Land Of Desire

Land Of Desire

The transformations that America went through in order to become a

capitalist country were very significant and are sometimes looked past.

However, in the book Land of Desire, the author, William Leach extensively

goes into many of those things. There were many things that went into this

ranging from specific poeple and incidents to outside places and things. Leach

shows each individual ordeal and explains the personal effect that it had on the

industry, as well as how society accepted, or in some cases condemned such

things. All of this comes from his own education and understanding of the

situation. He shows the drift into a capitalistic country as being a gradual

change in one thing that then led to another, and to another, and so on. Not to

mention that many, many things took part in it. And that if such things had

not occurred, we would not be the country that we are today.

There isn't a whole lot of information on William Leach, but he does

appear to be a very well-thought out man. This is not his only historical book

and he's also done other things, including the book True Love and Perfect

Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society, and editing The Wonderful

Wizard of Oz. That specifically shows up a number of times in Land of Desire.

He refers to L. Frank Baum (the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)

throughout the book, as well as to the book itself. Other than that, though,

there's not much else I know about him, too bad it's not exactly the most

helpful information as far as why he thinks the way he does.

Leach broke the book up into 5 major parts. The first being the preface

and the introduction. These two parts laid out the main ideas of the book.

After that, Leach went into the three main sections of the book, which end up

being the three main steps in the transformation into capitalism. The first

entitled Strategies of Enticement, went into a little bit of history, as well as the

first recognition of capitalism and were it all began. The second section,

Circuits of Power, retold stories of how the public reacted to the whole thing.

It also dealt with the philosophical side of capitalism. The final major section

of the book, Managing a Dream Culture, displayed the managerial aspects of

capitalism and the poeple behind it. Then, the last pages illustrate how the