Call of the Mall The Geography of Shopping by the Author of Why We Buy

Paco Underhill, the Margaret Mead of shopping and author of the huge international bestsellerWhy We Buy,now takes us to the mall, a place every American has experienced and has an opinion about. The result is a bright, ironic, funny, and shrewd portrait of the mall -- America's gift to personal consumption, its most powerful icon of global commercial muscle, the once new and now aging national town square, the place where we convene in our leisure time.It's about the shopping mall as an exemplar of our commercial and social culture, the place where our young people have their first taste of social freedom and where the rest of us compare notes.Call of the Mallexamines how we use the mall, what it means, why it works when it does, and why it sometimes doesn't.

Paco Underhill is the founder and CEO of Envirosell, Inc. (www.envirosell.com). His clients include Saks Fifth Avenue, Gap, ExxonMobil, the U.S. Postal Service, Wal-Mart, Citibank, and Starbucks. He is a regular contributor to NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. His previous book, Why We Buy, was an international bestseller and has been translated into twenty-three languages. Underhill is based in New York but spends a third of the year on the road.