How long does it take to read The Conquest of Cool?
Thomas Frank, Mónica Sumoy Gete-Alonso, Juan Carlos Castillón, Jordi Costa Vila
The Conquest of Cool by Thomas Frank, Mónica Sumoy Gete-Alonso, Juan Carlos Castillón, Jordi Costa Vila takes about 5 hours 54 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 54 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1997. 322 pages, about 88,550 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 50 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 54 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 41 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
While the youth counterculture remains the most evocative and best-remembered symbol of the cultural ferment of the 1960s, the revolution that shook American business during those boom years has gone largely unremarked. In this fascinating and revealing new study, Thomas Frank shows how the youthful revolutionaries were joined - and even anticipated by - such unlikely allies as the advertising industry and the men's clothing business. In both areas, each having also been an important pillar of fifties conservatism, the utopian, complacent surface of postwar consumerism was smashed by a new breed of admen and manufacturers who openly addressed public distrust of their industries, who recognized the absurdity of consumer society, who made war on conformity, and who finally settled on youth rebellion and counterculture as the symbol of choice for their new marketing vision. The Conquest of Cool is a thorough history of advertising as well as an incisive commentary on the evolution of a peculiarly American sensibility, the pervasive co-optation that defines today's hip commercial culture. By studying the devices and institutions of co-optation rather than those of resistance, Frank offers a picture of the 1960s that differs dramatically from the accounts of youth rebellion and sell-out that have become so familiar over the years. The Conquest of Cool forsakes the stories of campus and bohemia to follow the Dodge Rebellion, chronicle the Pepsi Generation, and recount the Peacock Revolution - by so doing, it raises important new questions about the culture of that most celebrated and maligned decade.
Subjects: History, Social conditions, Subculture, Consumer behavior, Advertising and youth, Marketing
