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mrchance's review against another edition
2.0
The dying mall fascinates me. Buildings lying empty and decayed like concrete whales stranded on asphalt beaches. My hometown had a dead mall and a "new" mall, which is now an old, but still breathing, mall. I've been to bustling malls and malls that feel like dark caverns populated with bargain stores and churches (salvation on a budget). So I was drawn to this book. Billed on the flap as "part memoir and part case study," Shopping Mall is at its best when focusing on the latter, but it is unfortunately, for me, heavy on the former.
This book is in a series called "Object Lessons." I'm unsure if the other books are as self-indulgent as this one, as I haven't read them and don't plan to.
Matthew Newton crafts loving images of a nostalgic past. His final image is a stirring one -- "It is the mall rendered in spare parts pulled from memory, its image flickering like a hologram, threatening to vanish before the future ever arrives." But for me, the memoir portions soon become more about Matthew Newton and less about malls. His personal story is so loosely tied to the concept, it reads like "here are things that happened to me in a shopping mall."
The naval-gazing puts this book in "it was good" territory for me, but the abjectly bad copy-editing lowered my enjoyment of the book further. Does Bloomsbury employ a copy-editor? Do they need freelance help? Take notes: The phrase "wrap his knuckles" creates an entirely different image than the author likely intended. The phrase "standing across from Charles and I" demonstrates that the "Object Lessons" crew needs lessons in objects of prepositions. Other issues include, "Usually its apples, bananas, yogurt, and string cheese on my list." (There is a correct "it's" in the previous sentence, making this one even more baffling.) and Newton's use of the phrase "two-year-old son" three times in five pages, without mentioning any other kids, so this is clearly his ONLY SON why does he have to remind us that he's two years old every other page? Where is the editing?!
Most of these slip-ups I noticed at the end of the book, so a) I must have been skimming the memoir parts in the middle, b) I was grumpy, or c) the copy-editor they did hire gave up around page 100, or they expected the reader to.
There is also a baffling chapter where Newton writes in second-person, addressing the reader, but as if the reader were inside the board game Mall Madness. Even I, as a board game fan and dying mall looky-loo, thought WTF.
When Newton is focused on his subject (the title subject on the book's cover), he draws smart connections between shopping malls, suburban culture, and white anxiety. He also interviews a photographer of dead malls who gives him the best quote in the book: "The things I photograph are the direct result of a system that defines progress only in economic terms." In that sense, the mall, formulated in the 1950s, brought to prominence during the excess of the 1980s, on life support in the 2010s, is a sobering metaphor for America itself.
This book is in a series called "Object Lessons." I'm unsure if the other books are as self-indulgent as this one, as I haven't read them and don't plan to.
Matthew Newton crafts loving images of a nostalgic past. His final image is a stirring one -- "It is the mall rendered in spare parts pulled from memory, its image flickering like a hologram, threatening to vanish before the future ever arrives." But for me, the memoir portions soon become more about Matthew Newton and less about malls. His personal story is so loosely tied to the concept, it reads like "here are things that happened to me in a shopping mall."
The naval-gazing puts this book in "it was good" territory for me, but the abjectly bad copy-editing lowered my enjoyment of the book further. Does Bloomsbury employ a copy-editor? Do they need freelance help? Take notes: The phrase "wrap his knuckles" creates an entirely different image than the author likely intended. The phrase "standing across from Charles and I" demonstrates that the "Object Lessons" crew needs lessons in objects of prepositions. Other issues include, "Usually its apples, bananas, yogurt, and string cheese on my list." (There is a correct "it's" in the previous sentence, making this one even more baffling.) and Newton's use of the phrase "two-year-old son" three times in five pages, without mentioning any other kids, so this is clearly his ONLY SON why does he have to remind us that he's two years old every other page? Where is the editing?!
Most of these slip-ups I noticed at the end of the book, so a) I must have been skimming the memoir parts in the middle, b) I was grumpy, or c) the copy-editor they did hire gave up around page 100, or they expected the reader to.
There is also a baffling chapter where Newton writes in second-person, addressing the reader, but as if the reader were inside the board game Mall Madness. Even I, as a board game fan and dying mall looky-loo, thought WTF.
When Newton is focused on his subject (the title subject on the book's cover), he draws smart connections between shopping malls, suburban culture, and white anxiety. He also interviews a photographer of dead malls who gives him the best quote in the book: "The things I photograph are the direct result of a system that defines progress only in economic terms." In that sense, the mall, formulated in the 1950s, brought to prominence during the excess of the 1980s, on life support in the 2010s, is a sobering metaphor for America itself.
pearl35's review
3.0
From Bloomsbury's "Object Lessons" series, this is an impressionistic social and cultural history of the shopping mall, from its earliest incarnation in Edina MN, to the ghost malls sprawled across 21st century suburbia. In between, Newton reflects on packs of wandering teenagers at the arcade, mall shootings, Tiffany's mall concert tour in the 1980s, mall walkers, anchor stores, consumer overload and Romero's zombie allegory, online retailing, malls in movies, Mattel's Mall Madness board game and the ethos of "shop till you drop."
otterno11's review
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Matthew Newton’s short 2017 book Shopping Mall, published as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, essays discussing the “hidden lives of ordinary things,” explores the history of the mall through Newton’s own personal experiences with malls and other public spaces. Beginning with a pilgrimage to Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota in search of remnants of its designer Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen’s lost humanistic vision, he folds his own memories, especially those of his own local mall, Monroeville Mall in western Pennsylvania, into his reflection on the shopping mall as a US icon. Monroeville, built in 1969 and the filming location for George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, seems like an especially apt example to focus on, representing many of the shifts that malls have been an expression of socially.
Like nostalgia itself, Newton describes malls as offering contradictory visions in US culture, emblematic of both a flattering “portrait of success and happiness” and a darker one of “greed, lifestyles of excess, and a national obsession with material goods.” He also, using the term “render ghost,” expresses the mall’s eerie liminal relationship to the present, offering both a memorable past and a prosperous tomorrow, made even eerier if the mall itself becomes obsolete and abandoned. Representing so much of late twentieth-century life, both our memories and what we believed about the future, the mall itself, then, feels like a lost time, an embodiment of the ephemeral American dream.
I continue these thoughts at Harris' Tome Corner discussing Dead Malls: Nostalgia in the Ruins.
Like nostalgia itself, Newton describes malls as offering contradictory visions in US culture, emblematic of both a flattering “portrait of success and happiness” and a darker one of “greed, lifestyles of excess, and a national obsession with material goods.” He also, using the term “render ghost,” expresses the mall’s eerie liminal relationship to the present, offering both a memorable past and a prosperous tomorrow, made even eerier if the mall itself becomes obsolete and abandoned. Representing so much of late twentieth-century life, both our memories and what we believed about the future, the mall itself, then, feels like a lost time, an embodiment of the ephemeral American dream.
I continue these thoughts at Harris' Tome Corner discussing Dead Malls: Nostalgia in the Ruins.
andrealaurion's review
5.0
The rise and fall of the shopping mall is also a story of the American teenager in a very particular time and place.
dejunker's review
2.0
I wanted to like this book based off other reviews. But, it was more autobiography than about shopping malls. Almost half of it could be torn out and still tell the author’s biography and the mall life. More facts or points of interests about other malls would have been nice even with the fact that the mall he constantly discusses does have a very eventful history, albeit tragic. I skimmed the second half. Disappointed.
dianna_bolide's review
4.0
This title has been provided by the publisher VIA NetGalley at no charge in exchange for an honest review.
'Shopping Mall' is the first volume of Bloomsbury Academic's Object Lessons series that I've read. The series examines "the hidden lives of ordinary things." Although the books in this series are intentionally brief, I found Davis' look at shopping malls to be engrossing. A blend of personal narrative, history, and cultural analysis that really gave me clarity on the subject...especially the recent cultural role of malls and what their future may hold. The format is appealing...basically a podcast (reading time is about 1-2 hours) in text form and ideal for busy, curious non-fiction lovers.
'Shopping Mall' is available now wherever you purchase/borrow books.
'Shopping Mall' is the first volume of Bloomsbury Academic's Object Lessons series that I've read. The series examines "the hidden lives of ordinary things." Although the books in this series are intentionally brief, I found Davis' look at shopping malls to be engrossing. A blend of personal narrative, history, and cultural analysis that really gave me clarity on the subject...especially the recent cultural role of malls and what their future may hold. The format is appealing...basically a podcast (reading time is about 1-2 hours) in text form and ideal for busy, curious non-fiction lovers.
'Shopping Mall' is available now wherever you purchase/borrow books.
clairelorraine's review
4.0
Newton artfully blends memoir, cultural history, and sociology in this book o' malls. I love the organization into three parts (childhood, adolescence, and adulthood) that delightfully merge mall history w/ the author's experience of malls at those ages. I was actually getting a bit misty at points while reading a nonfiction book about malls, so that should say something!