Foibles of Abundance

The Conquest of Cool:
Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
by Thomas Frank
University of Chicago Press, 1997
272 pp $22.95

Over the past decade, cool has become the trademark of American consumerism. The triumph of cool is especially apparent in advertisements, as Madison Avenue has discarded the scientific ethos that dominated the trade during the 1970s and early 1980s in favor of an antinomian spirit. Countercultural malcontents like William S. Burroughs and Lou Reed have elbowed aside lab-coated spokespeople. Screaming guitar solos, psychedelic graphics, and jump cuts have supplanted bar graphs and pie charts. Most important, the ironic wink, not the faux-populi...