About this title: Using the American wedding as a rosetta stone, Mead poses of series of questions that cut to the heart of the country's national identity.
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Penguin Press
Date Published: 05/2007
ISBN-13:9781594200885ISBN:1594200882
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 245 p. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Like New. Book in almost Brand New condition. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781594200885ISBN:1594200882
Description: Very Good. ** ADVANCE READER'S EDITION PAPERBACK! ! Marketing Campaign info on back! Great Collectible! ** Very Good Condition. Reasonable light wear. Clean inside and out. Ghost of penciled price inside. ** ADVANCE READER'S EDITION PAPERBACK! ! Marketing Campaign info on back! Great Collectible! **Very Good Condition. Reasonable light wear. Clean inside and out. Ghost of penciled price inside. SHIPS W/IN 24 HOURS! FREE INSURANCE on all orders! E-mail notification! Careful, thorough packaging. ... read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781594200885ISBN:1594200882
Description: Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. 1594200882. Price on DJ is $25.95. # line 13579108642.; 6.4 x 9.5 inches; 245 pages; From DJ: "Using the American wedding as a rosetta stone, in One Perfect Day writer Rebecca Mead poses a series of questions that cut to the heart of our national identity. Why, she asks, has the American wedding become an outlandishly extravagant, egregiously expensive, and overwhelmingly demanding production? What is the derivation of the nuptial imperative upon brides and ... read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: The Penguin Press, New York
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781594200885ISBN:1594200882
Description: Fine in Fine jacket. This book has a cream-colored dj with black and beige spine lettering. Front cover has an embossed title panel designed to look like a receipt. Very clean, bright, unmarked, tight copy. Mead examines the American wedding industry and its sociological implications in this incisive book that brings a historical perspective to our current wedding-obsessed culture. 245 pages; approx. 6"x9". read more
"In "One Perfect Day," Rebecca Mead explores the overwhelming madness that is the American wedding industry. This journey takes her to bridal-gown factories in China, Disney's bridal boutique, and Aruba, among other locations. The book was written back in the parallel universe of 2007, when wedding expenses were on the upswing (they have gone down a bit, on average, in the recession), a fact that's important to keep in mind reading it. Rather than simply rehashing the terrific expense of the present-day American wedding, Mead offers an interesting thesis: the wedding industry has stepped in to provide meaning to an event that is no longer the transition it once was. Weddings no longer mark most couple's initiation into living together, sleeping together, running a household, leaving their parents, or earning a living. So instead of marking an occasion, wedding celebrations must become one. This well written book provides food for thought, laced with keen observation and not a little humor, but Mead remains largely sympathetic to both marrying couples and the professionals whose livelihoods depend on their extravagance."
"This book is an amazing expose of the 160 billion dollar, recession proof wedding industry. As weddings are no longer a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, they've become a passage from one type of consumer to another -- and there's an entire industry out there looking for your lifelong loyalty.
I think the most important chapter in this book is the one regarding the "traditionalesque" -- the industry standard practice of referring back to the Victorian era, or creating something and assuring it's traditional. It's something that traps the unwary consumer, for sure.
Then there was the whole chapter on dresses. Most wedding dresses are made in China by women making 40 cents an hour. One position is a woman who is paid to take the pins out of dresses -- and is paid based on the weight of the pins at the end of the day to assure she isn't losing any.
There's also a whole chapter on manufacturing memories -- and how photographers and videographers profit off the idea that we will "forget" our wedding, and that our grandchildren will somehow be deprived of something if they can't watch a video of our grandparents getting married. I'd much rather journal about it.
Anyway, it's a really good primer to be a savvy consumer of the wedding culture."
"I wasn't sure what I was expecting when I read this. I love weddings and have been in wedding withdrawal since my own wedding last year. I also frequent the nest/knot boards daily ( that's even how I found goodreads).
That being said, I'm not sure that I got much that I didn't already know about the wedding industry. Nothing was really shocking, eye-opening or interesting. If you are a knottie, than I say skip this. You'll get way more and better info hanging out on the message boards. For the uninitiated, you might enjoy this foray into another world much better."
"A survey conducted by the wedding website The Knot in 2008 found that the average wedding cost about $28,000. With something like 2.3 million weddings in America each year, this amounts to an absurd amount of cash changing hands - $160 billion annually as of 2006 (when Mead was writing). Each year, more articles on the attendant craziness and "bridezilla" culture appear - brides who spend $5,000 on a Vera Wang wedding gown, who ask their bridesmaids to get botox, plastic surgery, or worse. And each year, the rate of divorce seems to go up.
How did we get here? What prompts this sort of behavior and why is it culturally acceptable? In fact, in a world where women make as much as men and are as likely to keep working afterwards, where we enjoy the ability to live with our significant others before marriage, why get married at all?
These are the questions that Rebecca Mead sets out to answer in One Perfect Day. And what she finds is very interesting to anyone who has been to a wedding or had thoughts of getting married herself.
The story Mead puts together is one of a fairly secular public with no particular institutions to turn to for guidance in putting together a wedding - with the exception of the bridal industry. Where traditional practices have been rejected for disallowing the sort of personalization that those about to be married demand for their ceremonies, the "traditionalesque" has sprung up to replace it, replete with bits of ceremony stripped from other religions, or even from TV shows or films that sound good. Huge industries have sprung up to allow the bride to find exactly the right meringue, which is then sewn for her by four hundred Chinese laborers making $0.50 per hour, or to remind her that her invitations match her shoes.
If family and culture dictate tradition, Mead says, traditionalesque is dictated by industry and driven by profit. Even the idea of a diamond engagement ring is a relatively new one, developed by the DeBeers company in 1938.
So does this hollowing of tradition lead inevitably to the hollowing of a culturally significant turning point in a person's life? Not necessarily. Mead attends numerous weddings over the course of the book, some of which seem especially poignant (for example, a wedding by an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas) and some of which seem perfunctory or disappointing (including a tiny wedding in a church in Hebron, WI). In a world with no set bodies to prescribe what is meaningful, meaning is where you make it.
The one complaint I have about this book is that gay weddings and the question of "Why marry?" are addressed only in the epilogue. She does have some poignant things to say about the former (for example, addressing the way that every gay marriage seems like a triumph), but though she raises the latter, even asking a handful of brides, she never offers a good explanation. Perhaps, like the rest of a wedding, the reason must be created by the couple to suit themselves."
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