Description:
Selling Seattle, the first book by newly minted Ph.D. James Lyons, is a British academic's take on the city's rise from provincial backwater to 1990s cultural icon. Removed in time and space from local, contemporary accounts such as Clark Humphrey's Loser and Fred Moody's I Sing the Body Electronic, it examines the transformation in terms of Seattle's natural setting and its class and racial composition in addition to the usual suspects: grunge, tech, and espresso. It should come as no surprise that, as a student of film, Lyons chooses to illustrate many of his points with references to popular movies and television series. He effectively points to The Hand That Rocks the Cradle as a depiction of suburban white anxiety and to Frasier's Café Nervosa not only as an example of the pervasiveness of the coffee culture in Seattle but as an influential reinforcement of the stereotype. A work like this written by someone without a stake in the city is overdue; Lyons may not be intimately familiar with Seattle, but such outside perspective is necessary to a fair, unbiased account. However, it should be understood that although the hardcover dust jacket spells the title as $elling $eattle, uses Starbucks' color scheme, and features iconic representations of an LP, a globe, a computer, and a steaming cup of coffee, this is definitely an academic text, not one for popular consumption. An expansion of the author's doctoral dissertation, it boasts 34 pages of footnotes, a 13-page bibliography, and plenty of terms in italics. A cultural studies paper is what prospective readers should expect--and those to whom this sounds appealing won't be disappointed. --Benjamin Lukoff
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