What does it mean to be cheap? When is it mature to stow money away and when is it miserly, even Scrooge-like? And how might Americans navigate the economic downturn in an era when everything seems disposable and when credit has felt dangerously unlimited?

In answering these questions, In Cheap We Trust combines a consideration of cheapness as it relates to personality, lifestyle, and philosophy with a colorful ride through the history of thrift in America, from Ben Franklin and his famous maxims to Hetty Green, the 19th-century millionaire named by Guinness as "the world's most miserly person," to the branding of Jews, Chinese, and other ethnic groups as cheap in order to neutralize the economic competition they represented.

Weber also explores contemporary expressions and dilemmas of thrift, from Dumpster-diving to Keynes's "Paradox of Thrift" to today's recession-driven enthusiasm for frugal living.

This volume comprises contributions from several fields of study in the social sciences. The different disciplinary angles intersect at the level of the research subjects: families, households and consumers. Together they reflect a broad field of study that always had its particular niche in Wageningen as 'household and consumer studies'. The five separate parts: the formation and dissolution of families; stratification and inequality; consumer and household behaviour; leisure time; and hygiene, health and society, nicely reflect the broadness of this field.The eighteen contributions in this volume were purposefully selected, not only based on their contents and quality, but also because of their relationship to the work of Kees de Hoog, who retired this year. Although Kees de Hoog is a professor of family sociology and family policy, his work throughout the years has extended far beyond that and covers the fields that are captured by the different parts in this book. Therefore the contributions in this volume comprise an interesting read for scholars all over the world who have an interest in families, consumers, households, and the ways they interface.

Is it possible any longer to "read" markets fast enough to respond to them? A world of discrete parts is now one interconnected web of ceaseless calculation and response. Marketing has become a thing of speed and turbulence, with all the players moving simultaneously.

For marketing guru Grant McCracken, the key to success in this dynamic new marketplace is to find a way to slow the world down. And McCracken believes he has the solution. It begins with understanding the mechanics at work today. He says, "Complexity has a theory. Commotion has a pattern. Dynamism has a system. We can continue to live by damage control, or we can change the way we play the game." To survive our own world of collision and speed, marketers need to see the world as "flocks and flows."

In this exciting new book, McCracken deploys "complex adaptive theory" to track the movement of trends and new groupings of consumers. He shows how to monitor new trends, whether and when to introduce new brands and brand extensions, how to speak to niche markets, and how to avoid costly mistakes. McCracken s sage and witty advice could not come at a better time. His book will be a valuable aid for anyone trying to keep up with marketplace changes in our rapidly evolving world."

In The Ambivalent Consumer, Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan bring together an array of scholars who explore the ambivalence provoked, especially in East and Southeast Asia, by the global spread of "American" consumer culture. As the world's second-largest economy, Japan has long engaged in a vibrant consumerism tempered by deeply held beliefs about morality, thrift, community, and national identity. Its neighbors in East and Southeast Asia-South Korea, China, Malaysia, and Singapore-have likewise anxiously balanced consumption and saving.

The first comparative volume to examine global phenomena of consumer culture from the perspective of East Asia, this book analyzes not only the attractions of mass consumption but also the many discontents and dilemmas that arise from consumerism. Placing Japan and the United States in a transnational context, the book's contributors find that European countries more closely resemble Japan than they do the United States in their saving rates, consumption levels, environmental concerns, and discomfort with consumer credit.

The Ambivalent Consumer offers a useful perspective on the political economies of consumption to address such pressing topics as movements against genetically modified foods; shifting relations among consumers, producers, and states; the differential influence of gender on consumption; and conflicting consumer attitudes toward globalization.

Contributors: Takatsugu Akaishi, Nagasaki University;Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University;Deborah S. Davis, Yale University;Sheldon Garon, Princeton University;Andrew Gordon, Harvard University;Charles Yuji Horioka, Osaka University;Patricia L. Maclachlan, University of Texas at Austin;Laura C. Nelson, California State University, East Bay;Takao Nishimura, Yokohama National University;Jordan Sand, Georgetown University;Sven Steinmo, University of Colorado at Boulder;Frank Trentmann, Birkbeck College, University of London;Shunya Yoshimi, Tokyo University"

In The Ambivalent Consumer, Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan bring together an array of scholars who explore the ambivalence provoked, especially in East and Southeast Asia, by the global spread of "American" consumer culture. As the world's second-largest economy, Japan has long engaged in a vibrant consumerism tempered by deeply held beliefs about morality, thrift, community, and national identity. Its neighbors in East and Southeast Asia-South Korea, China, Malaysia, and Singapore-have likewise anxiously balanced consumption and saving.

The first comparative volume to examine global phenomena of consumer culture from the perspective of East Asia, this book analyzes not only the attractions of mass consumption but also the many discontents and dilemmas that arise from consumerism. Placing Japan and the United States in a transnational context, the book's contributors find that European countries more closely resemble Japan than they do the United States in their saving rates, consumption levels, environmental concerns, and discomfort with consumer credit.

The Ambivalent Consumer offers a useful perspective on the political economies of consumption to address such pressing topics as movements against genetically modified foods; shifting relations among consumers, producers, and states; the differential influence of gender on consumption; and conflicting consumer attitudes toward globalization.

Contributors: Takatsugu Akaishi, Nagasaki University;Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University;Deborah S. Davis, Yale University;Sheldon Garon, Princeton University;Andrew Gordon, Harvard University;Charles Yuji Horioka, Osaka University;Patricia L. Maclachlan, University of Texas at Austin;Laura C. Nelson, California State University, East Bay;Takao Nishimura, Yokohama National University;Jordan Sand, Georgetown University;Sven Steinmo, University of Colorado at Boulder;Frank Trentmann, Birkbeck College, University of London;Shunya Yoshimi, Tokyo University"

Talks about sugar workers before and after emancipation. The contributions of the black population to the history and economic development of Puerto Rico have long been distorted and underplayed, Luis A. Figueroa contends. Focusing on the southeastern coastal region of Guyana, one of Puerto Rico's three leading centers of sugarcane agriculture, Figueroa examines the transition from slavery and slave labor to freedom and free labor after the 1873 abolition of slavery in colonial Puerto Rico. He corrects misconceptions about how ex-slaves went about building their lives and livelihoods after emancipation, and debunks standing myths about race relations in Puerto Rico. Historians have assumed that after emancipation in Puerto Rico, as in other parts of the Caribbean and the U.S. South, former slaves acquired some land of their own and became subsistence farmers. Figueroa finds that in Puerto Rico, however, this was not an option because both capital and land available for sale to the Afro - Puerto Rican population were scarce. Paying particular attention to class, gender, and race, his account of how these libertos joined the labor market profoundly revises our understanding of the emancipation process and the evolution of the working class in Puerto Rico.

We constantly hear about 'the consumer'. The 'consumer' has become a ubiquitous person in public discourse and academic research, but who is this person? The Making of the Consumer is the first interdisciplinary study that follows the evolution of the consumer in the modern world, ranging from imperial Britain to contemporary Papua New Guinea, and from the European Union to China. It makes a novel contribution by broadening the study of consumption from a focus on goods and symbols to the changing role and identity of consumers. Offering a historically informed picture of the rise of the consumer to its current prominence, authors discuss the consumer in relation to citizenship and ethics, law and economics, media, work and retailing.Contributors include:Donald Winch (University of Sussex)Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck College, University of London)Vanessa Taylor (Birkbeck College, University of London)Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel (CNRS: Centre de Recherches Historiques, cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)Michelle Everson (Birkbeck College, University of London)Erika Rappaport (University of California, Santa Barbara)Uwe Spiekermann (Georg-August University, Gttingen)Jos Gamble (Royal Holloway University)Stephen Kline (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada)Frank Mort (University of Manchester)Ina Merkel (Philipps-Universitt, Marburg, Germany)James G. Carrier (Indiana University and Oxford Brookes University)Ben Fine (SOAS: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)

Kitchens are where we cook, clean, cry, talk, laugh, break things. Hugely symbolic - as well as practical - kitchens evoke thoughts of hearth and home, family and domesticity.People today commonly spend more refurbishing their kitchens than refurbishing any other room in the home. On kitchen units alone, annual expenditure in England has been around the billion pound mark for some time. And this only represents part of what people spend on a kitchen. For, when they do up their kitchens, people frequently also buy new machinery and nearly always buy new accessories.To get at the heart of the meaning, design and purpose of the modern kitchen, the author interviewed a sample of seventy four homeowners. She follows them through the process of shopping and purchasing a new kitchen, and she discusses the importance of layout, colour, shape and texture. She explores the dominant role that women play in shaping the appearance of a new kitchen and considers the evolution of the modern kitchen in the context of the consumer age.The first history of the fitted kitchen in England, this innovative new book will appeal to anyone interested in design, sociology, gender studies and cultural history.

Sitting in the ruins of the Third Reich, most Germans wanted to know which of the two post-war German states would erase the material traces of their wartime suffering most quickly and most thoroughly. Consumption and the quality of everyday life quickly became important battlefields upon which the East-West conflict would be fought. This book focuses on the competing types of consumer societies that developed over time in the two Germanies and the legacy each left. Consuming Germany in the Cold War assesses why East Germany increasingly fell behind in this competition and how the failure to create a viable socialist "consumer society" in the East helped lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By the 1970s, East Germans were well aware that the regime's bombastic promises that the GDR would soon overtake the West had become increasingly hollow. For most East German citizens, West German consumer society set the standards that East Germany repeatedly failed to meet.By exploring the ways in which East and West Germany have functioned as each other's "other" since 1949, this book suggests some of the possibilities for a new narrative of post-war German history. While taking into account the very different paths pursued by East and West Germany since 1949, the contributors demonstrate the importance of competition and highlight the connections between the two German successor states, as well as the ways in which these relationships changed throughout the period. By understanding the legacy that forty-plus years of rivalry established, we can gain a better understanding of the current tensions between the eastern and western regions of a united Germany.

Today, we live in an age where consumption and consuming have become dominant practices - so dominant they allow little room for alternatives. Consumption has become a global phenomenon. This expansion of consumption has occurred at the same time as notions of information and digitization have become all-pervasive in our media culture . As ever greater aspects of the world have come to be seen as data, information has increasingly become the very currency of consumption.Consumption in an Age of Information analyses this new relationship between information and consumption. Leading theorists and critics map this new terrain, ranging across high theory and popular culture - from E-Bay auctions to smart homes, from the everyday consumption of MP3 files and DVDs to the rituals of media violence, from internet-surfing to the role of speed in contemporary culture.

""Life has become more joyous, comrades.""--Josef Stalin, 1936Stalin's Russia is best known for its political repression, forced collectivization and general poverty. Caviar with Champagne presents an altogether different aspect of Stalin's rule that has never been fully analyzed - the creation of a luxury goods society. At the same time as millions were queuing for bread and starving, drastic changes took place in the cultural and economic policy of the country, which had important consequences for the development of Soviet material culture and the promotion of its ideals of consumption.The 1930s witnessed the first serious attempt to create a genuinely Soviet commercial culture that would rival the West. Government ministers took exploratory trips to America to learn about everything from fast food hamburgers to men's suits in Macy's. The government made intricate plans to produce high-quality luxury goods en masse, such as chocolate, caviar, perfume, liquor and assorted novelties. Perhaps the best symbol of this new cultural order was Soviet Champagne, which launched in 1936 with plans to produce millions of bottles by the end of the decade. Drawing on previously neglected archival material, Jukka Gronow examines how such new pleasures were advertised and enjoyed. He interprets Soviet-styled luxury goods as a form of kitsch and examines the ideological underpinnings behind their production.This new attitude toward consumption was accompanied by the promotion of new manners of everyday life. The process was not without serious ideological contradictions. Ironically, a factory worker living in the United States - the largest capitalist society in the world - would have beenhard-pressed to afford caviar or champagne for a special occasion in the 1930s, but a Soviet worker theoretically could (assuming supplies were in stock). The Soviet example is unique since the luxury culture had to be created entirely from scratch, and the process was taken extremely seriously. Even the smallest decisions, such as the design of perfume bottles, were made at the highest level of government by the People's Commissars. Sometimes the interpretation of 'luxury goods' bordered on the comical, such as the push to produce Soviet ketchup and wurst. This fascinating look at consumer culture under Stalin offers a new perspective on the Soviet Union of the 1930s, as well as new interpretations on consumption.

This book provides a clear and concise introduction to the concept of consumption and to the wide-ranging debates about the nature and consequences of consumer society.

Community and social class appear to be in irreversible decline. Job insecurity has grown, and fewer people see work as giving meaning to their lives. Instead they turn to consumption for social standing, a sense of identity, and personal fulfilment. We appear to be living through a profound transition from a society based on production to a new social order, the consumer society, from which there is little chance of escape.

The book analyses the relationship between the rise of consumerism and the transformation of the world of work, including the new demands for 'emotional labour'. It concludes by examining the limitations of consumer organizations and consumer protection in a promotional culture dominated by global brands and saturated with advertising, corporate sponsorship and product placement.

This lively book will be essential reading for students and researchers in sociology and cultural studies.

This is an accessible black and white edition of the successful full colour book, at a lower price point.

Some of the leading names in the globalisation debate have contributed to the book, including Naomi Klein, Susan George and David Korten, as well as organisations and charities such as Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network.

The book deals with a diverse range of the issues surrounding globalisation, including human rights, the environment, international trade and finance, health, the food we eat and the clothes we wear.

Ultimately, this book is a call to action, showing how each and every one of us can take on the corporate giants and make a real difference.

?Globalisation is the most important change in the history of humankind, and the latest name for the conspiracy of the rich against the poor. It is the phenomenon most subject to the efforts of economists and statisticians, and the least understood and measured change in our time.? Anita Roddick

This first book-length treatment of the life and work of Christine Frederick (1883-1970) reveals an important dilemma that faced educated women of the early twentieth century. Contrary to her professional role as home efficiency expert, advertising consultant, and consumer advocate, Christine Frederick espoused the nineteenth-century ideal of preserving the virtuous home -- and a woman's place in it. In an effort to reconcile her desire to succeed in the public sphere of modernization and consumerism with the knowledge that most middle-class Americans still held traditional beliefs about gender roles, Frederick fashioned a career for herself that encouraged other women to remain at home.

With the rise of home economics and scientific management, Frederick -- college-educated but confined to the drudgery of housework -- devised a plan for bringing the public sphere into the domestic. Her home would become her factory. She learned how to standardize tasks by observing labor-saving devices in industry and then applied this knowledge to housework. She standardized dishwashing, for example, by breaking the job into three separate operations: scraping and stacking, washing, and drying and putting away. Determined to train women to become proficient homemakers and efficient managers, Frederick secured a job writing articles for the Ladies' Home Journal. A professional career as home efficiency expert later expanded to include advertising consultant and consumer advocate. Frederick assured male advertisers that she knew women well and promised to help them sell to "Mrs. Consumer."

While Frederick sought the power and influence available only to men, she promoted a division of labor bygender and therefore served the fall of the early-twentieth-century wave of feminism. Rutherford's engaging account of Christine Frederick's life reflects a dilemma that continues to affect women today -- whether to seek professional gratification or adhere to traditional family values.

"Antique', 'vintage', 'previously owned', 'gently used', 'cast-off' n the world of second hand encompasses as many attitudes as there are names for it. The popular perception is that second- hand shops are largely full of junk, yet the rise of vintage fashion and the increasing desire for consumer individuality show that second hand shopping is also very much about style. Drawing on six years of original research, Second-Hand Cultures explores what happens when the often contradictory motivations behind style and survival strategies are brought together. What does second hand buying and selling tell us about the state of contemporary consumption? How do items that begin life as new get recycled and reclaimed? How do second hand goods challenge the future of retail consumption and what do the unique shopping environments in which they are found tell us about the social relations of exchange?
Answering these questions and many more, this book fills a major gap in consumption studies. Gregson and Crewe argue that second hand cultures are critical to any understanding of how consumption is actually practised. Following the life stories of goods as they travel into and through second hand sites, the authors look at the work of traders as well as consumers' investments in second hand merchandise n including gifting and collecting as well as rituals of personalization and possession. Through its revealing investigation into the practices and customs that make up these unconventional retail worlds, this much-needed study carefully unpacks the persuasive allure of the 'previously owned'.

"Consumption Intensified "examines how self-identified middle class Brazilians in Sao Paulo redefined their class during Brazil's economic crisis of 1981-1994. With inflation soaring to an astounding 2700 percent, their consumption practices intensified, not only in relation to the national crisis but also to the expanding global consumer culture. Drawing on her observations of everyday practices and on representations of the middle class in popular culture, anthropologist Maureen O'Dougherty explores both the logic and incoherence of middle- to upper-middle-class Brazilian life.
With the supports of middle-class living threatened--job security, quality education, home ownership, savings, ease of consumption--the means and meaning of "middle class" were thrown into question. The sector thus redefined itself through both class- and race-based claims of moral and cultural superiority and through privileged consumption, a definition the media underscored by continually addressing middle-class Brazilians as consumers--or rather, as consumers denied. In these times, adults became more flexible in employment, and put stakes in their children's expensive private education. They engaged in elaborate comparison shopping, stockpiling of goods, and financial strategizing. Ongoing desire for distinction and "first- world" modernity prompted these Brazilians to buy foreign goods through contraband, thereby defying state protectionist policy. Discontented with the constraints of the national economy, they welcomed neoliberalism.
By uncovering connections between culture and politics, O'Dougherty complicates understandings of the middle class as a social group and category. Illuminating the intricate relation between identity and local and global consumption, her work will be welcomed by students and scholars in anthropology and Latin American studies, and those interested in consumption, popular culture, politics, and globalization.

Captains of Consciousness offers a historical look at the origins of the advertising industry and consumer society at the turn of the twentieth century. For this new edition Stuart Ewen, one of our foremost interpreters of popular culture, has written a new preface that considers the continuing influence of advertising and commercialism in contemporary life. Not limiting his critique strictly to consumers and the advertising culture that serves them, he provides a fascinating history of the ways in which business has refined its search for new consumers by ingratiating itself into Americans' everyday lives. A timely and still-fascinating critique of life in a consumer culture.

Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with possessions. Early Americans suspected luxuries as a corrupting force that would lead to an aristocracy. In Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World, Phyllis Whitman Hunter demonstrates how elite Americans not only became infatuated with their belongings, but also avidly pursued consumption to shape their world and proclaim their success. In eighteenth-century New England harbor towns, the commercial gentry led their communities into full participation in a flourishing Anglo-American consumer culture. Affluent traders constructed roads, wharves, and warehouses, built mansions and assembly buildings, adopted new forms of sociability, and fostered the rise of the public sphere. Using case studies of influential merchant families, Hunter brings alive the process by which Boston and Salem evolved from Puritan towns dominated by families of English origin to Georgian provincial cities open to a diversity of religious affiliations and European ethnicities. Hunter then explores how revolutionary politics overturned polite society and transformed the meanings of possessions. Patriots threw tea to the fish in Boston Harbor, donned homespun at Harvard commencements, and transformed a silver punch bowl into an icon of liberty. The wealthy either espoused republican values and muted their material displays or fled to exile. Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World, reveals a critical link in the complex relationship between capitalism and culture: the process by which material goods become symbols of profound social and cultural significance.

Picture a familiar scene: long lines of shoppers waiting to check out at the grocery store, carts filled to the brim with the week's food. While many might wonder what is in each cart, Andrew Warnes implores us to consider the symbolism of the cart itself. In his inventive new book, Warnes examines how the everyday shopping cart is connected to a complex web of food production and consumption that has spread from the United States throughout the world. Today, shopping carts represent choice and autonomy for consumers, a recognizable American way of life that has become a global phenomenon. This succinct and and accessible book provides an excellent overview of consumerism and the globalization of American culture.

The dreams of abundance, choice, and novelty that have fueled the growth of consumer culture in the United States would seem to have little place in the history of Mississippi--a state long associated with poverty, inequality, and rural life. But as Ted Ownby demonstrates in this innovative study, consumer goods and shopping have played important roles in the development of class, race, and gender relations in Mississippi from the antebellum era to the present. After examining the general and plantation stores of the nineteenth century, a period when shopping habits were stratified according to racial and class hierarchies, Ownby traces the development of new types of stores and buying patterns in the twentieth century, when women and African Americans began to wield new forms of economic power. Using sources as diverse as store ledgers, blues lyrics, and the writings of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, and Will Percy, he illuminates the changing relationships among race, rural life, and consumer goods and, in the process, offers a new way to understand the connection between power and culture in the American South. |Shows how consumer goods and shopping have played important roles in the development of class, race, and gender relations in Mississippi from the antebellum era to the present-or from the plantation store to Wal-Mart.

The Overspent American explores why so many of us feel materially dissatisfied, why we work staggeringly long hours and yet walk around with ever-present mental "wish lists" of things to buy or get, and why Americans save less than virtually anyone in the world. Unlike many experts, Harvard economist Juliet B. Schor does not blame consumers' lack of self-discipline. Nor does she blame advertisers. Instead she analyzes the crisis of the American consumer in a culture where spending has become the ultimate social art.

The field of material culture, while historically well established, has recently enjoyed something of a renaissance. Methods once dominated by Marxist- and commodity-oriented analyses and by the study of objects as symbols are giving way to a more ethnographic approach to artifacts. This orientation is the cornerstone of the essays presented in "Material Cultures," A collection of case studies which move from the domestic sphere to the global arena, the volume includes examinations of the soundscape produced by home radios, catalog shopping, the role of paper in the workplace, and the relationship between the production and consumption of Coca-Cola in Trinidad.
The diversity of the essays is mediated by their common commitment to ethnography with a material focus. Rather than examine objects as mirages of media or language, "Material Cultures" emphasizes how the study of objects not only contributes to an understanding of artifacts but is also an effective means for studying social values and contradictions.

The pathbreaking essays in this collection explore the history of consumption by synthesizing discrete historical literatures on consumer culture, gender, and the history of technology. Luxury hotels and the chocolate industry are among the diverse array of topics these authors use to demonstrate that consumption is both a material and a cultural process. Production and consumption become equally inextricable under close analysis. Tools from both the history of technology and gender studies illuminate how these categories intersect. Although broad social and technological trends influence the outcome of these stories, the authors emphasize the agaency of particular groups, including consumers, workers, manufacturers, and the "mediators" who communicate between producers and consumers. This volume will be of interest to historians in a wide range of fields.

"A Living Wage", the rallying cry of activists, has a revealing history, here documented by Lawrence B. Glickman. The labor movement's response to wages shows how American workers negotiated the transition from artisan to consumer, opening up new political possibilities for organized workers and creating contradictions that continue to haunt the labor movement today.

Nineteenth-century workers hoped to become self-employed artisans, rather than permanent "wage slaves". After the Civil War, however, unions redefined working-class identity in consumerist terms, and demanded a wage that would reward workers commensurate with their needs as consumers. This consumerist turn in labor ideology also led workers to struggle for shorter hours and union labels.

First articulated in the 1870s, the demand for a living wage was voiced increasingly by labor leaders and reformers at the turn of the century. Glickman explores the racial, ethnic, and gender implications, as white male workers defined themselves in contrast to African Americans, women, Asians, and recent European immigrants. He shows how a historical perspective on the concept of a living wage can inform our understanding of current controversies.

"Vital reading for anyone who wants to understand the public's decades-long love affair with vitamin supplements. Rima Apple deftly explores the science, politics, history, marketing, and mystique that have kept vitamins a hot-button issue for the American public."--Bonnie Liebman, Director of Nutrition, Center for Science in the Public Interest "Have you taken your vitamins today?" That question echoes daily through American households. Thanks to intensive research in nutrition and medicine, the importance of vitamins to health is undisputed. But millions of Americans believe that the vitamins they get in their food are not enough. Vitamin supplements have become a multibillion-dollar industry. At the same time, many scientists, consumer advocacy groups, and the federal Food and Drug Administration doubt that most people need to take vitamin pills. Vitamania tells how and why vitamins have become so important to so many Americans. Rima Apple examines the claims and counterclaims of scientists, manufacturers, retailers, politicians, and consumers from the discovery of vitamins in the early twentieth century to the present. She reveals the complicated interests--scientific, professional, financial--that have propelled the vitamin industry and its would-be regulators. From early advertisements linking motherhood and vitamin D, to Linus Pauling's claims for vitamin C, to recent congressional debates about restricting vitamin products, Apple's insightful history shows the ambivalence of Americans toward the authority of science. She also documents how consumers have insisted on their right to make their own decisions about their health and their vitamins. Vitamania makes fascinating reading for anyone who takes--or refuses to take--vitamins. It will be of special interest to students, scholars, and professionals in public health, the biomedical sciences, history of medicine and science, twentieth-century history, nutrition, marketing, and consumer studies. Rima D. Apple teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she holds a joint appointment in the Department of Consumer Science and the Women's Studies Program. She is the author of Mothers and Medicine: A Social History of Infant Feeding, 1890-1950 and editor of Women, Health, and Medicine in America: A Historical Handbook.