Looking at theft with the right touch

BOOK REVIEW

June 30, 2011|By Molly Young

Winona Ryders much-publicized arrest for shoplifting is one of the more… (NICK UT/REUTERS/file 2002 )

THE STEAL: A Cultural History of Shoplifting By Rachel Shteir

Penguin, 256 pp., $25.95

First, a question about the subtitle. What does it mean for a book to present itself as a “cultural history’’? In practical terms, it promises that an author has extracted the best bits of data from a specific subject, tied the bits together with a thesis illustrating the (ideally counterintuitive) importance of the subject, and topped the stack of pages with a short, catchy title. Chop suey, broadcasting, coffee, boxing, moss, Frankenstein, the periodic table of elements, tattoos, and fat, have all been recent recipients of the cultural history treatment. Certainly the matter of the five-finger discount, which Rachel Shteir analyzes in “The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting,’’ is as worthy of a book as any of these others.

Calling it a cultural history, however, potentially places the author at something of a disadvantage, given that shoplifting doesn’t have a terribly extensive history. Stealing may be an age-old phenomenon, but shoplifting is a modern one: It simply didn’t exist until retail stores and malls created the opportunity for a new species of theft.

Still Shteir gamely tries. The opening section of her book dips into the archives to visit Plato’s thoughts on the five-finger discount — as well as those of usual suspects Zeno, Aquinas, and St. Augustine — despite that shoplifting was no more possible in 380 BC than illegally downloading Ke$ha tracks off the Internet. It’s an inauspicious start that Shteir, to a reader’s relief, speedily corrects by narrowing her focus to the book’s proposed subject and then reporting the heck out of it.