Book Review: Fussell on Class

I had a great discussion about Class with author Sandra Tsing Loh:

https://mattasher.com/2020/09/01/ep-18-sandra-tsing-loh-on-a...

Sandra wrote what is imo the definitive book review of Class.

Do you mean this piece in The Atlantic?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-d...

It's a much better review than Scott Alexander's, although that's an unfairly low bar given he doesn't appear to have caught on the book is supposed to be funny, a "cocktail-party-ready argument" as Sandra Tsing Loh puts it.

He's treating it as "ha ha only serious": http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html .

Haven't read it myself but he sounds right. Jokes like that aren't funny if they don't have a lot of truth in them.

The parts I read that I could directly relate to from my own upbringing (a mix of Middle and mid-to-upper Prole, between the two sides of my family, with my own strong coating of Middle and accidentally-adopted Upper-Middle thinly painted on top) were very accurate and insightful, even when funny. I'm inclined to believe very little of it is manufactured or even exaggerated for entertainment value, despite the wit of the book and the way it sometimes reads as jokey, even when I know for a fact it's relating plain truth.

[EDIT] That is, I wouldn't take it as a straightforward academic effort or something like that, but I wouldn't dismiss it because it happens to be entertaining. Not one thing I had first-hand knowledge of in it make me go "oh come on, that's not quite right". I'd guess if it contains such, it's a very small portion of the book.