|
Product Description
The diversity of contemporary London is extraordinary, and begs to be better understood. Never before have so many people from such diverse backgrounds been free to mix and not to mix in close proximity to each other. But increasingly people's lives take place behind the closed doors of private houses. How can we gain an insight into what those lives are like today? Not television characters, not celebrities, but real people. How could one ever come to know perfect strangers?Danny Miller attempts to achieve this goal in this brilliant exposé of a street in modern London. He leads us behind closed doors to thirty people who live there, showing their intimate lives, their aspirations and frustrations, their tragedies and accomplishments. He places the focus upon the things that really matter to the people he meets, which quite often turn out to be material things, the house, the dog, the music, the Christmas decorations. He creates a gallery of portraits, some comic, some tragic, some cubist, some impressionist, some bleak and some exuberant.
We find that a random street in modern London contains the most extraordinary stories. Mass murderers and saints, the most charmed Christmas since Fanny and Alexander and the story of how a CD collection helped someone overcome heroin. Through this sensitive reading of the ordinary lives of ordinary people, Miller uncovers the orders and forms through which people make sense of their lives today. He shows just how much is to be gained when we stop lamenting what we think we used to be, and instead concentrate on what we are becoming now. He reveals above all the sadness of lives and the comfort of things.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Materiality (Politics, History, and Culture)
- American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998
- Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940
- The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
- Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
- Advertising and the Transformation of American Society, 1865-1920: (Contributions in Economics and Economic History)
- For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It
- How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
- American Society: How It Really Works (Second Edition)
- Stuff
*If this is not the "The Comfort of Things" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Dec 24, 2024 23:57 +08.