One Perfect Day : The Selling of the American Wedding

The Way We Marry, for better or worse, is who we are. So what does the American wedding tell us about ourselves? New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead goes behind the scenes of the $161-billion wedding industry-making stops at a Chinese bridal-gown factory, a wedding chapel in Las Vegas, and a conference for videographers, as well as interviewing ministers-for-hire, heirloom manufacturers, and elopement consultants-to explore and expose the ways in which an ever-proliferating number of wedding professionals have transformed the hopes and dreams of brides and grooms into a marketing opportunity. In this deft, sharply observed, and bitingly funny combination of investigative reportage and social commentary, Mead shows how a rite of passage has become a consumerist adventure and reveals what that tells us about the values to which we, as a culture, have become wedded. Book jacket.

Rebecca Mead has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1997.