| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. By Andrew Hurley. (New York: Basic Books, 2001. xx, 409 pp. Cloth, $27.50, ISBN 0-465-03186-2. Paper, $17.00, ISBN 0-465-03187-0.)

In this book Andrew Hurley traces the historical relationship among three facets of post-World War II consumption--diners, bowling alleys, and trailer parks--and the expanded economic and social horizons of millions of newly affluent working-class families. His thesis is that those 'three quintessentially American institutions' functioned as 'transitional' agencies that exposed and ultimately integrated white working-class families into the ways and means of middle-class 'mass consumer culture' in the two decades following World War II. Hurley, who teaches history at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, argues that after 1945 this consumer triad not only symbolized an easier, more secure life for working-class families but enabled them to achieve 'a standard of domestic relations that connoted middle-class status' and served as 'testaments to the perseverance of the American Dream.'
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