Reviews

A “terrific book,” “lighthearted and learned” — The Washington Post

The Washington Post’s Carolyn See gave ICWT a wonderful review on Sept. 4, 2009. Here’s an excerpt, and here’s the link to the full review.

Two lessons steam up from this terrific book about the history of thrift (and spending) in our great country: First, Americans possess a phenomenal capacity to endure scoldings about our fiscal behavior. From Cotton Mather to the present, we’ve been told we don’t save enough, we’re too materialistic and our spiritual lives are going to hell as a result.

Second, from the beginning, many Americans have nursed a seething contempt for the poor. Again, this goes back to Puritan times, when our ancestors labored on the brink of starvation but in the hope of God’s grace. After only a few decades of such labor, the hard work paid off. The Puritans had enough money to buy ribbons and pewter, but was this morally right? They came up with this comforting conclusion: To have worked and then prospered must surely be proof of God’s grace.

Those people on the outskirts of town who still lingered in poverty? They must be alcoholics and adulterers or irresponsible spendthrifts. For many of us, that attitude still exists today.

Money, in this country, has always been involved with moral stances. Americans deplore things as a national exercise; we deplore people who buy things that we wouldn’t buy. But the only thing that scandalizes us more than a materialistic yahoo is a penny-pinching cheapskate who won’t buy anything at all. Journalist Lauren Weber comes to this argument from a far-out, extreme position: Her father was a world-class skinflint who kept his home at 50 degrees during New England winters, washed the dishes by hand with cold water and no soap, and tried (unsuccessfully) to ration the family toilet paper. “It’s easy to mock these extremes of thrift,” Weber writes, “to marvel at the amount of time, thought, and emotional energy that some people will expend just to save a few dollars, even a few pennies. We call them eccentrics. We call them irrational. If we’re related to them, and even if we’re not, we complain bitterly about how cheap they are.”

Weber grew up to find — disconcertingly — that she had inherited many of her father’s penurious habits. Here she places her thrift-mania against the far larger nuttiness of America’s personal and institutional deficit spending, which has led to a sea of credit card debt, maybe even global warming and a host of other ills. What is it with us and money?

(See the rest of the review here)

ICWT gets a nod from Oprah

The September issue of O: The Oprah Magazine gives ICWT a thumbs up. Here’s the review (from page 44 of the mag):

“If you have only 15 minutes: Put the recession into historical perspective. Dip into a chapter of In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue (Little, Brown), Lauren Weber’s entertaining, wide-ranging — and very timely — exploration of thrift.”

An “engaging, uniquely American story” — Fast Company

America may be 233 years old, but really, she’s a teenage girl with bulimia. In this fascinating account of our nation’s binge-and-purge cycle of spending and sacrifice, Weber, a second-generation cheapskate — her father reuses a tea bag up to 12 times — traces thrift’s evolution from bedrock principle of the Founding Fathers to behavior that’s demonized as harmful to today’s consumption-driven economy. She takes surprising, insightful turns into the birth of home economics, the way we financed World War I on personal savings, and Freud’s theory that being a tightwad is rooted in unresolved potty-training issues. Weber ultimately makes her case for what she calls “ethical cheapness,” embracing sustainability and social responsibility to cloak frugality in virtue again. Try not to take it too far by denying yourself the pleasures of this engaging, uniquely American story.

Kirkus Reviews calls ICWT “welcome reading for a newly frugal world”

Entertaining history of scrimping and saving in America.

In her debut, former Newsday reporter Weber makes clear that frugality is not a long-lost virtue of consumer culture. Rather, scaling down has been a cyclical manifestation of hard times: Americans have tightened their belts in periods of war, financial panics and recessions, only to go on spending sprees shortly thereafter.

A cheapskate’s daughter—her economist father uses teabags a dozen times—Weber advocates a moderate approach of “mindful consumption: considering each purchase, embracing a stricter set of guidelines for winnowing down what I buy…thinking about the values that are most important to me, and spending or saving accordingly.” Read the rest of this entry »