reviews 290 College & Research Libraries May 1998 mentioned that staff were reassigned from technical to public service positions as a result of outsourcing. Everyone indi­ cated the need for careful planning in ad­ vance and for periodic evaluations. In gauging the success of outsourced work, several authors granted that no figures existed for making certain comparisons. A surprising number of institutions lack data on cataloging error rates, turnaround time from order to shelf for new acquisi­ tions, and so on. More appendices outlining contract specifications would have strengthened the case studies and provided potential assistance to those who are anticipating the outsourcing of some operations. The book was intended to present case stud­ ies of successful outsourcing, however; and this purpose was fulfilled. The text proper is followed by an annotated bibli­ ography. Included are almost 125 citations to materials that present both the nega­ tive and positive aspects of outsourcing. Anyone with an interest in the subject will find this work a useful addition to the lit- erature.—James W. Williams, University of Illinois-Urbana. Radway, Janice A. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Pr., 1997. 424p. alk. paper, $29.95 (ISBN 0-8078-2357-0). LC 96-52037. Janice A. Radways’s first book, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popu­ lar Literature, dared to take seriously one of the most despised genres of mass fic­ tion and to listen to the voices of real read­ ers. Those were the days when popular culture was still unmentionable in many English departments. In this new project, Radway tackles a tamer, but more am­ biguous, subject: the Book of the Month Club and the middlebrow culture it both reflected and promoted. She seems deter­ mined to repeat her earlier triumphant vindication of reading matter scorned by highbrow critics. But times have changed since 1984. Attacking the modernist canon, validating the reader’s desires, in­ terpreting the economic, social, and psy­ chological meanings of cultural texts—all this is old hat today. Radway acknowl­ edges her uncertainty about what she herself describes as a work of self-discov­ ery whose focus “oscillates continually between critique and appreciation.” A Feeling for Books consists of three sec­ tions, each with a distinctive subject mat­ ter and methodology. It begins with a field study of the Book of the Month Club or­ ganization that Radway undertook in 1985 as part of an “ethnographic” study of reading. She recounts her impressions of the club’s editors as they responded to a takeover by Time Incorporated. The sec­ ond and longest section uses a more de­ tached, scholarly approach to survey the history of publishing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the rise of the Book of the Month Club, and responses to it. In conclusion, Radway offers per­ sonal interpretations of several club titles she read as a fourteen year old: Marjorie Morningstar; Gods, Graves, and Scholars; and To Kill a Mockingbird. When the well-read advertising man Harry Scherman launched the Book of the Month Club in 1926, he knew exactly what he was doing. He applied modern techniques of marketing and distribution to bookselling to “sell new books as an identifiable category with recognizable uses for potential buyers.” The books were selected by a carefully chosen panel of judges who were presented as both experts and generalists. The ingenious “negative option,” which allowed read­ ers to reject a book, enabled the club to maintain an illusion of freedom and in­ dividuality. (The irrepressible Scherman described readers’ rejection of a chosen title thus: “The country didn’t want The Heart of Emerson’s Journals; they didn’t want any part of Emerson’s journals.”) The number of subscribers quickly stabi­ lized at a million. By the 1950s, the club had become a cultural icon, subject of an Book Reviews 291 oral history project at Columbia Univer­ sity. A long, slow decline led to today’s more purely commercial orientation. Radway interprets and deconstructs the Book of the Month Club as a social and cultural symptom and force with rel­ ish. Her ability to find meaning in what some might regard as a minor, if not trivial, subject is prodigious. Middlebrow culture, she demonstrates, defined itself in opposition to high culture and not as a diluted form of it. Valued above all was the personal experience of both author and reader, the emotional experience of being caught up and transported by a book. The Book of the Month Club saw itself as the “book club of record,” which maintained the highest standards in bal­ ancing reader demands and literary qual­ ity, matching the best books of all types to potential readers. Radway rather hesi­ tantly defines the readership as a socially insecure, rising class of managerial pro­ fessionals who used these books both to gain information about contemporary is­ sues and for the emotional element miss­ ing from their professional lives. Radway is an exciting thinker who can ring interesting changes even on the fa­ miliar triad of race, class, and gender. Early critical attacks on the Book of the Month Club, for example, had an under­ lying gender bias, and popular novels during the Cold War subtly promoted the superiority of the white man. Yet, I found the book profoundly irritating. The trendy words desire, performance, bound­ ary work, circulation, and construction echo like mantras. Radway’s residual grudge against the English professors who clipped her wings in college leads her to belabor the culture wars between mod­ ernist and middlebrow culture ad nauseum. Repetition and overinterpre­ tation leave the reader weary, whereas important questions, such as the cost of buying these books and their reception by ordinary people, remain underexplored. (Radway’s explanation that data on read­ ership are lacking is not convincing. What about book reviews in newspapers and popular magazines, book club lectures, etc.?) The book’s tone can be inflated comically, as in the claim that “a system enshrining speed, repetition, circulation, and integration . . . did away almost from the start with the very idea of origin, cre­ ation, inspiration and source.” Unfortu­ nately, all the comedy is unintentional in this earnest exploration of a subject that cries out for humor, as Sinclair Lewis well knew. School and public librarians may see themselves mirrored in the Book of the Month Club judges who tried so hard to anticipate the needs of all kinds of read­ ers. The relevance of A Feeling for Books for academic librarians is less direct. This is a fairly accessible example of cultural criticism that can serve as an introduction to the burgeoning study of reading, read­ ers, and the book. It explains (albeit in a biased way) some of the ideological struggles going on in academic depart­ ments of English. It can make us pause and consider the assumptions and biases that go into our own choice of resources for the library, and to understand that there are no eternal, universal, and unconstructed (to use a trendy word) principles of selection.—Jean Alexander, Carnegie Mellon University. Restructuring Academic Libraries: Organi­ zational Development in the Wake of Tech­ nological Change. Ed. Charles A. Schwartz, for the ACRL. Chicago: ALA, 1997. 289p. alk. paper, $28 (ISBN 0-8389-3478-1). LC 97-40243. The computer has radically changed how librarians and patrons access information. Librarians search to find the best organi­ zational structures and services to utilize new technologies most effectively. Nu­ merous articles and books address these issues. Now, the ACRL has published this collection of nineteen essays concerning library organizational change in light of technological development. Although these essays offer few new insights, they