Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids: American Teenagers, Schools, and the Culture of Consumption

Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids: American Teenagers, Schools, and the Culture of Consumption, by Murray Milner Jr. New York: Routledge, 2004. 305 pp. $27.50 cloth. ISBN: 0-415-94830-4.

Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids, the new book from the distinguished sociologist Murray Milner Jr., arrives in a screaming green slipcover promising that the volume will lay bare the status order of the middle-class American high school, an order that "distills the worst features of American consumer society" (per the jacket flap). One might be inclined to take that gauntlet-dropping as a provocative overreach rather than the result of a rigorous empirical analysis-an inclination that would unfortunately be correct.

Milner, best known for his work on the caste system in India (his book on the subject won the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Publication Award), has taken the intuitively appealing step of applying this status theory to the cliques and crowds (two different things, argues Milner) of high school. His methodology involves intensive ethnography at a single high school-making use of a phalanx of undergraduate research assistants-and the gathering of 300 college students' retrospective accounts of their own high schools.

Opening the book with a bold...