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Hann, C. & Hart, K. (Eds) (2009). Market and society: The great transformation today. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, cloth, $110.00, pp. xi, 320, index.

Six Feet Under is one of HBO's most unlikely success stories, which in its third season in 2002 was nominated for ten Emmy awards. Let's say you are the CEO of HBO and I come in proposing to do a series on a family of morticians, living in their funeral home. Dad dies in the pilot episode (although he makes cameo appearances from the great beyond). Ruth, the mother, is a repressed housewife who smothers her family. David, the son who takes over at dad's death is a closeted gay, who comes out in the second year of the series. Nate, the elder son, is a Birkenstock-style floater, who, after an Oregonian vegan experience, finds himself caught at home by his father's death, suddenly a partner in the family business. His teenaged sister Claire, suffers from the angst that characterizes her cohort, angst intensified by growing up and living in a funeral home. You, as the CEO of HBO are likely to say: You want to do what? We’ll call you, don’t call us. However, then, you learn that my name is Alan Ball, and that I just won the Oscar for writing American Beauty. I get to do the unlikely series about morticians and burials.

As triumphantly announced in journals and magazines, a la Fukuyama, late capitalism and its contingent logic of neoliberalism (ostensibly) reigns supreme, exploiting each site it encounters with precision. According to this fantasy of capitalism's seamless and ultimate triumph, domination is produced as inevitable, social struggle and revolution, a utopian dream. Yet, what many have seen since the 1990s is that this narrative requires military mobilizations of different kinds (i.e., “the war on terror” has become of late the reason thousands are being killed daily in Afghanistan and Iraq).