Sources: Pop Culture Places: An Encyclopedia of Places in American Popular Culture
Pop Culture Places: An Encyclopedia of Places in American Popular Culture. By Gladys L. Knight. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2014. 3 vols. Acid free $310 (ISBN 978-0-313-39882-7). E-book (978-0-313-39883-4) available, call for pricing.
The American landscape offers an abundance of places that are enshrined in American cultural memory. Places such as Area 51, surrounded by mystery and intrigue, and Coney Island, arguably America’s most historically famous amusement park, have achieved lasting cultural prominence and remain important places in America’s collective imagination. Gladys L. Knight’s Pop Culture Places: An Encyclopedia of Places in American Popular Culture seeks to inform readers about America’s most prominent and historically significant popular culture places. This three-volume encyclopedia contains an alphabetical and topical list of entries, a useful preface and introduction, over 350 entries, images, a select bibliography, and an index.
Arranged alphabetically, Pop Culture Places offers readers an overview of popular culture places from actual places such as Salem, Massachusetts, home of the Salem witch trials, to more conceptual places such as the American diner and barbershops. This broad array of culturally significant places is among this work’s most appealing features. Equally important is Knight’s preface, in which she frames the scope and purpose of the encyclopedia. Applying a broad definition to popular culture, Pop Culture Places focuses on providing the reader with information on how and why a place entered into America’s collective memory and why a particular place’s cultural appeal has sustained or why its significance has waned. All entries in this work are structured in a useful and easy to follow format, with each entry containing “historical perspectives” and “images in popular culture” sections.
Most popular culture reference works, such as the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture (St. James Press, 2013), focus largely on popular culture personalities, films, and music. With almost no comparable works addressing popular culture places or spaces, Pop Culture Places is a relatively unique reference work. While Pop Culture Places offers insightful perspectives on American popular culture, the encyclopedia has several shortcomings. From a conceptual perspective, Knight’s work is grounded largely in a historical framework in which the historical importance of a place dominates. As an encyclopedia addressing the importance of place, this work would have benefited from a cultural geography framework in which the importance of place and space come more to the fore. Additionally, readers may be disappointed to learn that very few entries contain photographs or images. While cost and copyright were the likely barriers, one would expect more images of the places highlighted in the three volumes.
Pop Culture Places is an informative and useful reference work for general audiences. It provides readers with a less common perspective on familiar places in the American historical and cultural landscape. With its diverse selection of places, Pop Culture Places will appeal to large audiences interested in American popular culture, cultural geography, and cultural history. Pop Culture Places is recommended for high school and academic libraries and medium to large public libraries.—Joseph A. Hurley, Interim Director, Collaborative University Research and Visualization Environment (CURVE), Georgia State University Library, Atlanta, Georgia