I've only read a few of the Object Lessons books, but they have so far all been interesting and surprising. On the surface, one might wonder why you'd want to read a book about the Shopping Mall (or personal stereo, or coffee, or whatever). But each of these books has offered so much more - wide ranging discussions of not only the object/thing in question, but also the ways it has changed us and society. Unlike some of the other books in the series I've read, this one is a bit more memoir-based, which some people might not like. However, I found the personal memories Newton includes rather interesting, and offered an alternative perspective with which to consider the mall.

Not my favourite in the series, but still rather interesting.

This was an interesting look at an institution so common we forget they didn’t always exist. Malls are a strange place, and the author got the weirdness just right.

These consistently fascinating books from Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, which has as its goal to uncover “the hidden lives of ordinary things”, always have much to offer and Matthew Newton’s contribution is a great example. His history of the American shopping mall gives an insightful and in-depth portrait of these massive shopping areas from their earliest incarnations to their somewhat jaded reputation now, not least because of some real-life mall shootings. Newton describes the heyday of malls and the part they played in the lives of ordinary American people. However, Newton intersperses his exploration with rather too much of his own personal story and that unfortunately is not quite so interesting, although it does admittedly give a personal view of the importance of malls in daily life.

'Shopping Mall' is the first volume of Bloomsbury Academic's Object Lessons series that I've read. The series examines "the hidden lives of ordinary things." Although the books in this series are intentionally brief, I found Davis' look at shopping malls to be engrossing. A blend of personal narrative, history, and cultural analysis that really gave me clarity on the subject...especially the recent cultural role of malls and what their future may hold. The format is appealing...basically a podcast (reading time is about 1-2 hours) in text form and ideal for busy, curious non-fiction lovers.

A good description of Shopping Malls in America - before and now.

When I was a kid, a shopping mall opened, for the first time, in my home town. It was a small building, with just two anchor stores and a lot of mom and pop businesses relocated from various parts of town. About ten years later, a new, much larger mall opens across town. The big stores moved out. The little shops were wiped out by the chain stores in the new mall. Before long, the original mall was abandoned.
Eventually, it was bulldozed and replaced by a conventional strip mall. Now, thanks, in part, to digital retailing, the strip mall has also been closed. It’s giant parking lot used by teenagers for impromptu beer parties and doughnuts in their cars. .
This tale of the rise and fall of a shopping mall has been repeated all over the country, and is the topic of the latest in the Object Lesson series: Mathew Newton’s Shopping Mall.
Newton begins with a visit to the oldest enclosed mall in the U.S, , Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota. Opened in 1956 and designed by Austrian immigrant, Victor Greun, Southdale was intended to replicate a European city’s town square. But by the time Newton visits, Greun’s old word decorations had been removed to make room for kiosks and more storefronts.
Gruen, a socialist, lived to regret his mall concept. He saw malls turned into shrines for capitalist mega-consumption.
The second part of the book tells the story of the author’s interaction with his home town mall, Monroeville Mall in a suburb of Pittsburg. We see Newton as a child waiting for his mom to get off work after an exhausting shift as a complaint manager at a department store. The teenaged Newton discovers girls and heavy metal music while roaming the mall during the summer. After dropping out of high school, he meets his future wife at the mall.
The Monroeville Mall becomes temporarily famous as the setting for George Romero’s 1978 zombie movie, Dawn of the Dead. The surviving humans barricade themselves in the mall to try to hold off the zombie army.
Dawn of the Dead was released just as mall culture was reaching its peak in the U.S. Old people were using the mall as a de facto community and exercise center. Teens used it as a place to hang out without parental meddling. And adults found the mall as a safe place to shop amid the increasing crime and violence of the cities.
Newton does a fine job of describing the euphoria people felt entering a mall. To many, it was a place of endless possibilities. His parents wander around a furniture store, daydreaming about the kind of house they may someday own.
But it was during this time that critics of shopping mall began to make their voices heard. The mall was a magnet for white flight to the suburbs, leaving inner cities to decay into poverty and crime. These people decried the shallow materialism that malls perpetuated and their sterile uniformity.
Newton concludes his book with an account of the shopping mall in decline. After being laid off during the Great Recession, He returns to the Monroeville Mall to find its ice skating rink pulled up, its giant clock with animatronic animals gone, and many storefronts vacant.
People began to fear going to the mall after a mass riot broke out between rival gangs. A few months later, a mass shooting there destroyed the illusion of the mall as a safe refugee. As Newton wanders through Monroeville, he notices life-sized cardboard cut outs of shoppers, what designers call people textures, placed in abandoned storefronts to create the illusion that the mall is busier and more successful than it really is.
The most memorable part of Newton’s short volume is an interview he does with a woman who expresses a sad nostalgia after her home town mall has closed. All of her greatest childhood memories were centered on the mall: birthday parties, school shopping, dating boys for the first time. Now the home to all of those memories is gone. She comes, too late, to realize that her youth would have been better spent somewhere else than at a shopping mall.

I was hoping to read a book that gave me insight into the development of shopping malls or even of the cultural and sociological trends they represent. Instead, after a reasonably good introductory essay what I got was a not-very-well-written semi-biography.

The author tells us plenty about his experiences in the mall and, occasionally, there is a comment or a chapter about malls, but his experience why it might be typical, I don't know, won't give us the insight it should.

Don't waste your time with this book.

A very mixed bag, this - which encapsulates the whole series it belongs to. Brilliant social commentary about the shopping mall, and all the attendant inane consumerism and time-wasting it seems to have been parent to, is interrupted by the most OTT and OT autobiography. Makes you grateful for Internet shopping.

Shopping Mall by Mathew Newton is a personal history of what was one of America's centers of popular consumerism.  Newton is Associate Editor at the Carnegie Museum of Art, USA. He has written for, among others, The Oxford American, Esquire, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Rumpus, Guernica, and Spin.

Malls were the center of so much American culture in the 1980s and 1990s. That may seem like an odd thing to say, but the mall came to represent something to American youth in that period.  American movies included malls from Fast Times at Ridgemont High to the horror movie Chopping Mall and The Blues Brothers to Jackie Brown.  The mall was a place to hang out as well as shop.  In the late 1990s, I went with friends to the mall, we never bought anything material, but it was a place where many kids hung out on Friday or Saturday nights.  When I was stationed in California I made it a point to visit the Galeria -- the mecca of Valley Girls and Mohawk punk rockers as well as the setting for several teen movies of the period.  Later I went to the Mall of America in Minnesota.  My visits were not for shopping,  but more for visiting the "landmarks."

Newton starts with a visit to one of the oldest malls in the US, the Southdale Mall in Minnesota.  He was trying to capture a little bit of the magic from his youth.  By now, though, malls have been emptying out and closing down.  His pilgrimage came empty.  Newton goes on to explain growing up and the role the mall played in his life and his families.  The malls had everything, imagine a physical Amazon.com.  There were even two floor Barnes and Nobles that dwarfed Daltons and other book sellers.  There was something for everyone from department stores to specialty stores including head shops.  Newton's mother even worked at one of the anchor stores.  

For those who grew up around the mall culture or were simply annoyed by it.  The malls original intent of being a social place for the community with open air meeting areas, fountains, and coy ponds.  In more modern times, they drifted away from the community and became centers that fed the conspicuous consumption that was the 1980s and some of the 1990s.   They did offer some community for school choirs to sing Christmas carols or meeting places for clubs and organizations.  Teen singer Tiffany ran a series of mall tours, spreading her music as well as bringing money into the malls.  

Shopping Mall is a history of an American institution as well as the author's personal experience growing up in the mall culture.  Today malls are closing faster than ever. Stores that were anchor stores have gone away (The May Co. and Montgomery Ward) and others are fading fast (Macy's, Sears, JC Penny's).  Newton tells of the rise and fall of the mall as an American icon.  It's not that Americans have quit shopping or meeting up; it's that is done online now.  A good history with added nostalgia.

This was probably my least favourite from the Object Lessons series books I've read so far. The shopping mall is such a rich subject, one that I was really excited to read and learn more about ... but the author takes a more biographical approach. This book is filled with the author's personal anecdotes and memories about 2 shopping malls from his childhood - and while this is a very personal approach, the history behind the mall as a concept was somewhat lacking?

I would have preferred more content about the cultural history of malls - rather than equal attention to that and the author's stories. There is so much discussion about the death of malls is the media and academia today as well, and I would have loved to see something more than a brief mention of that towards the book's finale.

From Bloomsbury's "Object Lessons" series, this is an impressionistic social and cultural history of the shopping mall, from its earliest incarnation in Edina MN, to the ghost malls sprawled across 21st century suburbia. In between, Newton reflects on packs of wandering teenagers at the arcade, mall shootings, Tiffany's mall concert tour in the 1980s, mall walkers, anchor stores, consumer overload and Romero's zombie allegory, online retailing, malls in movies, Mattel's Mall Madness board game and the ethos of "shop till you drop."