Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are

By Rob Walker (Random House, $25)

We hear a lot about how commercial advertising and slick marketing don't work on consumers anymore. We're too jaded, it's said, too savvy, not sufficiently compliant to the fine-tuned directives of highly paid message makers. Received wisdom says that "the consumer is king." But don't get too comfy with that crown, folks. As Rob Walker states in Buying In, proof that shoppers have gained the upper hand over the marketplace -- evidenced by an absence of logo-bearing sports gear, for instance, or shrinking landfills -- simply doesn't exist.

Instead, the commercial persuasion industry is adapting to what he calls "the era of murketing," a blend of "murky" and "marketing." Walker, who writes the "Consumed" column in The New York Times Magazine, points to the blurring of lines between brand sales and everyday life -- "deals to integrate product placements and brand mentions in blockbuster movies, popular computer games, comic books, and even cult online Web video shows" -- as indicative of this change. Meanwhile, consumers are doing just the opposite of rejecting commercial persuasion; they're contributing to it. "More and more people of all ages," notes Walker, are "signing up with 'word of mouth' firms to spread the news about some new products the firm represents or submitting their own home-brew advertisements on behalf of well-known consumer brands."

It's in that complicity where Walker finds his "murketing." So, what is it about Hello Kitty or Coke or Red Bull that makes people more comfortable with those brands than others? Walker dives into the dark reaches of human desire, fear and community acceptance to show how companies can break the "Desire Code" and turn Americans into willing promoters of their name brands.

"Today, companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars studying our behavior. ... In recent years, they have offered to 'collaborate' or 'co-create' with us -- by, say, letting us make design suggestions, or send in, ideas for products' names, or provide instant feedback about their wares. Within the commercial persuasion industry, this sort of consumer interaction is a sea change, on the theory that it's the opposite of the one-way communication of a traditional 30-second ad. ...

In the end, even today's product makers and brand owners must -- understandably, really -- filter their view of the consumer through the things they still control, like form and function and image. ...

[T]he interaction between consumer and consumed is more subtle and unpredictable than figuring out consumer problems and dreaming up ways to solve them. Perhaps the most important reason for this is that we don't always know, and could never articulate even if we did, what problems we're trying to solve until we encounter the solution."

Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It

By Julia Keller (Viking, $25.95)

It seems Dr. Richard J. Gatling hoped to save lives, rather than take them, when he invented the Gatling gun, his hand-cranked, rapid-firing weapon that first saw action during the mid-19th century. Explaining himself in 1877, Gatling recalled the pain he'd felt at seeing so many men die in the Civil War as a result of illness, rather than gunshot injuries: "It occurred to me if I could invent a machine -- a gun -- which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished." Things didn't quite work out that way. Although trained as a physician, Gatling decided his real calling was as a technological innovator. During his lifetime he registered more than 40 patents, for everything from cropplanting devices to toilet improvements. However, it was the Gatling gun that made him a celebrated tycoon and later -- once Americans realized the destruction his gun was capable of inflicting -- a reviled business figure. Keller charts Gatling's climb and collapse with both acuity and sympathy.