Overall, the descriptions provided by the official reviews are fairly apt. This is an attempt to translate the work on 'everyday life' and its critiques to the world of middle class, U.S. late capitalism. It attempts to look at how relations of class, race, and gender are created through consumption and the commodity. This puts it strongly in line with the critiques of the commodity as provided by Jameson and Adorno. However, it also has a feminist focus that those two authors don't offer. One could say that it tries to avoid the sort of celebratory elements that U.S. cultural studies has a reputation, while at the same time, avoiding the kind of apocalyptic reading that is found in baudrillard. It does this by critically reappraising the concept of use value that constitutes half of the economy of the commodity (see Marx, Capital I). Willis agrees with B. that the notion that use value constitutes some sort of originary and transcendental value is false, and reactionary, but at the same time, she insists that it gestures towards the elusive concept of the non-identical that Adorno opposes to the structures of identity and exchange found in capitalism. That is to say, capital can never be understood as total, and it must contain shards of its other in order to stay in existence, that is structures of the social, no matter how 'degraded.' The book ends on an interesting note, comparing the isolated lives of the middle classes to the description Marx provides for the peasantry in the 18th Brumaire, that is, isolated and unable to cohere itself into a class identity. To be honest, there are some dated moments in the text. There are a number of moments that Willis feels the need to show that she too watches television, etc in a particularly symptomatic 1990's cultural studies manner, however its still a fairly interesting read, even if you don't catch the Benson references....