Starred Review What do the Hula-Hoop, Pokémon Go, and the ice-bucket challenge have in common? They all began as fads, ran their course, and faded from public consciousness. Making the point that fads and trends (the latter are longer lasting than fads) can have good effects or detrimental ones, the text explains that although news reports about the theft of the Mona Lisa and its recovery turned a relatively unknown painting into an icon, the popularity of the beaver hat during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to beavers being hunted nearly to extinction in Europe and North America. Vermond describes a good many fads and trends while discussing why they matter, what psychological factors drive people to adopt them, and how readers can resist the potentially dangerous ones, such as medical trends based on misinformation. The discussion also includes malicious propaganda in Nazi Germany. The many concise, well-focused fad narratives make for intriguing reading, while the insightful commentary offers useful intellectual tools for evaluating new fads and ideas as they come along. Hanmer illustrates the text with energetic and sometimes amusing cartoon-style drawings, which appear singly or, occasionally, in a page of connected panels tracing a process through time. An entertaining, enlightening book on an unusual topic.

An overview of trends, how they are born—or made—and their dangers.After contextualizing trends and fads with an introduction focusing on how a silly 17th-century fashion trend—the beaver-felt hat—had drastic and far-reaching consequences that included genocide, the book's four chapters focus on what fads are, how fads spread, how they can be manufactured, and how much damage they can cause. Complex material is broken down into accessible language and explained with lively example stories, allowing for a surprisingly sophisticated overview. Each chapter is primarily organized into two-page spreads covering separate ideas: Pokémon Go illustrates the temporally linked rise and fall of a fad; stock market crashes and the rise of popular restaurants are both exemplars of an "information cascade"; Starbucks' Unicorn Frappuccino allows exploration of systematic strategies in corporate-driven trends; slime-making YouTubers demonstrate the power of the social media influencer; and the anti-vaccine movement exposes the persistence of logical fallacies. The design—punctuated with peppy cartoon drawings and comic-book pages that introduce each chapter—helps the book bounce along. Despite the book's cautionary elements—how companies secretly use people's internet browsing histories to manipulate their purchases and the ways that propaganda spreads hate—the text also offers empowerment, showing kids how not to be manipulated, and concludes with a call to action to harness the power of trends for positive ends.A must-read for the modern, viral-content age. (index, sources) (Nonfiction. 8-14)

An overview of trends, how they are born—or made—and their dangers.After contextualizing trends and fads with an introduction focusing on how a silly 17th-century fashion trend—the beaver-felt hat—had drastic and far-reaching consequences that included genocide, the book's four chapters focus on what fads are, how fads spread, how they can be manufactured, and how much damage they can cause. Complex material is broken down into accessible language and explained with lively example stories, allowing for a surprisingly sophisticated overview. Each chapter is primarily organized into two-page spreads covering separate ideas: Pokémon Go illustrates the temporally linked rise and fall of a fad; stock market crashes and the rise of popular restaurants are both exemplars of an "information cascade"; Starbucks' Unicorn Frappuccino allows exploration of systematic strategies in corporate-driven trends; slime-making YouTubers demonstrate the power of the social media influencer; and the anti-vaccine movement exposes the persistence of logical fallacies. The design—punctuated with peppy cartoon drawings and comic-book pages that introduce each chapter—helps the book bounce along. Despite the book's cautionary elements—how companies secretly use people's internet browsing histories to manipulate their purchases and the ways that propaganda spreads hate—the text also offers empowerment, showing kids how not to be manipulated, and concludes with a call to action to harness the power of trends for positive ends.A must-read for the modern, viral-content age. (index, sources) (Nonfiction. 8-14)