Customer Reviews

For Shame

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I love a good rant. I adored Paul Fussel's "Class", and enjoy this book quite nicely. He does admit right up front that he (at the time of the writing) is 55 years old. He starts off by describing the concept of shame in a cross cultural sense and maps its decline along the lines of out of wedlock births. There are some very telling graphs showing a somewhat constant rate, which suddenly skyrockets in the 1960s. He goes on to skewer television and how it glamorizes anything that rivets the attention of the demographic most likely to try new products. He nails some media icons who are noteworthy for nothing more than their apparent lack of shame at the misdeeds they have perpetrated or have had perpetrated on them.

He also describes and correctly uses the word schadenfreude, which makes me love him dearly. A curmudgeon with a glorious vocabulary.

The downside to all this, of course, is that the man is shouting into a wind tunnel. As people who lived before the advent of the 1960s (or whose parents raised them with pre-TV values) die off, there will be a whole new culture of vulgarity left behind. But, in the interim, it's nice to know one is not alone in wondering where the constant boundary-pushing is ever going to end.

It's easy to see similarities between our times and the latter days of the Roman empire. Clearly we're near the far end of the pendulum swing between repression and dissolution. Mr. Twitchell's book "For Shame" does an excellent job of describing how behavior that is unhealthy for a culture has become acceptable and, in some instances, encouraged.

I think this issue would have been better served, however, had he seriously addressed the problems (as he identified them) with suggestions for solutions that deal with where we are and where we are going, rather than obsessing over where we once were. As Mr. Twitchell describes, "One generation attempts to apply taboos, the next attempts to remove them, and so on in an endless Viconian cycle." But he fails to take the next step, to concoct an approach to alter that cycle; instead, he simply urges the taboo-end of the spectrum to hurry up and return.

His comparisons between the Victorian era and today are engaging and enlightening. This book pulled together disparate issues in a way that made evident their commonalities. Very readable; I recommend it.

Contrary to the Kirkus review which I found more academic than the book, and generally misses the point, I found the book quite interesting. I think it made one heck of lot of sense. In fact I'm going to get two of his other books: The Trashing... & the Advertising book.