In this book Cross and Walton employ four major “pleasure places” to discuss developments in the amusement industry and the evolution of western leisure preferences. They compare Coney Island and Disneyland in the United States and the seaside resort Blackpool and the Beamish Open Air Museum in England to trace ways in which the middle and lower classes have sought entertainment, release, thrill, and contact in a mass environment. In doing so, they have formed “playful crowds,” which exhibit particular characters in terms of their compositions, behaviors, and moods.

Most of the book is devoted to the golden age of Coney Island and Blackpool, two seaside resorts sporting hotels, rides, and curiosities and providing “industrial saturnalia” for the working classes. The authors offer a minute description of the infrastructural development of these pleasure places, focusing on the challenges of reconciling playfulness and respectability. While the authors acknowledge that “American commitment to novelty and mobility, and British tradition and class stability” (55) may have shaped the pursuit of pleasure in the two countries, they carefully consider the influence of location, climate, means of transport, length of season, land holding patterns, political alliances, and more distinctive factors. The analysis thus extends well beyond amusement parks to examine wider social networks, familial relations, and political arrangements, as well as the interplay between leisure traditions and cultural aspirations.

While Coney Island and Blackpool are obvious counterparts, less self-explanatory is the authors’ juxtaposition of the world-famous Disneyland with the Beamish Open Air Museum, which even many British people will not have heard of. In the second half of the book Cross and Walton argue that the emergence of a middle-class crowd focused on children and child fantasies gave rise to amusement parks catering to nostalgia for innocence and wonder. In a persuasive and astute chapter, the authors show ways in which Disneyland has borrowed selectively from the “industrial saturnalia” at Coney Island, adopting its playful architecture but shunning its freak shows. It thus creates a “commercial saturnalia” that satisfies the crowd's appetite for the “cute” and the “innocent” while seemingly offering a family learning experience about scientific progress and a virtuous past. The Beamish Museum similarly couples enjoyment and enrichment, the educational and the commercial, in a family-centered environment. Both Disneyland and the Beamish are presented as separate but cognate responses to the challenge of controlling the playful crowd and rendering pleasure places suitable for the swelling middle classes.

Yet if this stimulating and detailed text (with its beautiful period photographs) presents an admirable comparative analysis, several questions remain unanswered, particularly regarding the character and causes of the claimed transformation from “industrial” to “commercial saturnalia.” While the authors are convincing in their presentation of Disneyland as a response to and improvement upon Coney Island, the same cannot be said of the Beamish Museum's relationship to Blackpool, with which it hardly seems commensurate. Disney may have superseded Coney Island, but the answer to Blackpool seems to have been the Costa Brava rather than the Beamish. Further, the authors describe the playful crowd as pursuing, by turns, the “exotic,” the “cute,” the “nostalgic,” the “innocent,” and the “cool,” without investigating the formation of and transitions between these categories of taste. What will most elude readers as they are captivated by the playful crowd and the pleasure places it populates are the movers in the development of amusement parks across the century and the Atlantic