This collection of ten ethnographic studies of "middle classness" around the world, presented by Heiman (social sciences, The New School for Public Engagement), Freeman (anthropology and gender studies, Emory U.), and Liechty (anthropology and history, U. of Illinois at Chicago), seeks to go beyond Eurocentric understandings of the operations of class and capitalism in their readings of how culture, consumption, subjectivity, and material and immaterial modes of production play into the production of class within global capitalism. Specific topics include class aspirations in provincial Egypt; gated communities and narratives of space in India; entrepreneurial marriage, affective labor, and the new Caribbean middle class; family lifestyle and the postsocialist middle class in Hungary; femininity, virtue, and excess in Indonesian discourses of middle classness; American middle class parenthood in an insecure economy; and the performance of lifestyle among the new middle class in China. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)