, image and advertising.

This book deserves to be ranked with Sennett's and Ritzer's recent works as one of the sharpest cultural critiques of our fin-de-siecle.

What is cool then?

Cool is unpredictable, unconventional, non-routine, anti-bourgeois, anti-domestic, dangerous, uncomfortable, non-rational, detached, engaged, self-contradictory. It is youthful, it is thin, it is passionate but not sentimental. It is dying in many different ways.

Cool rules! But for how much longer?

This book is important reading. I read a great deal,and
I have used ideas from this book in my college classrooms.
It is a kind of academic yet popular treatment of a subject deserving of a more lengthy study. COOL is very underrated as an attitude and way of life and that is why this book seems important to me. One reviewer said it was uncool. In a sense, yes, because it tries to be impartial rather than just being another youth culture "cool" book. I liked it so much that I bought the book AFTER I have read it from the library. The book is more of an introduction to the subject and it makes good points that young people in particular should know about.

In Cool Rules: Anatomy Of An Attitude, Dick Pountain and David Robins successfully collaborate to provide readers with insights into American popular culture from African history and jazz, through 60s cinema, to 90s loft living -- all in service to defining "cool". Cool Rules reveals the line between "hip" and "cool"; shows how the concept of "cool" evolved in different cultures, the influence of British attitudes and styles on American fads and reflections of the "cool"; and a great deal more. Always informative, occasionally iconoclastic, Cool Rules is highly recommended reading for students of cultural anthropology, psychology, sociology, semiotics, and the evolution of American lifestyle fads and fancies.

If you are buying this book, chances are that you are buying it for a college English class. Be prepared to be pissed off by what you read. I was. These are two obviously disgruntled and put out English yuppies whose egos got hurt when their kids no longer considered their taste in music cool. So they set about perverting the true meaning of what cool is so that they could make themselves feel better. If someone recommends this book to you run, don't walk, in the opposite direction.

"If you are cool, you don't need a history of the subject. You just recognize cool when it arises."

These guys open to door for new discourse on the complexities and contradictions of our everyday lives. While there's a sense the book is a little Arnoldian(What is a clean, proper, civilized body?) it maps out an engaging history. Much is missing from their last chapter of Cool in Politics and globalization- Perhaps where this discourse needs to continue.

Cool Rules has to be in the "Top Ten Worst Books Published In 2000" list. Whatever made the authors think they could write about this subject?!? This book is definitely un-cool!