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Wow! I'm not even sure what to say. I've had this on my to-read list for 20 years, and think very highly of Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. This book was a huge disappointment. At times I thought it must be tongue-in-cheek, but I'm afraid it wasn't. At times it seemed to be trying to be scholarly, quoting from other scholarly works (tho never giving actual citations--no footnotes or references of any kind in the book); sometimes it was somewhat humorous; at other times it was purely Fussell's personal opinion/bias spewing out. The tone was smug and condescending. There were some contradictions within his own arguments (e.g. personalizing/monogramming is solidly middle-class; LL Bean catalog is upper-middle, yet Bean offers loads of monogrammed items). A lot of it is dated--particularly when talking about television shows and fashion. In part the book seems to ride on the coat-tails of The Preppy Handbook, but he takes that at face-value and doesn't seem to realize that it was tongue-in-cheek. One thing he did get right--class is a touchy subject! I was amazed at my strong reaction to this book!