| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Beautiful Democracy: bbbbsthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era. By Russ Castronovo. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xiv, 287 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 978-0-226-09628-5. Paper, $24.00, ISBN 978-0-226-09629-2.)

"How does democracy taste?" (p. 1). With this line begins Russ Castronovo's Beautiful Democracy, and the reader quickly discovers that this odd-sounding question is complicated and that the path to the answer does not resemble a straight line but is circuitous, full of dead ends, double-backs, and cul-de-sacs. How could it be anything else when the goal of the book is to provide "a cultural geography of beauty" (p. 2)? Specifically, Castronovo is interested in both popular and academic debates about beauty in the United States from 1877 to 1936, and his impressive archive includes the work of the popular reformer Jacob Riis, the critics W. E. B. Du Bois and William Dean Howells, the writer Frank Norris, as well as academic syllabi, dissertations, plans for extension courses, and university textbooks from the period. The lesson is that democracy in this formative period was deeply concerned with questions of aesthetics and beauty—yet beauty proved to be a slippery subject.

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