Rating: 
Summary: Awful beyond description
Review: The main problem with this book is that the content is totally unrelated to the title. The title puts forth that the book will discuss how marketing has affected American culture, but the book constitutes no such treatise. Instead, the reader is assaulted with a series of the author's autobiographical vignettes. Despite Seabrook's best efforts to tie these together with the occasional sentence or two about marketing, the tales remain disjunct. Further, they're totally uninteresting! I kept reading in the hope that the book would match up to the promise of its cover description, but it never did. What a waste of money and time.
Rating: 
Summary: Essential reading
Review: The smartest, most sensitive guide to the culture of Buzz ever written. Buzz being media noise Ñ the excitement of marketing bees dancing the rest of us to nectar. Nectar being todayÕs New Shiny Thing. TodayÕs New Shiny Thing being the chemical essence of honey. Unscrew the head of the plastic honey bear and pour fashion, power, money, sex and celebrity into the marrow of American culture. This is the sweet part.The bitter part is the emptiness of it all. NobrowÕs a poignant elegy for old Highbrow/Lowbrow cultural values and distinctions that werenÕt worth preserving anyway. ItÕs a captivating cry from a discerning heart. But even better, Seabrook intelligently surveys the ever-evolving gridwork, rules and motivations of Nobrow culture. He diagrams the blender mechanics of Nobrow that can spin every product and institution into a cultural vortice of success or failure. NobrowÕs both surreal ballad and dirge, played with the sharp sense and dumbstruck nausea you can only get from a sane writer. It poignantly renders the weird dislocation and low-grade depression of waking every day to a world where Brands are the verity and Hits the intimacy. Where Nobrow rules like Cyclops with a myopic agenda of fast-forward 24/7 entertainment. There is an understated quality to his vignettes. His commentary on our shifting cultural values is often uncommonly brilliant. ItÕs refreshing to discover a writer who steers clear of over-amped irony and hyperbole. John Seabrook is one of our few trustworthy Virgils in this cultural hell that is hyped as heaven. The fact that he guides us with his own dumb amazement only makes him more trustworthy. The fact that he is not left speechless like the rest of us, but can articulate it, is extraordinary. NobrowÕs essential reading about the all-pervasive marketing beehive and its Buzz.
Rating: 
Summary: John Seabrook muses on Marketure, buy the used copy.
Review: This book is not a hard book read. It actually might have been a really fascinating book. Ironically though, this book almost seems like an ad for the writing of John Seabrook, much as the Author contended was true of Pipilotti Rist and her art/marketing piece known as entitled sip my ocean. There are some interesting idea presented in the book like big grid small grid and the significance of star wars and how it might be the modern day equivalent of Faust. The book would have been far more entertaining and maybe enlightening if it had explored these ideas further. Instead it tries to be two books, one on the modern day fusion of art and marketing and one on the pretentious feeling cool white boy narratives of Seabrook. As interested as I was by the notion of star wars being a modern day religious movement, I was equally bored by hearing about the gap and the banana republic. The book struggles between a discussion of the American culture/market system and John's narratives. The book is good, but he tries to go in two directions at once and it doesn't work as well as it could have, it could have been a better book.
Rating: 
Summary: when culture is marketing
Review: This book is not about how to market culture. Moreless this book is the observations and experimentations in life as observed by one person. While he is exceptionally funny, this book is as much about how his fathers closet shaped his personality as it is about marketing. The whole point of the book is how everything intertwines. A favorite part of mine is when he gets lost in an amazing painting in an abstract art gallery, only to find he is lost in reality.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointingly self-indulgent
Review: This book is not as interesting as it sounds. The author has a single insight which he strings out over several hundred pages of gloriously self-indulgent prose. The book sounded intriguing, so I bought it. The basic idea was interesting so I started to read it. The writing was facile and fluent, so I kept on reading, hoping to find something in it besides self-indulgent reflections on popular culture and how cool the author is to be on the "inside". I believe that MTV has some kind of deep meaning, but this book's discussion of it fails to uncover that meaning. I suppose there is something new to say about Tina Brown and the New Yorker -- this book fails to say it. This book holds the promise of explaining what the convolutions of the New yorker in recent years mean as a parable of the changing cultural mores. However, and sadly, it fails to deliver on its promise, and in the end is a self-indulgent memoir of one man's odessey through popular culture. Not really bad, this book is primarily a disappointment.
Rating:
Summary: Self-consuming Seabrook Comes up Short
Review: This book read more like Seabrook's autobiography and should have been titled "My New Yorker Years". What's the difference between the culture of marketing and the marketing of culture (and more importantly, what's the relevant argument here)? After two hundred odd pages, it beats me.
Rating:
Summary: Not bad
Review: This books is less about the effect of mass consumerism on society and more about one man's romp through that society. Seabrook attempts to define today's nobrow world as saturated in a consumer "Buzz." His "Buzz" theme suffers from vagueness and has the feel of an author desperately trying to coin a new catch-phrase. The best parts of this book are the very entertaining behind-the-scenes looks at The New Yorker, MTV, David Geffen and George Lucas. Seabrook insightfully dissects each's place in today's marketing culture with first-hand accounts. It's good stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Reader, spare yourself
Review: This is a very revealing book, but it tells the reader a good deal more about the Seabrook family -- father and son -- than it does about the admittedly dismal state of American culture. The elder and younger Seabrooks come across as a couple of rich twerps -- from the CEO father with his two-story closet stuffed with a lifetime's wild spending on Saville Row tailoring, to the hot-young-writer-about-SoHo son agonizing over whether to buy a $200 Helmut Lang T-shirt that couldn't be washed or it would fade. Seabrook the Younger apparently considers himself quite the deep thinker, but he constantly mistakes pedestrian reportage for piercing analysis. All in all, I was reminded of Truman Capote's take on "On the Road" -- that it wasn't writing but typing. In short, stay clear of this pretentious, utterly muddle-minded book.
Rating:
Summary: Over-written dirge
Review: This is not so much a book about culture as a book about John Seabrook. There is little structure to it, and the tone is self-congratulatory. Although he hits many good points with regard to the commercialization of American culture, it is -- and this is what makes the book hypocritical -- ultimately a work without soul.
Rating:
Summary: What exactly is the author trying to say?
Review: Though the book is an enjoyable and easy read, the author seems more determined to point out who HE knows and what He has accomplished rather than any real insight into this so-called "buzz" he keeps referring to. Enjoyable, but utterly forgettable.
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