Not as good as Class, but in the same vein. ( )

[BAD] is a curmudgeonly look at American culture in the 80s/90s and is intent on demonstrating how monstrously bad much of it is. Although I didn't agree with all of his analyses, many of them were spot on and hilariously written. His main point is that, as a country, we take the art of being bad and raise it to a new level, that of BAD, which combines poor quality with pretense and pomposity. Since the book was written in the early 90s, it's somewhat dated and I recognized a few things that were problems then but aren't now, and a few that had just shifted (like pagers to cell phones). America bashing usually really puts me off a book, since I'm rather fond of my country, so when I started and realized what I had gotten into, I was a bit annoyed. However, through the contempt and mockery comes a faint whiff of fondness that made me feel like the author doesn't so much hate his country as hate that it's not a great as it should be, a sentiment I can agree with. At times I had to roll my eyes, like when French toilets are favorably compared to American ones (sort of), but it wasn't too slavishly pro-Europe/anti-American, esp compared to some modern social writing. All in all, a funny if dated look at our culture. Everyone should be able to find at least a thing or two to identify with and laugh at, I would hope. ( )

A funny book on taste and class in America. Fussell looks at the gap between appearance and reality and how Americans are so blinded by marketing and insecure about their status, that we accept BAD things. ( )

With deadly wit and a nose for fakery, Fussell takes aim at the bad, things promoted as highly desirable that are in fact trivial; his targets are arrayed in A-to-Z format, each dispensed with a single mini-essay.

From Fussell, a great crying out at just about everything that's awful about today's America. Bad things have always been around--cheap, false, deceitful; but when, as in our deluded ``age of hype,'' these things are not just swallowed whole but are declared to be ``better than any other sort,'' then ``bad'' is raised to ``BAD,'' otherwise understood as the culture-wide ``manipulation of fools by knaves'' that makes up the reality of our everyday experience in a nation that's insecure, ``subadult,'' and ``intellectually deprived.'' Fussell (Wartime, 1989, etc.) chronicles the shabby charade that comprises life in America, organizing his laments into a bitterly hilarious reference book with entries from ``BAD Advertising'' through ``BAD Television,'' to "pop music" with stops in between, for example, at airlines, beliefs, conversation, engineering, language, people, poetry, and even restaurants. The key idea throughout is that what determines true ``BAD'' is ``the distance between appearance and reality,'' and what Fussell is really decrying is the class insecurity, the ``doltishness and provincialism,'' that causes Americans to love the third-rate and to have not a clue as to the genuine. ``BAD Colleges and Universities'' may be the central entry in the whole, since wholesale and happily complacent ignorance lies at the heart of the horror. Out-Menckening Mencken in his silver-tongued diatribes at bunkum and pretense and fraud, Fussell slips sometimes into mere disgust, or worse, into plain insensitivity (West Virginia is a place where the waitresses ``will have no teeth''); but in declaring America to be a clownish nation empowered today only by ``a conspiracy against actuality,'' he addresses what might just be the awful truth about the last rotting timber our house stands on. With droll and despondently elegant wit, a study of the manipulated ignorance of our mass culture, and a dirge for the ``wiping-out of the amenity and nuance and complexity and charm that make a country worth living in.''