Despite the rather tongue-in-cheek review by the student from Boston, this is a well-edited and thoughtful collection. It provides context for selections from Marx, Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Freud and others. As a professor who has taught widely about critical theory, I highly recommend this intelligent book.

When this book popped up on my list of textbooks for a seminar class I was taking, I gave it nary a thought. I simply purchased the book, like the diligent student that I am, and went on my merry way. As the course picked up, we spent more and more time discussing the contents of this little collection of thoughts. Deconstructing to our hearts content, we flew through the pages. Our fabulously postmodern, poststructuralist ideas overflowed from the container that was our classroom. Swimming in the discursive bliss that is this book, we lapped up the sweet elixir of its signifiers. Yet, always lurking in the back of our minds were threats of delegitimation. Where were we to go? What were we to do--plagued in this postmodern, capitalist utopia we like to call the United States of America, wallowing in one of its academic institutions no less? Clutching our readers we walk the streets, the strong winds of the anti-revolution revolution beating against our frail student bodies. Weaving our way through the carceral network of our lives, accumulating a gaunt identity of pastiche we walk smack into the inevitable wall--the wall that is our own knowledge limited; the wall that is truth or its abscene. And so, we turn back, open our reader, and meditate.

This is, put simply, a Very Useful Book. It seems to be mostly aimed at people used to traditional literary criticism, who are interested in the whole new & exciting thang that is Cultural Studies - reading and interpreting all sorts of cultural objects, from tv shows and movies, to public buildings, to cereal packets, to (and this is really where this book comes in) poems and novels and plays. It's a good, clear summary of a fascinating but often confusing field, and it's practical too if (like me) you want to start doing this cultural analysis yourself. I was saying to myself "Oh, that's right!" all the way through this book. Okay, so the guy next to me on the bus was looking at me funny, but who cares?! Since you have to live in our culture, you might as well get the tools to understand it!