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James B. Twitchell, Living It Up: Our Love Affair With Luxury (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), xv + 309 pp., illus., $27.95 (cloth).
Something happened to James B. Twitchell while he was conducting field research on the evolving concept of luxury. He started feeling desire for his objects of study. One minute, the professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida was having appropriately academic thoughts about the shirt scene in The Great Gatsby. The next, he was lusting after the thick silk ties for sale in the Ralph Lauren "mother ship" (185) on Manhattan's upper Madison Avenue. "I felt this terrible rush of pleasure," he confesses in Living It Up: Our Love Affair With Luxury. "This stuff, this terrible, overpriced stuff, this stuff with that dreadful little pony on the fat end of the tie, was making me feel... what? Fantastic and a little sad, and in a moment I realized -I...