If AMC's critically acclaimed drama Mad Men has taught us anything, it's that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover. Indeed, as a number of the essays in this edited collection point out, this is a lesson best exemplified by the series’ protagonist, Don Draper. Draper, or Dick Whitman as he was formerly known, is clearly not who he appears to be. This central conflict of identity, which itself is driven by a conflict between past and present, is part of a wider network of social, cultural and political tensions explored throughout the series and throughout this collection of essays. This concern with the politics of identity is clear from the book's introduction, in which the editors draw attention to the way that “Mad Men presents both the promise and fragility of the self under conditions of late capitalism: while most evident in the figure of Don Draper/Dick Whitman, each major character attempts to make a radical break with the past,” before suggesting that “the tensions Mad Men represents in each character reflect a greater debate in Cold War political enquiry concerning the standard pluralist understanding of American politics” (26). In other words, Draper's dual identity stands as a metonym for the broader politics of Mad Men, which, as the subheading of this collection indicates, is as much about the politics of now as it is about the politics of then.

In a rather fitting tribute to Mad Men, this collection of essays features an impressive array of contributions and critical perspectives that are just as complex, rich and nuanced as the series that they examine. Despite this breadth, there are a number of recurring critical threads linking all ten contributions. One way or another, each essay uses Mad Men as a way to engage with the politics of national and/or individual identity, examining the series in terms of representation, misrepresentation, and even nonrepresentation. The first section of the book, “The American Century,” includes four essays that introduce and explore a range of key political themes and narratives that run throughout Mad Men’s seven seasons. The first of these chapters, written by the book's editors, Beail and Goren, offers a concise yet necessary overview of Mad Men, with an emphasis on its production context. In providing this industrial outline, Beail and Goren seem to suggest that the sociopolitical complexity of Mad Men is not simply a consequence of its portrayal of one of the most transformative decades in American history but also very much tied to the equally complex conditions of its production.

Whereas Beail and Goren's introduction largely attributes the complexity of Draper and, to a lesser extent, his fellow mad men and mad women to their complex conditions of production, the following three chapters adopt a very different approach, reading Mad Men through an expanded literary, political and historical lens. Indeed, the second essay, penned by Goren, continues one of the book's central concerns with identity politics. Complementing the industrial analysis of the preceding chapter, Goren focusses again on the figure of Draper, this time situating him within a long line of literary grifters including F. Scott Fitzgerald's eponymous hero of The Great Gatsby (1925) and the protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). As Goren's essay demonstrates, this is a lineage in which the conflicted identity of the grifter can be partly read as a product of the American Dream and its constant promise of individual (and national) reinvention.

The remaining two chapters in this section continue in this critical vein, but shift their focus to more marginalized characters and aspects of the series. In chapter 3, Loren Goldman applies C. Wright Mills's “elite theory” to examine and deconstruct ideas around individual agency through the figure of Bert Cooper – a founding member of the series’ fictional ad agency. Meanwhile, the final chapter in this first section explores the dynamics of sexual politics in Mad Men, once again reminding us that the series is as much about the 1960s as it is about today. In this essay Laurie Naranch notes that “the past is not really the past” and through an analysis of the series’ sexual politics offers a sober reminder that “meeting the conditions for liberal equality is on ongoing political project” (97).

Nanrach's essay opens up a number of questions concerning Mad Men’s relevance to the present. This offers a useful segue to the second part of this book in which these ideas are further explored. Comprising just two essays, this section adopts a more economic approach, drawing a number of fruitful parallels between the creative industries and the culture and politics of the 1960s and beyond. Despite its brevity, these essays offer a relatively comprehensive outline of the industrial and economic developments of this period, focussing on the culture of advertising, which, according to Kate Edenborg, provided the writers of Mad Men with a “canvas on which to knit together the past and present” (169).

The third and final section of the book, “Those Seen and Not Seen, Heard and Not Heard,” features three essays that deal with some of the more contentious aspects of the series: specifically the representation (or marginalization) of women, racial minorities and other groups on the social periphery. Whilst all three contributions offer valuable insights into the sexual, racial and political dynamics of Mad Men, the final of these chapters, written by Beail, is perhaps the most compelling. In response to criticisms of the series’ supposed marginalization of racial minorities, Beail interrogates the political significance of Mad Men and considers its relevance to the politics of today, a critical dilemma explored throughout this collection. Rather than chastise the series for its notable omission of ethnic minorities, as so many others have, Beail acknowledges a range of different possible readings, even suggesting that “an argument can be made that Mad Men does not overlook or avoid the politics of race. Rather, the show is deliberate and sophisticated in critiquing racism by immersing viewers in ‘white privilege’” (234).

Despite Mad Men’s cautionary tale about judging a book by its cover, there's a sense that this collection doesn't quite deliver on what its title promises. In particular, there is a somewhat misleading emphasis on “nostalgia” – a concept that is liberally deployed throughout this volume but rarely defined and too often taken for granted. Indeed, given that nostalgia provides an integral theoretical framework for many of these essays, there are a number of surprising omissions here: most notably work by critical theorists such as Fredric Jameson (1991) and Svetlana Boym (2001), as well as a rich body of more media-oriented scholarship on nostalgia including Paul Grainge (2002), Amy Holdsworth (2011) and Andrew Hoskins (2004).Footnote ¹ This criticism aside, Mad Men and Politics represents an exceptional collection of essays and critical interventions, as smart, as articulate and as convincing as Draper himself.