BOOKS: One Perfect Day, Rebecca Mead (2007)

In the tradition of Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death, Mead explores the American wedding industry. How is it, she asks, that we have turned the wedding into an elaborate and absurdly expensive celebration?

It wasn't always this way, after all. Mead cites a 1939 study which asked recently married couples whether they had a wedding ring, a wedding reception, or a honeymoon; about one-third answered no to each question. (To be sure, the lingering effects of the Great Depression may have had something to do with those results -- couples marrying in 1939 would have understood better than most the foolishness of throwing money away on trivialities and parties -- but the change from then to now is dramatic, nevertheless.)

Mead talks to magazine editors, wedding planners, gown manufacturers, tchotchke marketers, and clergy, each of them working in their own way to create the notion of the wedding as a once-in-a-lifetime event -- a silly notion these days -- and to implant the idea that any wedding smaller than you can afford is an inadequate celebration of your love.

And for retailers, a wedding is the gift that keeps on giving. Get the happy couple to create a wedding registry at your store, and they'll be customers for life; bring them to your resort for your honeymoon, and they'll return for life. Even those businesses that might not seem like naturals for ongoing business can reap recurring rewards; a bride who was pleased with the catering of her first wedding may return when she's planning her second, and the renewal-of-vows ceremony is a fast growing sector of the industry.

The issue of same-sex marriage exploded while Mead was working on this book, and she discusses it briefly in her epilogue, noting that whatever their personal feelings on the subject may be, those in the wedding industry know a potential large market when they see one, and that they began targeting same-sex couples almost immediately.

Mead has a sharp eye for the telling detail, and a gift for getting her subjects to tell her more about their businesses than they might wish they had. It's a lively, witty book, successful both as entertainment and as reporting.