Rating: 
Summary: Preaching to the Choir
Review: Postrel manages to do nothing more than preach to her choir. Those who believe that our obsession with appearances makes us shallow and easily manipulated will merely point to Postrel as an example of that shallowness and lack of self-perception that makes her easily manipulated; those who accept Postrel's thesis will believe that her opponents are the ones being manipulated into lives of dullness and little imagination.Neither side, and Postrel is particularly guilty of this, can respond to the other with anything more than polemics and platitudes. More importantly, if this is the biggest issue Postrel can find to write about, her world must be a very safe and just place. For those with more pressing concerns, her book is a waste of time.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty AND Smart? Well, neither...
Review: Postrel takes an interesting thesis -- that we, as a culture, are becoming more aesthetically savvy, and that aesthetic expression is hard-coded in us -- and supports it with a grab bag of documentary and anecdotal evidence. She builds whole pages on a TV interior designer's insistence that 8 year-olds worship design, and relies on thesis repetition to make up for the lack of thesis support. In the last chapter, it seems as though every paragraph ends with a variant of "Pretty and Smart," which is not only annoying, but often unsupported. The greatest problem, though, is the lack of a logical thread -- Postrel makes the valid argument that aesthetic taste is a personal, subjective thing, but then goes on to brand whole genres and generations as objectively "ugly." She also feels that external aesthetic mandates are generally misguided, unless, of course, they're hers. Postrel raises interesting issues, and has certainly done her reporting homework. In the end, however, "The Substance of Style" has not much of either.
Rating: 
Summary: Postrel just wants your money
Review: Postrel's thesis is deceptively simple: human beings are more than merely rational creatures. We enjoy our senses and we seek pleasure through them. That, of course, is enough to indict her in the eyes of those for whom the ascetic ideal is indeed ideal. These fundamentalists come in many forms: religious, political, environmental, aesthetic. They have one thing in common. They all want the rest of us to share their deep concern for whatever it is they're deeply concerned about. Inevitably, all fundamentalists are about the narcissistic project of saving the world. Postrel, in this elegant book, is wiser than to think that what we consume or sanctimoniously don't consume can save the world, or even ourselves. She puts daily aesthetics into a proper place, a place not where grand projects clash, but where simple pleasures and differences are savored. I thank her for that.
Rating: 
Summary: Listen to the New Puritans Squeal!
Review: Postrel's thesis is deceptively simple: human beings are more than merely rational creatures. We enjoy our senses and we seek pleasure through them. That, of course, is enough to indict her in the eyes of those for whom the ascetic ideal is indeed ideal. These fundamentalists come in many forms: religious, political, environmental, aesthetic. They have one thing in common. They all want the rest of us to share their deep concern for whatever it is they're deeply concerned about. Inevitably, all fundamentalists are about the narcissistic project of saving the world. Postrel, in this elegant book, is wiser than to think that what we consume or sanctimoniously don't consume can save the world, or even ourselves. She puts daily aesthetics into a proper place, a place not where grand projects clash, but where simple pleasures and differences are savored. I thank her for that.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting ideas
Review: The author presents some interesting ideas on the value of aesthetics in our society. As a designer myself, I found these arguments validating and solid. But the author also has some disturbing arguements on the place of aesthetics in our economy. Postrel points out that our economic model values efficiency and supply/demand but does not factor in improved aesthetics when calculating the strength of the economy. Postrel then goes on to argue that by factoring in aesthetics, Americans are actually earning approximately 30% more than their parents earned (an argument with which the authors of Nickel and Dimed and The Working Poor would ardently disagree). Postrel actually claims poor people are living better lives because pagers and toilet brushes have pleasing aesthetic design. Postrel has clearly never had to "get by" or lived "paycheck to paycheck", else she would know a cool looking toilet brush doesn't mean squat when there's no food on the table.
Rating:
Summary: Style Points
Review: This book convinced me I was not nuts. Not the my-dog-wants-me-to-kill nuts, but the sinking feeling that no one else is thinking like you when you decide you absolutely hate your kitchen cabinets. Virginia Postrel shows us that millions of people are thinking about the look and feel of things -- their door knobs, their pagers, their alarm clocks, their cabinets -- and, moreover, that it is a perfectly normal human interaction with the world around us. This copiously footnoted book explains how the urge to decorate ourselves and our surroundings has always been with us and has only accelerated with modern means of production. In sum, the desire for stylish things is not the product of Madison Ave. manipulation, but the brains we climbed out of the trees with on the African plains. With all these natural designers now on the loose and with previously unavailable ways to express their style in their hands, conflict is inevitable. But Postrel shows how it can be clumsy at best to try and impose a top-down style on neighborhoods or commercial development. You end up with elected officials with no better taste or sense of style than anyone else -- and that is being kind -- deciding that things like glass block just does not fit their vision of what a building should be. Better to reconcile yourself to the fact that different people like different things and move on. Like it or not, the Aesthetic Age is upon us and there will be no going back to just the old duopolies of style -- Contemporary or Colonial, Preppie or Punk, Casual or Formal, not when there are a dozen quite distinct variations on Goth alone. It is a measure of how important aesthetics have become that if you work in retail, marketing, real estate, auto sales, or the hospitality industry, you need to read this book. The rest of you could do worse things with your time, too.
Rating:
Summary: I've got a headache THIS big!
Review: This book gave me a headache! The whole thing feels like it was written during business travel or while gulping down lunch. It raises a lot of interesting points but never seems to tie them together into a cohesive argument, or even series of arguments. Anything that can be made to pass for supporting evidence is merrily dragged into the mess so that teenageer's fashions, Nazi movie directors, economics and urban planning are all treated as part of some greater whole. Don't get me wrong, there were several places where the book gave me a new perspective - but on the whole I found this to be sloppy work.
My views may be in the minority but I would still recomment the average reader keep some aspirin handy!
Rating:
Summary: Badly written and superficial blithering
Review: This book is quite a disappointment. I wanted to read the book through but I just couldn't get myself to finish it. I'll illustrate why:
It's written very badly.
If you've ever read the outside of a bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap, you'll know the basic style. Take that mess of sentence making, mash it together with the story-telling method of a 3 year old and crush it under a heaping sack of gluttony glorification and sketchy opinions masked as facts... then you're a little closer to Postrel's performance in this book. I'll attempt to emulate: "Stuff is happening! Blaaaahhhh! There's this and stuff and this and that and stuff and and and it's SO GREAT that we think we're so rich and we can buy everything from brand names and this unrelated person said that and this and other random people said other things I can jumble into how I love not thinking about anything beyond the surface of magazine articles and corporate marketing is so great and people LIKE it! Blaah!"
Other irritants include her frequent use of listing in paragraph form, rapid-fire name dropping and quoting of unintroduced people, deceptive use of the english language, jumbled or contradictory anecdotes, and not concluding the inklings of any point.
Her writing gets less frantic the farther she goes but it doesn't ever reach a point at which I would call 'good' or even 'skilled'. Doing spot checks throughout the remainder of the text reveals nothing more than a slower pace of stream of consciousness without conscience.
An organized thought? Cohesion? Sorry..
The chapters I read contained no structure, no organization of thought, no points of cohesion throughout their entirety. If there was a point behind the apparent meaning of each word in series, I must have missed it. Because as far as I could tell, everything was face value and no further.. and that face is an ugly portrait of average, current mass-media writing.
It's almost as if Postrel is not really a human but a author simulator, programmed to take magazine archive keyword searches and mash them chaotically together with marketing slop and corporate praise. A human would take all that data and assemble it into a flow of thoughts, reflections and deeper postulations to form a book. A badly written software program though, would do as she has done and vomit a number of barely formed paragraphs of pseudo-speak into a large number of random pages. Don't believe me? Go to any one page, anywhere in the book and start reading. Do so again. It's the same effect as starting at the beginning and reading the pages in numeric order.
Maybe she IS just a computer program. Her picture in the back certainly looks like a stock photo. Wouldn't surprise me a bit.
The point of view is seriously out of touch.
Her angle of attack in this book seems to be written by someone who doesn't exist outside of what other people are writing and saying in popular media. In her fantasy world, all Americans are rich, we love corporate marketing and we don't notice or care about why things are made in China, why people are poor and starving, or why anyone should care about anything that isn't a famous person or a name brand.
Her stance is very pro aristocrat
I personally am offended with her glorification of all things aristocratic. In the same way it's not nice to give praise to bullies, I don't appreciate tone of her statements writing off origins and consequences of americorp imperialist dominance as fine and dandy. Everything beyond that it seems, is not worthy of her attention. For the sake of a book like this though, it should be. Her bias causes the book to fail yet again because it NEVER DOES grapple any substance within the plasticine fantasy vapor of what she defines as style. She just cheers the bullies of industry from the insidious sidelines of pretentiousness. Her only goal past that seems to be circuitous statements trying to convince you that all of that is okay.
Rating:
Summary: Style and the next generation(s)
Review: This book reflects the process described by Adams, when he said that "I must study war and politics so that my children shall be free to study commerce, agriculture and other practicalities, so that their children can study painting, poetry and other fine things." As an aging programmer (and author of possibly-practical books about Java, XML, web services and such) I guess I fit into his second stage; Postrel is giving people like me a very interesting way to think about the world of our children. (And I suggest "Other Fine Things" as a title for a follow-up volume.)
I've given a copy (autographed by VP -- seems appropriate) to my 18-year-old, soon off to college. He is in some ways as geeky as I was, academically outstanding and all that, but he also designs his own clothes, and classmates (mostly female, but not all) come here for him to dye their hair in interesting patterns. There have always been kids like that, I suppose, but the world is now changing to fit them.
I think Tyler Cowen's "Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures" book makes a good companion piece.
Rating:
Summary: Substance AND Style
Review: Through inescapable logic and clear depictions, this book explains how features once derided as aesthetic have become increasingly powerful and uniquely personal product differentiators. Executives who continue to seek meaning within the cells of a spreadsheet, take heed of what Postrel implies: great product development doesn't cost...it pays.
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