- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial Canada; 1st HarperPerennial Canada edition (Aug 31 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0006391060
- ISBN-13: 978-0006391067
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #692,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Amazon.ca
In his foreword to Margaret Visser's The Way We Are, John Fraser offers definitions for a new coinage. "Visserism: A concise anthropological insight; an entertainment in which points are made by identifying and skewering absurdities; the doctrine that all scholarship exists to prove that life is rich, funny and meaningful." Fraser edits Saturday Night magazine, which hired Visser in 1988 to write a column called "The Way We Are." The book of the same name collects 60 of these pithy essays, teeming with Visserisms, that explore the cultural significance of everyday objects and phenomena such as jelly, offal, high heels, beards, baked beans, the colour red, tap-dancing, sour tastes, wigs, and the Easter bunny.
Visser traces her interest in "the anthropology of everyday life" to a plastic packet of mustard she encountered when she first arrived in North America from Britain in 1964. She and her companion "sat and looked at the mustard missile, and knew that we had reached a foreign place, an unpredictable and infinitely weird environment." Since then, Visser has produced a string of best-selling, award-winning books including Much Depends on Dinner, The Rituals of Dinner, and The Geometry of Love, "focusing on small humble objects" to "tease out of them philosophies, choices, prejudices, causes, contradictions, tragedies, absurdities." Thus, in The Way We Are Visser re-envisions the heart--"a terrifying, bloody, pumping muscle that throbs and shudders inside us"--as a "multivalent metaphor": seat of courage for the ancient Greeks, of compassion for the modern North American, something that can be, depending on circumstances, "in the right place," "broken," "eaten out" or "worn on the sleeve." She exposes Santa Claus as a phallic symbol: "dressed in red, coming down the chimney, and leaving a present in the stocking." And in chewing gum she sees "an arresting symbol of modernity": "gum is cud-like and primitive, yet it is now impeccably technological." --Russell Prather
From Publishers Weekly
Award-winning Toronto author Visser (Much Depends on Dinner) packs a wealth of intriguing information into this collection of witty essays. All but one of the deceptively short pieces were originally published in Saturday Night magazine and have as their subject matter quite commonplace objects and activities of everyday life. Visser's forte is to take the ordinary and turn it into the extraordinary by providing a cultural history of its evolution (each piece has a bibliography). The practice of showering, for example, was considered dangerous and became habitual only in the last 40 years, after central heating. Until the 1900s, when they established themselves as "professionals," doctors and lawyers accepted tips in the same manner that waiters and hairdressers do today. The concept of paid vacations has its roots in 1920s fascist Italy, where workers were ordered to take time off to exercise their bodies. An insightful volume that will delight both fans and newcomers to Visser's writing.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2.8 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This isn't rocket science..., May 17 2001
By Jennifer M. Macleod "yiddishe supermama" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Way We Are (Hardcover)
...but it is good, clean, fun urban anthropolgy. Whether she's looking at gloves or stockings or wigs or the way we eat our food, Margaret Visser's essays are always light-hearted journeys through things we'd otherwise take for granted.Other reviewers here have said this book is useless, since the information Visser collects is available elsewhere. That may be true, but what she does is bring it all together and present it in a uniformly enjoyable fashion.
I, for one, don't want to pend years sifting through all the sociology, anthropology and history texts that Visser has, just to unearth the "trivial" tidbits she brings to light. So I'm just grateful that she does all the dirty work, and happy for books like hers that I can flip through in my spare time.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very Enjoyable!, May 3 2000
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Way We Are (Hardcover)
Perhaps you ought to be a Visser fan before opening thiscollection of short newspaper essays -- Much Depends on Dinner is acomplete delight. It's definitely a light read, don't take it toseriously, each essay is highly digestible and quietly thoughtful.
1 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
No Rhyme or Reason, Mar 6 2000
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Way We Are (Hardcover)
One cannot help but wonder why the author bothered. She borrows facts lavishly from much better sources than herself, adds nothing, wanders from subject to subject without rhyme or reason and never tells you what she intends or intended. What a monumental waste of time!
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