The Tastemakers is relevant now only as historical artifact, as it covers approximately the century from 1850 to 1950 in detailing American tastes for architecture, art, and design. Americans dallied with Greek revival style, the gingerbread-cutesy Gothic of Andrew Jackson Downing, and concrete modernist structures, each style claiming to be more authentic and honest than what preceded it (there is always an overtone of morality that comes with taste, Lynes instructs). As the 1940s closed, the ranch house and its variations reigned supreme. America was exceedingly slow to embrace high art, preferring the banality of John Rogers' sculpture and Currier & Ives prints, which were the Thomas Kinkades of their day - produced in a factory and hand-colored on the premises by employees.

Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" at the New York Armory Show of 1913 shocked the massive crowds who thronged to see it and inspired countless cartoons and mockeries ("an explosion in a shingle factory," one wag called the Cubist painting). The exhibit was supposed to get Americans interested in American art, but the bulk of paintings bought were by Europeans, including Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse.

One of the chapters is Lynes's famous essay "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow," which explains what men (and trust me, it's all about men in Lynes's telling) fit in these categories circa 1949. The highbrow man listens to Bach, late Beethoven, Schoenberg, Bartok, and jazz - thus if he has any cultural alliance with another brow it's with lowbrow, rather than middlebrow, which he detests. Instead of having an oenophile recommend the best French wine, he tries to find a good red table wine, which is more difficult. He buys an Eames chair and never washes his salad bowl. The middlebrow man goes to foreign films, reads Toynbee, and never calls curtains drapes. (For today's middlebrow person, I would revise that to: watches Ken Burns miniseries, reads David McCullough, and never calls a woman "a gal.")