Bloom's Morning: Coffee, Comforters and the Secret Meaning of Everyday Life

In a witty, down-to-earth collection of 38 brief essays, Berger, a San Francisco State University communication professor, applies semiotic analysis, in the manner of Roland Barthes, to tease social, cultural, mythic and attitudinal meanings out of everyday objects and rituals, such as breakfast, shoes, ties, mail, king-sized beds, the morning newspaper and bath soap. Though he is sometimes silly (the electric hair dryer is ""a mechanical phallus.... the pistol/phallic type... would be popular with more modern, assertive women""), he is more often on target, as when he deconstructs the digital clock radio's liquid-crystal display as a metaphor for pervasive alienation in our electronic culture. Illustrated with his own quirky, fetching, black-and-white drawings, his book opens with a day in the life of an American everyman named Leopold Bloom after the hero of James Joyce's Ulysses. Using toasters and supermarkets as springboards, Berger mounts a devastating critique of the increasingly impersonal, dehumanized quality of our lives. (Dec.)