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Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column
 
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Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column (Hardcover)

by H.G. Cocks (Author)
2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
RRP: £14.99
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Price For Both: £13.96

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 230 pages
  • Publisher: Random House Books; First Edition edition (5 Feb 2009)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1847945007
  • ISBN-13: 978-1847945006
  • Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14.4 x 2.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 337,076 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

a fascinating portrait of changing social mores, from Thirties pornography and Seventies wife-swapping through to modern internet dating. --Mail on Sunday


Review

'A lively, surprising, sometimes saucy story'
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Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column
96% buy the item featured on this page:
Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column 2.5 out of 5 stars (2)
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Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944-1945 3.8 out of 5 stars (5)
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Customer Reviews

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Average Customer Review
2.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars interesting in places, wrong title, 8 Feb 2009
By G. Gavigan - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)      
I thought this would be social history through the history of personal ads, placement, language, context...

There was some of that. And some of that was quite interesting. His assertion that Facebook was invented in the 19th Century was well made. Some of the stories related to the First World War and early 20th Century were well presented.

But the story of personal ads petered out early on in the book. It drifted into stories of the famous/infamous/nonentities-as-heroes in a history of the sexual revolution. All of which was padded out with commentary on studies by various researchers, with the occasional personal ad inserted to justify the title of the book.

The final chapter on internet dating, seemingly an afterthought, was a surf through the obvious.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Close but no banana, 19 Mar 2009
By Steve Hearsum (Brighton, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
I want to declare at the outset that I know the territory well, having launched 'SoulMates' for The Guardian in 1997, worked within the telecoms industry, consulted for a company that offers dating services and lectured on the topic. I have been hoping for a good book on dating, the history of the phenomenon, the social context and relationship to technology for some time. Sadly, this is not it, and that is aside from the question of whether it has met my expectations.

What Classified offers if a solid grounding in how the personal ad developed and grew, in the intro and Chapter 1. It then proceeds to tell its story via discrete vignettes that shed light on particular aspects of, and players in, the field e.g. soldiers, the growth of contact ads, the on-going and never-ending balancing act between dating and the seedier side of human match-making. In and of themselves the chapters are interesting. The weakness in the book lies in the fact it fails to maintain a consistent narrative, or build on the research the author carried out to fully explore what might be going on now in relation to technological advances and social mores. It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to me e.g. the final chapter (Epilogue) is 12 pages long, when it could easily have been the launch pad for a more exhaustive foray into the other mediums that people use to meet each other e.g. SoulMates, for example, allows people to communicate via voice, email and text, and the multiplicity of communication channels, and how they each in turn configure dialogue in different ways, remains unexplored.

I struggled with how to rate the book (2 or 3 stars?), because as the author is a historian, Classified clearly offers a historical lens through which to explore the territory, and the detailed research and stories are worth a read. Even with that caveat, and allowing for the fact that maybe the intention was not to write as wide ranging a book as I might have wished for, it doesn't hang together well enough for me, in particular the last chapter feels like an after thought. For that reason, as I can't give it 2.5, I went for 2.
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