Walt Disney World, a world of "vinyl leaves," says Mr. Fjellman. And what exactly does he mean by this? Quite a bit more than might first meet our eyes. In the opening sentence of the book, Mr. Fjellman explains from where the title comes for his critique/celebration of the Disney Empire, "There is a tree in central Florida," quite a cute and subtle stock phrase from epic tradition to open a discussion of what we soon see is a subject of "epic" stature, "It is maybe ninety feet high and huge around the base and has a crown that stretches across almost as many yards as the tree is tall." This is bigger than any tree I've ever seen but, as Mr. Fjellman soon tells us, "it's not made of wood... [t]he trunk and branches are formed out of prestressed concrete wrapped around a steel-mesh frame." The bark and green stuff that cover much of it are painted on." And what's more, the "leaves, all 800,000 of them, are made of vinyl" (1). Thus Mr.Fjellman begins his intriguing and powerful study with an image that, while branching out in all directions of amusement and consumerism, intimates the crux of his message: the Disney way of magnitude, quantity, and fakeness is the "American way" of reality and being.

Throughout the work, Fjellman methodically asserts the manner in which WDW (Walt Disney World) is both the mirror and the quasi-generator of contemporary American (and what is becoming more infectious to the rest of the world with "Euro-Disney" and "Tokyo-Disney") consumer culture. He frames his entire narrative with the assertion that "the commodity form...is the hegemonic truth of our times" in that it breeds and permeates our values, maintains the power of the classes (i.e. corporations) that create and control it, and establish and define who and what we are. WDW is the quintessential corporation in that it produces its own material goods to be "bought" and consumed, but what's more important is that the WDW experience is itself a commodity that defines "you" as an American. Fjellman suggests that with the development of EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) Disney is a sort of corporate czar into which other corporations buy for the sake of advertising their own technologies and future prosperity. And as consumers of this WDW experience, we go on a consumeristic pilgrimage to the great cathedral of Cinderella's Castle or the great EPCOT golf-ball in the sky. And why do we go? Because, Fjellman continually proposes, we want an escape from our boring, dirty, and unsafe lives that lie just outside the 27,433 acres of central Florida that is Disney-owned. We want a clean safe environment, but, above all, we want to be AMUSED and we want all aspects of this amusement to be at the convenience of a short walk for quick and easy consumption.

The method Fjellman follows to make this argument is as fascinating as it is disturbing (disturbing only in the sense of how what he says makes me feel so disgusted with myself and fellow human-beings). Fjellman sets out to contextualize the present state of consumerism as it has developed in the history of America. Of course, to do this in the 20 pages that he does, something is bound to be over-generalized. However, the basic trend that he charts is an effective one as far as its applicability to "Disney culture:" the American as (s)he evolved through the turn of the century and into the present lost the sense of "value" of what Fjellman implies to be the "essential" qualities that "used to be" inherent in us and in the world around us. What happened, I believe Fjellman is suggesting, is that the trend of deconstruction, as it developed amidst the discontents of civilization, began to dissolve the "essences" of things where one no longer felt secure and stable with what something "meant" (did they ever?). So in the midst of uncertainty and potential "meaninglessness," the consumer was born; one who was left to assert identity through what (s)he owned, or, in the case of WDW, what (s)he experienced.

For the next few chapters Fjellman begins to correlate consumerism with the rise of WDW and Disney's tactics for success. For example, he explains how Walt, going incognito under some dummy companies, proceeded to not only buy up over 27,000 acres of central Florida for his "amusement," but even convinced the state to set up the acreage as the Reedy Creek Improvement District which more or less made WDW its own governing kingdom that would decide for itself what its own needs and resources would be and how they would be developed so that the State of Florida itself would have little say over the Magic Kingdom's activities. But what is more important for Fjellman is the ideology that WDW was built to project to its visitors an ideology that was as clean as the pedestrian paths on which they walked. Among other "clean" and "fake" developments, Disney created its own form of American History what Fjellman pejoratively terms (and rightly so), "Distory" a "tidy" narrative that showed how well the American white man (and not so often the woman or African-American) had controlled Nature something that the park itself makes a point of doing and had "made his dreams come true." In this slide show history with Mark Twain and Ben Franklin as your robotic tour guides, Vietnam is reduced to one slide of a helicopter rising above some palm fronds while Edison's invention of the light bulb earns the appropriately longer 15 seconds of fame. Again, Fjellman is sure to have the reader know that WDW is truly clean, fake, family fun, both physically and mentally.

The most important aspect of this work is how "fake" becomes the real. Citing several theorists of postmodern culture (Frederic Jameson included), Fjellman emphasizes how decontextualized WDW is how it places Japan next to Russia in the World Showcase of EPCOT,how amusement is possible through a Disneyfied version of history, how amusement and secure consumption is actually possible in America. The experience of Disney is real and we become surrounded by so many images that are a mixture of the real and the imaginary, the fleshly and the robotic, that we find ourselves clapping for a performance given by electronic dummies and smile spitefully at the young goofy-looking Disneyite who is trying to help us get seated, who is actually a human being. This is the postmodern, Fjellman asserts, this is the decontextualized, and "even when people can tell the difference between the real and the fake, increasingly they do not care. As long as we are amused, Neil Postman might say, it is enough" (401). Indeed, Disney is not, Fjellman claims, to be feared like Big Brother in 1984, but rather, Disney should be seen as a closer analogue to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where through great amusement ("soma") that the park gives us, we are ready to reintegrate ourselves back into the world outside of the Magic Kingdom and live our lives herding about, consuming and "being" by consuming. And when life gets disappointing again, when we feel unsafe, unclean, and un-American, we can always go back, for another 50 bucks, and enter our temporary paradise of "vinyl leaves."