hen, two weeks before the invasion of Iraq, a man named Stephen Downs was arrested in suburban Albany, New York, because he refused to remove an antiwar T-shirt he was wearing, it made news across the country. What seemed to give the story particular resonance wasn't any salient fact about the perpetrator himself (a 61-year-old lawyer on the verge of retirement) but where his arrest had taken place: the local mall.

Simultaneously loathed and loved by culture critics and teenagers alike, the modern mall stands as one of postwar America's most conflicted symbols: clean (some say sterile), safe (repressive), convenient (homogeneous), teeming (yet vapid), and designed with impressive pharmaceutical precision to stimulate its customers' desires (in other words, manipulate people into buying what they don't need). What happened to Stephen Downs and, most particularly, where it happened, raises an important question: What does it say about the world's most prosperous democracy that our most ubiquitous and most frequented public spaces -- our malls -- aren't public at all, but private?

It's only one of the questions James Farrell explores in his thought-provoking new book. The director of the American studies program at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, Farrell dissects our dysfunctional relationship with shopping malls and traces back to their benign origins those traits that, through 50 years of metastasizing, have ultimately produced the gargantuan four-million-square-foot Mall of America in Minneapolis, which has more visitors per year than all our national parks and monuments combined.

It was an Austrian refugee from the Nazis who created America's first recognizable malls. Victor Gruen believed that the mall could serve as "an urban oasis" in the auto-centric suburban sprawl that was already beginning to spread across the country. But his vision of a pedestrian-only space akin to the town squares of old Europe, filled with as much culture and community as commerce, was quickly co-opted by merchandisers who, taking their cue from Walt Disney, simply wanted a commercial fantasyland where customers could be seduced into leaving their problems at the door and focusing on shopping.

Farrell professes a "love" for shopping malls but so zealously exposes the hypocrisies underlying their polished brass-and-marble veneer that you don't really believe he's much of a fan. He gleefully points out their absurdities (right down to the trompe l'oeil trees that grace many a mall atrium: 35-foot amalgams of urethane, fiberglass, and chemically preserved palm fronds) and, with more seriousness, the ways in which retail science works behind the scenes to keep Americans hooked on a brand of consumerism that, environmentally and socially, is clearly unsustainable. From the "coolhunters" who stalk the mall's teenagers to identify the next hot trend, to the naturally portly, naturally white-bearded men who make up to $10,000 a season to play Santa, Farrell demonstrates that underneath their intentionally anodyne appearance, malls are weird, unsettling, undemocratic places.
-- Jason Best

e've long assumed that agriculture made "civilization" possible, that neat rows of wheat and maize were the inevitable precursors to towering rows of skyscrapers. But after sifting through 10,000 years of human history, author Richard Manning isn't so sure. Instead of freeing humanity from the uncertainty of a hunter-gatherer existence, Manning argues, farming actually consigned us to lives of tedium and sickness, both literal and spiritual, and ruined much of the planet in the process.

In his previous books, Manning explored the ecological effects of such industrial-scale assaults on the environment as clearcutting (in Last Stand ) and heap-leach mining ( One Round River ). Here he turns his attention to all of agriculture and shows that along with farming came slavery, disease, famine, and radical inequities in wealth -- elements of the human condition that were absent or muted in the lives of hunter-gatherers. At times, his view of life before agriculture smacks of naïveté: "Gamboling about plain and forest, hunting and living off the land is fun," he writes. "Farming is not." Tell that to Cro-Magnon man, half starved and hypothermal from tracking woolly mammoths across an icy plain. But Manning's survey of an immense body of scholarship casts legitimate doubt on just how beneficial agriculture was to its earliest practitioners.

And current practitioners. In his critique of industrial agribusiness, Manning points out that many of us are not reaping the benefits of agriculture even today: Despite a global surfeit of food, every night millions of people go to bed hungry. The effects of farm subsidies distort not only the economics of farming but also the very food we eat. Indeed, nearly everything we ingest in the developed world is not food in the age-old sense at all. It's a commodity, grown with massive inputs of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer (heavily derived from fossil fuels) and processed into something unrecognizable from its source. By eating it, Manning argues, we sever ourselves from the natural world and become merely the final cog in an industrial machine.

Manning offers no sweeping prescriptions for reforming industrial agriculture; it's too huge and too pervasive to topple by political means, in his reckoning, so he focuses on the small ways in which individuals can make conscientious choices about what they eat. His pessimism about reform is actually a refreshing break from Pollyanna progressivism; he advocates something more radical, a food counterculture. He notes that the number of organic farmers doubled in the last half of the 1990s; more than 2.3 million acres of American cropland and pasture were dedicated to organic farming by 2001. The number of farmers' markets in the United States increased by 63 percent in roughly the same period. He sees this as evidence that some of us still yearn for "sensuality," for a connection to the sources of our food -- for now a privilege of the rich, perhaps, but one that all of us deserve.
-- Philip Connors