I do not like to leave books unfinished. I have an unbelievable faith that everybody has something to say and, if one gives it a chance, every book will reward that effort. This book beat me. I struggled through 110 pages and then stopped to think about what I was getting from the exercise. The answer was precious little.

Professor Miller begins with a three way conversation between imaginary characters, each taking disparate views with which the Prof sympathises. The discussion is stilted in the extreme! Fiction writing is an art form in its own right and, with all due respect, not one at which Daniel Miller excels - on this evidence. The problem with having three anthropologists debating an issue within a book for the general reader, is that, either the conversation sails over the reader's head, or the participants must continually explain points in a manner unnecessary to themselves. This makes the conversation false and, quite frankly, tedious.

The meat of the book is then taken up by an argument that I simply failed to grasp. The big news that this tome wishes to impart is that consumerism is important in its own right, and not simply a bi-product of production. The evidence for this view was, to my reading, unconvincing and incredibly locked into an upper middle class milieu. A small example of the class bias is when talking of chocolate: Professor Miller refers to Cadbury's chocolate as the cheap form of the product and that of companies such as Blacks, as the standard variety. This may be so in the Professor's hallowed environs, but I have lived amongst people who would think that Cadbury's produce 'the good stuff' and supermarket own brands are the usual ( and even, sometimes, the luxury). This may seem a small point, but, for a man claiming to get under the skin of 'the people', it is one of a series of issues that indicate that it is only under very select skin that he will burrow.

You will be pleased to know that advertising is a necessary aside to consumerism and, of course, does not influence our choices in the slightest. Well, we don't want to distract the consumers from their goal of finding the can of soup, chocolate bar or underpants which will bring lifelong happiness and fulfilment, do we? The ubiquitous Coca Cola and MacDonald's are a healthy reward for the children dragged out on a shopping expedition, so that's all right too. I hope that the professor is well sponsored for this research - not, of course, that it would have influenced his opinions were it so to be.

This book came across, to me, as the chattering class inspecting their angst and concluding that it is reassuringly central to the continued existence of civilisation: but then, they were never likely to accept that it was a trivial back water of history, were they? ( )