Not a fanI thought it was going to be some science fiction like weird thing it's a non-fiction about malls it opened with her saying like I've never felt more myself at a mall and I was like I don't think I don't think this is for me
Big Mall (2024)
Others: Negative A phenomenology of the If the mall makes us feel bad, why do we keep going back? In a world poisoned by capitalism, is shopping what makes life worth living? In less than a century, the shopping mall has morphed from a blueprint for a socialist utopia to something else a home to disaffected mallrats and depressed zoo animals, a sensory overload and consumerist trap. Kate Black grew up in North America's largest West Edmonton Mall – a mall on steroids. It’s the site of a notoriously lethal rave for teenagers, a fatal rollercoaster accident, and more than one gun-range suicide; it’s where oil field workers reap the social mobility of a boom-and-bust economy, the impossibly large structure where teens attempt to invent themselves in dark Hollister sales racks and weird horny escapades in the indoor waterpark. It’s a place people love to hate and hate to love – a site of pleasure and pain, of death and violence, of (sub)urban legend. Can malls tell us something important about who we are? Blending a history of shopping with a story of coming-of-age in North America’s largest and strangest mall, Big Mall investigates how these structures have become the ultimate symbol of late-capitalist dread – and, surprisingly, a subversive site of hope. Ultimately, a close look at the mall reveals clues to how a good life in these times is possible.
- ISBN:
- 9781552454725
Genres: memoir, nonfiction
Lists: …
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