8 May, 2001: Fast Food Nation
At its heart, I think that this is a book about nostalgia: nostalgia not just for Mom's home cooking, not just for the kind of comfortable neighborhood diner that McDonald's eradicated, and not even for the kind of iconic ranching life that, as author Eric Schlosser argues, has fallen victim to the demands of the modern international agribusiness corproation. I think that it's nostalgic for a time in America in which power was less centralized, when individual workers had more autonomy, when individual cities were less standardized. I think that this is a book which longs for the Progressives.