Different paths to mass consumption: consumer credit in the United States and West Germany during the 1950s and '60s.
A 1971 comparative study surveyed differences and similarities in consumer behavior and aspirations in Europe and the United States. Among the first and most glaring discrepancies the authors found was the use of consumer credit: "About one-half of all Americans both approve of and use installment credit. At the...

INTO ADULTHOOD AND DEBT.
Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard Most college students don't expect to have to declare bankruptcy as part of their rite of passage into adulthood, but that's what happened to Jobetta Hedelman. Hobbled by credit card debt after she graduated from the University of Oregon in...

Are you planning to take a home loan?
Byline: Kavita Sriram The cost of a home has reached unimaginable heights. Many aspire to own a roof rather than live in a rented house. Here are a few factors that prospective borrowers must bear in mind before approaching a lender. Tenure Plan...

Rediscovering the family.
The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke (With Surprising Solutions That Will Change Our Children's Futures) by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi (Basic, 272 pp., $26) This book is a fine example of post-feminist angst. On one...

Other people's money: gambling and bankruptcy.
[There has been a renewed focus on gambling and its social consequences. One potential consequence facing gamblers is bankruptcy. This article considers how gambling and gambling debts are treated in bankruptcy. It includes an examination of the extent to which gambling is a cause of bankruptcy; whether gambling debts...

CREDIT CARD NATION: The Consequences of America's Addiction to Credit.
CREDIT CARD NATION: The Consequences of America's Addiction to Credit by Robert D. Manning Basic Books, $26.00 WITH 1.5 BILLION CREDIT cards floating around, $560 billion in outstanding credit-card debt, and negative personal savings rates, clearly credit-card debt in the United States is...

Investing in Miracles: El Sjaddai and the Transformation of Popular Catholicism in the Philippines.
Investing in Miracles: El Sjaddai and the Transformation of Popular Catholicism in the Philippines. By Katherine L. Wiegele. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005. 207 pp. El Shaddai (the name reportedly comes from that used by Abraham for God in the Old Testament) is one of the...

Zero Debt for College Grads: From Student Loans to Financial Freedom.
Zero Debt for College Grads: From Student Loans to Financial Freedom by Lynnette Khalfani / Kaplan Publishing / May 1, 2007 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As the cost of a college education continues to increase at a rate of about 9 percent annually--nearly three times the rate...

Chaucer's Wife of Bath and John Fowles's Quaker Maid: tale-telling and the trial of personal experience and written authority.
ABSTRACT This article examines the medieval influence of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales on John Fowles's postmodern novel, A Maggot. I argue that Fowles's fiction reimagines and ultimately transforms the Wife of Bath's debate about experience and written authority through the novel's 'Quaker Maid' Rebecca Lee, whose extraordinary spiritual...

Doomsday prophets.
FOUR economic experts forecast a very bleak future in terms of a falling currency, an ever-growing budget and trade deficit, increasing consumer debt, a surge in personal bankruptcies, and the prospect of inflation. Is it us theyre talking about? Guess again. Its the US of A, says...