It's in the Cards

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating footnotes aren't enough to redeem bad text
Review: Boy, there's a lot in this book, but not a lot about credit cards or even consumer credit. I learned that Dail-a-Porn lasts 57 seconds, how truckers negotiate prices from prostitutes on CB radio, and that a certain woman who doesn't find Arabian-nights themed hotel rooms sexy prefers bondage games. But what is the point: that credit lets people buy things, that credit cards let people borrow to buy, that a card rather then currency removes a fetish for retaining money, or that a card encourages annonymity? Don't truckers pay hookers in cash anyway?

This is a messy pastiche of the author's previous academic paper, the type of sociology that consists of recounting the scripts of ads then telling readers what the advertisers were really trying to say, and lots of academic sounding references. Freud, Marx, Weber, Veblen,Maury Povich,and Foucalt have all been included in that festive intellectual name- dropping style.

Rating:
Summary: Credit and the Material World
Review: The world of consumer credit offers many cultural and real financial implications. Credit cards, their marketing, social significance, and consumer utilization are areas not usually covered in both social and economic contexts. This book offers a view that credit is a part of everyday life. In addition, analysis offered in this study portrays consumer credit as both a positive and negative force in our society. The analysis of historical development, marketing, cultural values and facilitation of consumer spending would suffice as an adequate analysis. But the view of the credit card industry as dependent upon issuing more plastic after consumer bankruptcy is important. We get the idea that credit cards are facilitators for middle class lifestyles and continuance of the economic system. This book clearly builds upon the early assumptions and gives us a wider view of the socio-economic playing field related to the influence of credit card utilization.