This book is a penetrating analysis of the origins of our mass-culture, consumerist society. First, the author debunks the notion that consumerism was a natural technological development or clearly represents progress.

The author makes evident that the captions of industry sought to exert control over the entire social milieu beginning in the 1920s. Their foremost project was to define American life as consumerism. Consumption was marketed as far more than acquiring the essentials of life; it was a means to transform one's life: to achieve social esteem, to escape otherwise mediocre, humdrum lives. It was very much an individualistic approach to life in contrast to the traditional focus on small communities or extended families.

Industrialism was not easily swallowed by workers of the 19th and early 20th century. Traditional social bonds became irrelevant in factory production. Also under scientific management work was systematically deskilled and redefined by management. The strike wave of 1919 and the "Red Scare" of the early 20's convinced economic elites to set upon a course of pacification of discontented citizens in addition to measures of suppression.

The advertising in the 20's tried to convince that the mass production of consumable items was of tremendous benefit to society. The "freedom" of workers as consumers to transform their lives more than offset the actual loss of control over work processes. Every effort was made to see that mass-culture goods penetrated and hence defined all areas of life. Non-acceptance of that corporate-defined world was not viewed kindly. Virtually all non-market activity was cast as secondary, if not illegitimate. Buying superceded voting as the means to social remedy. Even families became purchasing units.

By the 1950s the transformation of the US to a consumerist culture was virtually complete. The penetration of corporate-owned television into all households ensured that alternatives to consumerism would not surface which was a continuation of the trend of centralization of all media outlets. The free-market and free trade ideologues of the 1990s are merely following in those same footsteps.

Though written 25 years ago, this book remains relevant today. More recent authors such as Kuttner, Schiller, Lindblom, or Frank can only add to what Ewen has already said.

When this book appeared twenty-five years ago, it blew my mind. Filled with amazing insights and information, it's still the best book on the topic. Provocative, thought-provoking, gutsy. Great that this new edition has appeared. It's still the book to read on the subject of advertising.

Captains of Consciousness, written more than twenty years ago, remains a classic in the field. A fascinating look at the rise of American consumer culture, the book places advertising firmly within the context of pivotal social developments that have shaped the life and mind of twentieth century America. A must read for anyone interested in understanding where we come from, where we are going

When I first read this book, I was 18, a freshman in college. I had spent the entirety of my existance under the fishbowl of advertising. Although I had seen styles come and go, I really didn't understand enough to truly fathom what Ewen was saying.

This, I think is Ewens's primary weekness. He comes off as attacking something that most people don't really see as existing. Fasion and style are too easily made straw men. Especially important is that fasion and style are usually under some sort of attack, either for using sex to interest people, for promoting an unrealistic standard of beauty, or even as the ultimate cause of violence and poverty when people murder others for their shoes or their coats.

It is far too easy to mistake Ewen's attack on style as an attack on having aesthetic values at all. His use of fascist and proto-fascist sources as examples of the evil of style also weakens his work, as it looks like he is trying to create a "slipperly slope" argument between Vouge and Mien Kampf.

Ultimately, I would say the book is worth reading, but only if one is looking for a way to better express what one already feels. If you are looking for something that will change minds, this is not the book.

This book is a powerful tool. It is eye-opening and thought-provoking. While giving you some insight and a point of view to look around you with a better focus, it lets you better know yourself.

The author examines the power of the image in our society, showing how, with the birth of photography, the image of an object became more important than the object itself. Ewen reminds us how style, images and propaganda affect our lives, by making people dissatisfied with the things they have (houses, cars, razors, sweatshirts), still good and useful and efficient, but lacking in the newest touch -- to make you buy what you don't need.

There are a few ads discussed, so you can learn how to analyze ads on your own.

You'll find how appearances work, so you can get rid of them.

Use your critical thought and read this book with a grain of salt. As an example, the author - to make his point - quotes Karl Marx three times. While Marx, the father of Communism, certainly influenced the lives (and especially the deaths) of millions of people, much research shows that he deliberately collected false data to write his book...

Also (see pages 186-187) the author somewhat condems the spread and use of computers and machines. I just don't agree, here. The advent of computer, for example, made my job as a pharmacist much easier. And I have to thank the Internet and the computing power of machines if I can run my publishing house and if I'm able to get in touch with people around the world who share my interests.

Please remember that this book is a history of the role of image and style in western societies - especially the USA one - and that the author is a Professor: in my opinion, a few chapters are not much interesting, because they don't give the reader information he can use.

I usually underline the books' parts I find more interesting, and I write down in a separate sheet the page number where the underlining occurred and why I did it. This is one of my most underlined books!

A few quotations from the book follow. I think they shed light on its value.

"Every element of politicians' public lives, every utterance, every countenance, every policy statement, every carefully chosen background setting is routinely passed through the image mill. Focus groups are staged, public perceptions painstakingly monitored, chiefly for the purpose of generating what one knowing "New York Times" reporter has termed "more potent propaganda."".

"Crowds have always undergone the influence of illusions. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master."

"To (...) modern architects of persuasion, independent public deliberation was something to be avoided at all cost. In its apparent capacity to advance a worldview in a bedazzling moment, and to stun the public mind into submission, the image was conceived to be an effective antidote to critical thought."

"In a highly mobile society, where first impressions are important and where selling oneself is the most cultivated "skill", the construction of appearances becomes more and more imperative. If style offers a representation of self defined by surfaces and commodities, the media by which style is transmitted tend to reinforce this outlook in intimate detail. They continually offer us visible guideposts, reference points to draw upon, against which to measure ourselves."

"As style becomes information, information becomes style. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in television news. "Newsroom" sets are styled to create the look of a command center, to offer an imagistic sense of being "plugged-in" to what is happening, to convey authority. Television journalists are selected and cultivated for their looks, their screen presence. From an authoritative, medium-shot vantage point, sitting behind a formidable desk, the anchorperson is constructed to transmit an appearance of incorruptibility, and of omniscience. On occasion, the camera moves in for a close-up, to impress a connotation of gravity upon a story, to show the audience that this newsperson "cares". From opening logo to sign-off, all information, all stories are filtered through a veil of appearances."

I first learned of this book when I heard Ewen give the keynote address at the American Institute of Graphic Arts convention in San Antonio in 1989. As a practicing designer the book gave me critical insights into my work and its impact on society. I've just read the new edition of All Consuming images and my eyes were opened once again. The new material is simply great. This book a major contribution to contemporary thought.

It took to me nearly one month to sit down and write about this book. It has valuable strenghts and some weaknesses.

As a whole, "PR!" makes no easy reading.
It is sold as a "Social History of Spin" and consists of five parts.

Part one tells us about the interest of the author - his attempt to discover the social and historical roots that would explain the boundless role of public relations in our world.
This is the best part of the book, it's fresh, it's written full of enthusiasm, and it feels; Stuart Ewen tells us of his visit with Edward Bernays, one of the most influential pioneers of American public relations.
Ewen describes how he started teaching his course, the "CULT(ure) of Publicity"; how he and his students made the class "look good", "look interesting" in the presence of an unaware journalist, so to meet the reporter's standard of "intriguing".
If you are interested in how spin works, this first part is a must!

Parts two and three really are a social history of spin.
Page after page, Ewen writes a "grim meditation on the human price of industrialization".
Mmmh.
I think this book is very smart. Why? The author brings us examples from the past, and extensively quotes other's sources. Here's an excerpt (as Upton Sinclair summarized it in 1908):
"See, we are just like Rome. Our legislatures are corrupt; our politicians are unprincipled; our rich men are ambitious and unscrupulous. Our newspapers have been purchased and gagged; our colleges have been bribed; our churches have been cowed. Our masses are sinking into degradation and misery; our ruling classes are becoming wanton and cynical".

The big picture is an account of the "business as usual", but, since the examples come from the past and there's no relation with today's firms and people, it's possible to avoid any costly lawsuit.
Eh, eh! Excerpt:
(...) AT&T, in 1903, engaged the services of a recently founded enterprise known as the Publicity Bureau, located in Boston. The Publicity Bureau, a partnership of experienced former newspaper men, was already achieving a reputation for being able to place prepackaged news items in papers around the country, and Frederick P. Fish, president of AT&T, believed that this know-how might be serviceable in the defense of the Bell System's corporate game plan.
James T. Ellsworth, a seasoned journalist with the Bureau, was given the job of steering the AT&T account.
(...) Developing a strategy out of his firsthand experience, Ellsworth took a firts step, which was based on his understanding of newspaper economics. By 1900, advertising - not circulation - was already the prime source of income for most newspapers, and Ellsworth fully comprehended the unspoken power that advertisers could exert over editorial policy and content.
(...) With the lubricant of advertising dollars, Ellsworth was soon providing suddenly compliant editors with a diverse range of packaged articles, already typeset and ready to be placed".

Pity, the extensive use of quotations tends to slow down the reading speed.

Part four looks like an hagiography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I just it think is out of the "Social History of Spin" topic.

Part five is a sum-up of the whole book.

Here is a quotation I appreciate a lot:
"The relationship between publicity and democracy is not essentially corrupt. The free circulation of ideas and debate is critical to the maintenance of an aware public. (...) Publicity becomes and impediment to democracy, however, when the circulation of ideas is governed by enormous concentrations of wealth that have, as their underlying purpose, the perpetuation of their own power. When this is the case - as is too often true today - the ideal of civic participation gives way to a continual sideshow, a masquerade of democracy calculated to pique the public's emotions. In regard to a more democratic future, then, ways of enhancing the circulation of ideas - regardless of economic circumstance - need to be developed.

What is the summing up of this review?
We have here a book worth reading, a smart book that uses history as a tool to understand how spin works right now.
It provides much food for thought - maybe try not to read it when you're tired, but when you are vigilant and with your sense of criticism well aware.""

Great book, very entertaining. Read Guerilla PR Wired too and recieve a full idea of what PR should, can and shouldn't be.

A teacher colleague and I read this book when it was first published. We would go to the teachers' lunch room almost everday with an ongoing discussion of what we read.

To understand the history, power and influence of public relations and advertising in this country, PR is a must read. In lucid analysis, Ewen lays out how the public relations industry in this country helps to shape the consumer thought of citizens. He shows how this industry grew out of
an elitist view of the masses of people in this country that they did not need to be expose to certain information or processes that converen or controll society--both politically and economically. That instead, their thoughts, ideas, and their access to certain knowledge needed to be controlled and that certain information needed to be manufactured in order to push people to act in a certain way.

He explains, for example, how elitist writers like Walter Lippman "had written that the key to leadership inthe modern age would depend on the ability to manipulate "'symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas. The public mind is mastered, he continued, through an 'intensificatioin of feeling and a degradation of significance.' " In other words, corporations, and their public relations workers essentially use symbols to further their agendas, which is basically to make huge amounts of profit.

I look forward to reading other books by Ewen.

In reading this book for a course on gender and consumerism, I found that many of the points the authors made were true, although they tend towards the pessimistic. While criticizing the control aspects of advertising and consumerism, they play into a "conspiracy theory" mindset that the same advertising they're criticizing helped to create. A good read overall, but remember to read it, as all things, critically

I read this book when it originally came out and then, recently, came across the revised edition. Reading it in 2001, the book remains fresh offering a brilliant look at the power of images within our lives. The sections on fashion and on early movies, in particular, present a wonderful look at the interface between mass culture and personal lives. A must read.