In Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America, Elizabeth Fraterrigo (History, Loyola University Chicago) examines the men's magazine Playboy, founded in 1953, as a window onto postwar middle-class culture. Fraterrigo's engaging analysis places the magazine at the center of many of the most significant social, economic, and cultural trends of the era: not only did founder Hugh Hefner and his magazine weigh in on the marriage and baby boom, changing sexual mores, and the roles of American men and women; they also engaged with the expanding postwar economy and the emergence of new models of class, transformations of the cities and suburbs, corporate life, Americans' embrace of expert advice, and battles over civil rights. These important postwar issues were central to Playboy, and the magazine thus mirrored the concerns and journeys of many Americans. For many, the era's prosperity was simultaneously alluring and unnerving, and the author argues convincingly that “Hefner offered an optimistic vision that defined American citizenship in terms of the freedom to consume” (78) and that he deflected worries about masculine consumption through “a justification for his magazine that shrewdly placed it at the center of national purpose” (79). As the magazine “reconciled competing desires for individualism and belonging,” it “reanimate[d] the links between production and consumption, work and play, while preaching that ‘the playboy life’ was indeed a moral one” (49). Through advice on proper consumption of popular culture, decor, and – always – attractive women, Playboy helped a generation of men aspire to middle-class status even as the magazine participated in remaking that status. Ultimately, mainstream culture embraced many of the magazine's central values, and, as Fraterrigo concludes, the magazine “played a catalytic role in the refashioning of gender roles and sexuality mores since the 1950s, and its underlying messages about pleasure, consumption, and the freedom to find fulfillment in a lifestyle of one's own choosing are now cornerstones of American culture” (210).

If the magazine's economic success and cultural omnipresence signaled its symbiosis with national preoccupations during its first two decades, so too did its eventual troubles in the later 1960s and after. Criticism of the magazine's consumerism and objectification of women, as well as the rise of a host of imitators, would diminish Playboy's currency, underlining just how much it spoke of and to the era of its founding.

In addition to her overall argument about the centrality of Playboy to postwar culture, the book's main strengths lie in Fraterrigo's analysis of specific episodes in the magazine's history. Her careful research and assessment of its advice on consumption, its take on public and private spaces, and its negotiations with both civil rights and feminism are original and sharply observed, as seen in sections examining an African American stag magazine and assessing the options of actual playmates and other women who worked for Hefner's enterprises. An epilogue that sketches out transformations in national sexual and social trends to the present is more fragmentary and less satisfying, but overall Fraterrigo's investigation makes a convincing case for Playboy's relevance to historical processes to which it has not usually been linked, and sustains her conclusion that “popular discussions of Playboy have become, in effect, debates about American life, revealing then and now much about the cultural preoccupations and anxieties of American society” (216).