Stuff White People Like [Paperback]

Moleskin Notebooks, Expensive Baby Buggies, Never Used Kitchen Aid Mixers, Yoga and Apple Computers. Middle Class consumers of these items get it in the neck in this fantastic book.
In a desperate bid to appear ecologically worldly wise and creatively individual, white upper middle class people all buy the exact same expensive stuff. It makes for a unsettling read as it lists all the stuff I love. I know the middle class are an easy target for satire but this book does it in a funny and thought provoking way.
Self congratulation, gentrification, white assimilation and division, and middle class guilt are all touched upon by the excellent choice of items.
Many of the reviews on the American web site claim this book is racist and devisive but they are really overeacting and miss the point (plus any book that can devide opinion and create debate is fine by me)
This is an American book so some of the brand names and companies will be unfamiliar but you can easily substitute English versions, plus everything is becoming Americanised anyway thanks to globalization.
For me this book punctures pomposity, piousness and elitism in a deadly accurate but ironically light hearted way. If you're looking for a present for the gently self loathing, irony loving person in your life, this is the book to buy (just make sure they read it on full view whilst drinking ultra expensive fair trade coffee in a Shoreditch coffee shop!)

I got this book on a whim. The title intrigued me, "Stuff White People Like", what was that all about? Well I soon found out and though it is very American you can very much relate it to any white middle class life all OVER the world. From the very first page I found myself laughing out loud. I couldn't help myself. Not only that I REALLY tried to feel guilty but I just couldn't because when all was said and done all Mr Lander was doing was showing us what was in front of our eyes, we just haven't realised it. Until now.

Diversity made me fall out of my wheelchair chuckling with mirth, so VERY true. And as for the page titled "having Black friends" well my friend had to practically resusitate me. I smiled when I read about Dogs, guilty as charged, I love dogs, I get that I suspect from my English (and white) mother, my Indian father has grown to tolerate us having dogs in our house but he isn't a fan the way we are. The "How White Are You?" at the end of the book sounds offensive, but actually it isn't. It makes a point that I think a lot of people don't get. Having read some of the other reviews I can see that a lot of people are offended by this book.

Would they be offended by a book called Stuff Black People Like? Somehow I doubt it. It would probably be looked at as some sort of seminal book on ethnicity that needed to be read from cover to cover and discussed in coffee shops, whilst contemplating a change of religion and looking at diversity as the new "way forward" but only if it means a change of menu.

Mr Lander you have opened a can of worms. I trust you will open another can and write another book, possibly titled, "More Stuff White People Like."

For greater accuracy, this book should be called "Stuff Middle-Class White American New Yorkers Like". If you're the kind of person who owns an Apple Macbook, or who reads Amazon reviews (erm...), then this book might well be for you, or at least about you.

It's a list of 150 different things, in no particular order, ranging from to Difficult Breakups to Barack Obama to Singer-Songwriters to Farmers Markets to Apple products to Snowboarding. Each item gets between one and two pages, that try to amusingly explain why and in what way white people like it.

At best, it does hit the mark and is really a biting satire on the white stereotype. The section on "Awareness", for example, is spot on: "once you raise awareness to an acceptable level you can just back off and say, 'bam! did my part. now it's your turn. fix it'". The bits about how and why white people love acoustic cover versions of hip-hop songs, seem fairly fresh and witty.

However, those are in the minority. Too often, Christian Lander is guilty of extreme glibness, and seems to be out to prove what a successful white person he is, by having an experience or opinion worth writing about on each of these items, not just from having experienced them but also from having friends who've had lesser success. Coupled with some photographs of the author during the book, the whole thing suffers from self-importance (self-importance, incidentally, is #149).

And, critically, a lot of the writing is not actually that funny. I was reaching the point where if I'd read the phrase "white people just can't get enough of it!" one more time I was going to throw the book out of the window in disgust. There are flashes of wit, but not nearly enough of them. Just spotting that you've got something in common with a lot of other white people is not, in itself, funny.

In the last quarter of the book, a lack of ideas starts to become apparent, and some of the sections start sounding surprisingly similar to bits you read earlier.

Also, this is an American book. Some of the items- mainly relating to sport but also to some of the corporations being raged against- are pretty much meaningless to a British audience. Of course there are British equivalents but a quick adaptation to British culture wouldnt've hurt.

This could have been a brilliant, 'zeitgeisty' book (yes I said 'zeitgeisty') but the uninspired writing and the shortage of ideas ends up being a let-down.