Orvell's THE REAL THING is the sort of book I wish I'd written. It is entertaining, wide-ranging across many cultural genres, and offers a coherent and stimulating account of American culture in the late 29th and early 20th centuries. It is especially acute on such complex and difficult-to-classify cultural phenomena as the rise of department stores and mass-produced consumer goods, the "aestheticizing" photographs of the machine-age city (and even of machine parts themselves) by such artists as Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. An outstanding study I return to again and again.