Word: suburbanitis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Industry experts attribute the buzz in higher-end mowers to several factors. As the average suburban lot size has increased--up 5.7% from 1992 to 2002--homeowners have been trading up to riding mowers. Baby boomers hitting retirement are dumping their old push mowers and warming to the back-friendlier seats and softer suspensions on many models. Folks in a rush are buying models that reduce gardening time. And there has been plenty of cheap credit to grease sales. "Consumers are voting with their pocketbooks," says John Jenkins, president of Deere's commercial and consumer division, which forecasts...
...painful yet delightful flashback scenes, wonderfully adept at tugging on adolescent girl anxieties, set the tone for 13 Going On 30, a Big story of suburban New Jersey girl Jenna Rink’s ascension into kitten-heeled city-girl life with the help of a boy, a wish, and a “seven minutes in heaven” game gone wrong. 13 year-old Jenna is, like, so not cool, until she wakes up in possession of a Fifth Avenue apartment and an editorial position at Poise magazine with her former nemesis as her right-hand woman. This...
Though All-Americanness to me (have pity on my land-locked, suburban Ohio soul) still invokes images of boys clad in Abercrombie polo shirts who conceal Natty Light six-packs at home football games on Friday nights, it is still fun, if not unrealistic, to enter the fantastical worlds of a “sunrise sail” on a boat called “Serendripity” and envision Pulitzer’s fond memories at the Kentucky Derby—Pulitzer says that “mother always had racehorses and her Louis Vuitton luggage was trimmed...
...Perrotta's suburban satire, Little Children (St. Martin's; 355 pages), is almost certainly talking about somebody around here. Perrotta is probably best known as the author of Election, a novel about a vicious race for class president at a New Jersey high school that became a satisfyingly nasty movie. He didn't invent the notion that high school sucks, nor is he breaking new ground when he reveals that American suburbs are petri dishes of ennui and alienation. But he shows admirable zeal in prosecuting the case, and he comes as close as anybody to answering a not unimportant...
Office Space notwithstanding, the life of the white-collar wage slave is chronically underchronicled, and one wonders, with all the suburban epics out there, why aren't there more office novels? Granted, with all the undead mayhem, there are moments when Hynes seems to lose track of what exactly he's trying to say about office life. Should we fear the zombified Dilberts that threaten Paul's sanity or pity them? After all, what office drone hasn't felt his or her humanity being leached away by carpeted walls and racks of low-hanging fluorescent lamps at $5.25 an hour...