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Big Mall

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A phenomenology of the mall: If the mall makes us feel bad, why do we keep going back? In a world poisoned by capitalism, what makes life worth living?

Kate Black grew up in West Edmonton Mall – a mall on steroids, notorious for its indoor waterpark, deadly roller coaster, and controversial dolphin shows. But everyone has a favourite mall, or a mall that is their own personal memory palace. It's a place people love to hate and hate to love – a site of pleasure and pain, of death and violence, of (sub)urban legend.

Blending a history of shopping with a story of coming of age in North America's largest and strangest mall, Big Mall investigates how these structures have become the ultimate symbol of late-capitalist dread – and, surprisingly, a subversive site of hope.

"Speaking as a child of PacSun and Hot Topic myself, Big Mall is like a madeleine dipped in Orange Julius. Like a mall, the book itself has a lot of everything, a sublime mix of memoir, history, and cultural criticism. Kate Black is a learned Virgil in the consumerist Inferno, always avoiding the obvious and leading us to surprising connections—oil, suicide, Reddit, squatters, dolphins. Whether malls fill you with nostalgia or horror, this book will change your relationship to the world we've constructed around us." – Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens

"Before there was Instagram, there was the mall. But what happens when a seasonless, tacky, fantasyland is all you knew growing up? How does one embrace a genuinely fake experience? Or to be more precise, a fake but genuine experience? Kate Black's Big Mall is a smart, sentimental, and perspective-shifting look at the outsized role that big malls play in modern life. Love 'em or hate 'em, one thing's for sure: after reading this book, you'll never look at a mall in the same way again." – Ziya Tong, Science broadcaster & author of The Reality Bubble

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 4, 2023
      Canadian essayist Black’s searching if meandering debut probes her ambivalence about shopping malls. Black recounts frequenting Alberta’s West Edmonton Mall, North America’s largest, as a teenager, drawn to stores that offered opportunities for reinventing herself through style choices. Nowadays, she reports feeling uneasy about how malls have privatized the public square, becoming manifestations of neoliberalism in which one must participate in a market to justify one’s presence. Nonetheless, she concedes that malls can serve important community functions, citing as an example Scarborough, Ontario’s Morningside Mall, which, before it closed in 2007, hosted a library branch and legal aid clinic. Delving into the history of indoor malls, Black explains the first­—the Southdale Center in Edina, Minn.­­—was built in 1958 by Victor Gruen, a Jewish architect who’d fled Vienna 20 years earlier for Los Angeles, where he was dismayed by the suburban sprawl of stores and envisioned bringing them under one roof. Black’s ambition sometimes exceeds her grasp and leads her to make sweeping assertions she hasn’t marshaled the evidence to support, as when she suggests that malls “isolate our realities from... the essential truth” that “we are so implicated by one another” without making clear why that is. Still, it’s a keen appraisal of malls’ social import.

    • Library Journal

      March 1, 2024

      Award-winning Canadian essayist Black analyzes the rise and the decline of indoor malls. The first American indoor mall was the Southdale Shopping Center in Edina, MN, which opened in 1956. Its two floors featured exotic birds, a petting zoo, a fishpond, an ice rink, a carousel, and 72 stores. Other space was used for a school, a post office, medical offices, and even a library. This innovative success led to the building of an additional 250+ malls across the United States over the next 10 years. By 2019, however, national legislation was proposed to save the no longer profitable shopping structures, but it didn't pass. Black, who also offers personal tidbits about how malls have made her feel during her childhood through adulthood, explains that several factors led to their decline, including perceived and actual unsafe conditions in parking lots, poor upkeep and security, increased crime rates involving young people from areas outside of where the malls were located, online retail, and the pandemic lockdown. Black argues that "dead malls" often house fond memories and coming-of-age stories of those who frequented them in their heyday. VERDICT The best up-to-date study on malls. For general readers, especially those interested in sociology and capitalism-related topics.--Claude Ury

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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  • English

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