ads Garfield loved.(Book of Tens)(List)

Byline: Bob Garfield
Dove
Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto.
"Evolution,'' the Cannes Grand Prix-winning viral about the perversion of beauty standards, was a tough act to follow. So, naturally, the follow-up is even better. "Onslaught''-which dramatizes the endless, irresistible barrage of unrealistic "beauty'' images-is not quite so riveting as "Evolution'' but it's more explicitly indicting of the culture, including advertising itself.
JC Penney
Saatchi & Saatchi, New York
Kevin Roberts' "Lovemarks'' sounds suspiciously like the branding of generic ad emotion. Nonetheless, consider us marked. The lovely spot "Calendar'' casts a magical spell that makes you go all gooey about the third-best department store in the mall-a spell broken only by actually entering a JC Penney.
Wal-Mart
Martin Agency, Richmond, Va.
The acting and direction aren't much, and the heavy-handed placement of logos is obnoxious, but the strategy of putting a concrete valuation-a Florida vacation, for example-on aggregate savings is simply brilliant. Save by spending-then spend the savings. Why, it's so ... American.
Wendy's
Saatchi & Saatchi, New York
The ridiculous red "Wendy'' wig as a symbol consumer defiance, of accepting nothing less than cooked-to-order. Sadly, so far, the executions have been utterly uninspired. But all but a few of Dave Thomas's hundreds of scripts were too. No problem. This is a Big Idea.
H&R Block
Campbell Mithun, Minneapolis
What was 2007-the Year of Insights? This one was probably the best. "I got people'' actually invested the mundane (and often completely unnecessary) act of consulting with a strip-mall tax preparer with the prestige attached to having an entourage or network of highly placed connections. It makes Joe 1040-EZ feel like a play-uh. The poor schmuck.
Sonic
Barkley, Kansas City, Mo.
Thanks to DirectTV, we finally discovered this 4-year-old campaign featuring various pairs of improv comics at the Sonic drive-thru. The byplay is laugh-out-loud funny yet somehow natural, even though it is 100% about product features.
Diamond Emerald Nuts
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco.
Around midafternoon, in a work world of soul-sucking cubicles, everybody gets a little woozy. Fatigue plus boredom plus the depletion of the post-lunch blood-sugar spike equals Snack Emergency. The message here: Eat our nuts to stave off drowsiness or else Robert Goulet will sneak into your cube and mess your stuff up. And there he is, on tiptoe, committing office vandalism! Hilarious, God rest his soul.
Nationwide Insurance
TM, Dallas
"Life Comes at You Fast,'' this company has been saying for a while, so be prepared. But finally the right gimmick: to use somebody who actually has been blindsided by misfortune. Kevin Federline, the ex-Mr. Britney Spears, sportingly permits himself to be portrayed as fast-food deep-fryer fantasizing about a solo rap career.
California Horse Track Association
Rubin Postaer Associates, Santa Monica, Calif.
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. So says the most popular tourism campaign ever. But what if it isn't true? That's what the California racing establishment wonders aloud in a campaign to persuade Californians to squander their money at home-lest Vegas indiscretions (some named "Misty'') come home to roost.
La-Z-Boy
RPA, Santa Monica, Calif.
It's not called Varie-T-Boy. It's not called Val-U-Boy. Anyone entering a La-Z-Boy furniture gallery is looking, first and foremost, to get La-Zied. It's all about the comfort, as three odd and very funny TV spots (and one odd and very unfunny TV spot) make abundantly clear. Also abundantly enticing.
bgarfield@adage.com

Garfield, Bob

r� 6 h pB �?B ion before 1776, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2000.
(With Grant Walker and Randall Balmer) Religion in American Life: A Short History, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000, updated edition, 2007.
Religion in Colonial America, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2007.
New World Faiths: Religion in Colonial America, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2007.
Also author of the booklet "Religion and Witchcraft in Early American Society," Forum Press, 1974. Coeditor of the series "Religion in American Life," Oxford University Press (New York, NY). Contributor to encyclopedias and other books, including Mapping America's Past, edited by Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty, 1996; and Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York, by David L. Barquist, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2001. Contributor to history journals.

ADAPTATIONS:

Awash in a Sea of Faith was a source for a four-part British television documentary, The Fate of Faith: Religion in Britain and America, broadcast in England in 1991, and for the PBS documentary special, Telegrams from the Dead, broadcast in 1994.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jon Butler is the author of Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776. A Publishers Weekly contributor who reviewed the book said that Butler "shows that the colonies were developing distinct ways of spending, building, praying, decorating, and politicking even then—a cultural revolution that anticipated the political revolution that was to follow." "This detailed overview brings fresh insight to the era," wrote Grant A. Fredericksen in Library Journal.
In Religion in American Life: A Short History (which, at nearly 550 pages, is not as superficial as the title might imply), Butler and his coauthors look at the impact of religious faith and practices on a highly diverse population over several centuries. New England Protestant Christianity figures prominently in this study, as it does in American history, but is not the central focus of the book. Butler, in particular, turns his attention to non-white, non-Protestant elements of colonial North America. Philip Jenkins reported in Books and Culture that Butler and his colleagues "offer a wonderfully polychrome account, giving the most extensive coverage I have ever seen in such a general history of Native spiritual traditions and their interactions with Catholic authorities." The book also covers African American practices, which often occurred outside the traditional church setting, as well as Roman Catholic worship as it was conducted by Spanish and French settlers. Library Journal contributor James A. Overbeck offered a different opinion of the book, citing scant coverage of Jewish, Muslim, and Asian religions in American life. Jenkins expressed reservations about the part of the book that offered commentary by coauthor Randall Balmer about the more recent elements of American religious practice (New Age groups, for instance, or the Promise Keepers) and how well his coverage of potentially transitory movements will stand the test of time. Church History contributor Peter W. Williams wrote, however, that "in the realm of American religious history, one can hardly do better than Religion in American Life." He recommended the book particularly to "the uninitiated," adding: "The initiated, however, might also read it for its felicity of narrative and the moments of illumination that fine scholars can inject even into stories we have all heard before."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, December, 1995, Charles H. Lippy, "Religion in a Revolutionary Age," p. 1669.
American Studies International, February, 2001, Joel Hodson, review of Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776, p. 144.
Books and Culture, January-February, 2003, Philip Jenkins, review of Religion in American Life: A Short History, p. 19.
Church History, March, 2004, Peter W. Williams, review of Religion in American Life, p. 239.
English Historical Review, September, 2001, Simon Middleton, review of Becoming America, p. 968.
History: Review of New Books, spring, 2000, Alan D. Watson, review of Becoming America, p. 109.
Journal of Southern History, February, 2002, Jack P. Greene, review of Becoming America, p. 153.
Kliatt, March, 2002, John E. Boyd, review of Becoming America, p. 33.
Library Journal, March 15, 2000, Grant A. Fredericksen, review of Becoming America, p. 102; December, 2002, James Overbeck, review of Religion in American Life, p. 134.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 7, 1990, review of Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, p. 9.
New York Times Book Review, April 1, 1990, Jan Lewis, review of Awash in a Sea of Faith, p. 33.
Publishers Weekly, February 21, 2000, review of Becoming America, p. 73.