Bywater, Michael. Lost worlds: what have we lost, & where did it go? London: Granta Books, 2004. ISBN 1-86207-798-3.

Summary: A collection of very short essays, arranged alphabetically by subject, mostly about things that have gone out of existence during the author's lifetime: Kunzle cakes, pudeur, analogue dials. About half of these are too specifically British to arouse much sympathy in American readers, except for the charming and imaginative style of the writing, which layers a kind of modern popular-culture sensibility over the sentimentality, visible (for example) in his entry on the Idea of America:

Once upon a time, America was our hope and our enchantment. We yearned for its manly men, its hats, its deserts and its saloon girls; we yearned for its can-do culture, the rough shock of its cities, the smooth suits of its Mob, the sense of infinite possibilities in its violet dusks and blue, blue mornings. We yearned for its beer and jazz, its smoke-filled nightclubs, its Edward Hopper bars, the melancholy of rainy Manhattan Gershwin nights and ring of its telephones; we yearned for the musicals, the high corn; we yearned for the prairie farmhouses and carried in our drizzled souls an inward, small-town Main Street to comfort us. We yearned for its big cars and, in our staid Northern climes, we yearned, not just for its detectives, its soda fountains, its cold beer and sardonic desk-clerks, but for its fun.

Now we yearn for America to be, not itself -- a greedy, domineering, isolated, stomping, hypocritical land of political correctness at home and blatant savagery abroad -- but the self we always believed it to be. And that, more than anything else, is why we are so angry. We have been let down. The America we yearned for has gone. Did it ever exist?