Still, Heller is Heller, and even the most jumbled segments of this generally affable memoir have their share of insightful observations and amusing asides. Heller’s memories of his Coney Island childhood are laced with sardonic humor and bathed in a warm glow of nostalgia. He tells of his first (and last) ride on the Cyclone at Luna Park (as a returning Air Force airman with 60 missions under his belt); of street games of “punchball” (a sort of stickball without the stick); of swims out to the bell buoy at Coney Island Beach — which he only now recognizes were exceedingly dangerous ventures.

Most of this memoir — which stutters to a halt some time before it reaches “now” — deals with Heller’s childhood, his stint in the Air Force and his years as a young adult. Aside from relating his early struggles to get into print (one of which involved a story called “Did You Ever Fall In Love With a Midget Weighing Thirty-eight Pounds?”), Heller provides few insights into his career as a writer. Still, the crumbs he gives are intriguing enough. He notes that over the years his memories of wartime incidents have gotten so intermingled with his fictional versions of them he can’t always tell them apart. But there are some things he’ll never forget. Like most writers, Heller is unable to forgive a bad review, including one rather unkindly review of “Catch-22″ from the New Yorker, which declared that the novel didn’t “even seem to have been written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper.” Heller restrains himself from gloating over the book’s triumph over its early critics, but, as he notes with blunt honesty, “What restrains me is the knowledge that the lashings still smart, even after so many years, and if I ever pretend to be a good sport about them, I am only pretending.”

Still, the omissions may be rectified; Heller suggests that he’s saving some stories for a sequel. If he does decide to commit more of his stock of memories to paper, Mother Oswald has a perfect title for him.

Twitchell, an English professor at the University of Florida and the author of several previous diatribes on the decline of American civilization (the most recent being “AdCult USA,” an antagonistic history of advertising), writes with energy and (occasionally) with some wit on this important and difficult topic. But in the end his book does more to obscure the debate than to illuminate it.

“We are living in shameless times,” Twitchell argues, our moral fiber diluted by feel-good advertisements, feel-good psychology, feel-good religion. “Shame that was once thought natural is now considered something to be sloughed off, even to be made fun of,” he complains. “The carnival culture of adolescents has become the dominant culture.” This could have been an interesting book, but Twitchell is more interested in scoring political points than in offering a careful and nuanced historical analysis. “For Shame” isn’t history; it’s a rant — another in a seemingly endless parade of dumb books lamenting the “dumbing of America.” When Twitchell really gets his dander up, his reasoned arguments give way to free-associational bluster, careering wildly from topic to topic without so much as a “how do you do” to the logic or logistics of debate. It’s like being stuck on the subway next to a raving crank. I’d almost prefer the company of Seinfeld’s unclad traveling companion.

“For Shame” has a retro feel about it — and not simply because of Twitchell’s moral nostalgia. Virtually all of his “contemporary” examples seem a couple of years out of date: Tonya Harding, Joey Buttafuoco, John Wayne Bobbitt, Jessica Hahn. He even devotes a good chunk of one chapter to an unilluminating tirade against Madonna (the one “from upstate Michigan, not the one from Bethlehem”).

But what is most troubling about the book is that its central premise is based upon a sort of rhetorical sleight of hand. The question is not, as Twitchell would have it, whether one is “for” or “against” shame. With the possible exception of certain guests on the Jerry Springer show, none of us is truly without shame — nor would we want to be. Twitchell and his ideological opponents (among whom I’d have to count myself) simply have different ideas about what counts as shameful. Some think we should stigmatize homosexuality. Others see homophobia as the real shame.

Despite his frequently professed preference for plain speaking, Twitchell is coy about his own beliefs, speaking in gruff generalities. Though broadly supportive of more traditional forms of Christianity — “Jesus was not a matinee idol, certain principles are better than others,” he proclaims — Twitchell won’t say exactly what this means when it comes to delicate issues like homosexuality and abortion. It’s funny: He almost seems ashamed to say what he really thinks.

We are thrilled with Jerry’s comeback, but we think he can do even better! Indeed, with all due respect to Oprah, we think he can grind the Queen of Daytime Talk into ratings powder.

Publicly, Jerry shows Oprah nothing but the utmost respect. (“Oprah’s the best there is,” he recently told a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.) But we know in his heart of hearts he’d love to vanquish her once and for all.

And we know how he can do it. What does Oprah have that Jerry doesn’t have? Only one thing: a book club.

Why can’t Jerry get one of his own?

We know what you’re thinking: “But Jerry’s guests can’t read.” Actually, that’s not true at all. Studies show that cross-dressers, for example, are extremely avid book-purchasers. And while white supremacists are, for the most part, illiterate, the majority of pregnant lesbian strippers have at least some college education — and a startling 35.2 percent have advanced degrees!

So we say: Jerry — You Go Girl!

Think of the possible topics for the show: “Cold Mountain, Hot Lesbian Strippers!”; “Angela’s Asses”; “The God of Small Penises”; “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Crouching Down in the Bushes, Naked, with Binoculars.”

And imagine the edifying exchanges that could result once Jerry’s Kids throw themselves into the serious study of literature.

JERRY PROMOTES THE GREAT AMERICAN DIALOGUE ON RACE

JERRY’S BOOK CLUB DOES TONI MORRISON

JERRY’S BOOK CLUB TALKS ABOUT THE CHILDREN

JERRY’S BOOK CLUB DOES FAMILY VALUES

Then I discovered thrift stores, and my latent consumerist cravings emerged with a vengeance. From my first big score (a set of useful mugs and an original oil painting based on the “Love is …” comic strip, all for $1.29) I was hooked. “The smart shopper shops often,” the sign in my local thrift proclaimed, and by this peculiar standard I was a genius. I bought shirts; I bought pants; I bought file cabinets. I bought black velvet paintings of kitties. I bought hideous ceramic figurines. I bought more than 100 novels about nurses.

Al Hoff understands the passion, the sheer irrational thrill of thrifting. Several years back, Hoff began a modest little zine, Thrift Score, to share her experiences with fellow thrift devotees. Soon the pages of Thrift Score were filled with letters from a vast and diverse Thrift Army, responding to her questions and giving all the gory details of their most obscure finds.

Now Hoff has distilled her thrifting wisdom into a book, also called “Thrift Score” — a guide to buying that makes (as they say) a perfect Christmas gift. Though not quite as deliciously eccentric as her zine, the book is an entertaining and practical guide to the lowest rungs of our consumer ladder, with Hoff taking on subjects ranging from the proper care and cleaning of thrifted lambswool sweaters to suggestions on how to furnish a Manly Den. (She suggests starting with an “All-American Cedar Souvenir Plaque.”)

As Hoff understands, the joy of thrifting lies not only in the occasional amazing score, but in the pleasure one can take in examining the raw materials of history firsthand. Thrift stores, after all, are where fads go to die; in a good thrift store, you can find dictionaries of CB slang, Pac Man pajamas, Masters of the Universe bedsheets. You can find almost every bestseller ever published — except, of course, the ones you might actually want to read. Every thrift store in existence seems to have a copy of Gail Sheehy’s “Passages,” John Naisbett’s “Megatrends,” Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities”; very few of them appear to have been read.

And then, of course, there are the Herb Alpert records. Hoff has a theory about Herb Alpert. “Whipped Cream and other Delights” sold 500,000 copies when it first came out — and, as Hoff points out, most devoted thrifters have seen what seems to be “each and every one of these.” Perhaps, Hoff suggests, all the copies of this infernal album have left the hands of their original owners and are now caught in an endless limbo, circulating and recirculating through the thrift stores of America like an especially virulent urban legend.

My own passion for thrifts waxes and wanes. At times, even the thought of entering the squalid disorder of a thrift makes my skin crawl. Other times, I can feel the fever coming over me, and I will gladly spend hours braving the crowded aisles, the screaming babies, the miserable music, the rancid human odors, sorting through pile upon pile of junk in search of the perfect score. I plowed through my copy of “Thrift Score” in an evening, reading like a man possessed. The next day I hit a brand new thrift. The magic was still there — waiting for me like Herb Albert, whipped cream in hand.

Blackwood’s ’80s are the decade of Culture Club and Flock of Seagulls; the Robb Report, by contrast, harks back to the decade of Dynasty and Donald Trump. Indeed, a recent Robb feature celebrated the triumphant “return” of this most flamboyant ’80s icon. “The Donald is back,” the editors croon — and, it goes without saying, he’s badder than ever (as is his hair). Writer Linda Marx defines for her readers the essence of Trump: “a fascination with flamboyance, an obsession with opulence — he is a man who believes his own braggadocio. Hyperbole, chutzpah, and singing superlatives are all hallmarks of the Trump personality that translate well to his casino hotels and yachts and planes and luxury apartments.”

Just as the swinging Hef — pipe in his mouth, playmates in his hot tub — was once the symbol of an idealized state of perpetual bachelorhood, so The Donald remains a symbol of ’80s-style excess. But while Hef’s style of sexual utopianism is looking long in the tooth (as is the man himself), ’80s-style excess is still tenaciously clinging to life — and nowhere more tenaciously than in the pages of the Robb Report.

The comparison with Hef is not made idly, for the Robb Report offers a kind of pornography for the very, very wealthy — only without all those naked people to clutter up the pictures. But the Robb Report, which began its life more than two decades ago as a Rolls Royce tip sheet, is far more hard-core than anything ever imagined by Hef. In the place of big-haired, hard-bodied, pontoon-breasted hussies, the Robb Report offers up tantalizing pictures of stereos, cigars, yachts and watches. And Hummers. Lots of Hummers.

Just as porn promises the hardest, the hottest, the biggest, the wettest, so the Robb Report promises only the finest — as its advertisers insist again and again. Why settle for an ordinary dog when a company called Baggins can deliver up “simply the finest Shar-Pei you can own,” with “Adult Wrinkling Guaranteed.” Why settle for a plain old Harley when you can own Confederate Motorcycles’ America GT, “the best damn motorcycle on the road today” (and one that is “Expensive. By Design”).

Nothing is too obscure to merit the most extravagant of superlatives. Philip Wolman and Co. offer up cufflinks designed to look like cigars — but which in reality look eerily like severed penises. The ad assures RR readers that these strangely unsettling objets-de-body-part are in fact “the finest 14K two-tone gold cuff-links” in the world — which makes me despair a little for the future of the two-tone gold cuff link.

Wolman and Co. aren’t the only folks declaring themselves to be at the top of their respective heap. One ad promotes “the most luxurious parfum in the world,” another “the world’s finest scale model train.” An upscale bakery offers “the best and most unusual cakes in the world” — including one cake that’s shaped like a yacht. (What’s next — a yacht shaped like a cake? Cuff-links shaped like … never mind.) A company with the irritatingly whimsical name of “Beau Ties” declares that it delivers “perfection to bow tie lovers.” Another company promises “the most innovative aquarium furniture ever.” Yet another touts “the finest motors and control systems for interior window treatments.”

Once in a while — a very long while — the advertisers let slip a tiny bit of doubt: In its RR ad, a clothier called Ascot Chang tentatively suggests that its ascots are only “perhaps the best.” But RR discourages this sort of hesitation, looking down on advertisers who don’t see themselves as offering the tippy-top of the line — whether they’re talking about scale model trains or Shar-Peis. And while there isn’t some sort of independent evaluation of these claims — a Shar-Pei Quality Assurance board, say — ad director Sedler assures me he keeps close track over who advertises in the magazine, and doesn’t hesitate to reject ads that don’t live up to his exacting, Trump-like standards. “Everything that’s in here is chosen because its a marketplace ideally suited for the best of the best,” he tells me. “We’re very careful about who we accept in the magazine.”

While many in our acutely self-conscious age try to disguise their consumer avarice a little — defending their various high-tech toys as business necessities, cultivating an almost ascetic style of opulence — RR readers make no attempt to hide their ostentation. After all, as Thorstein Veblen explained back in 1899, the whole point of good old-fashioned conspicuous consumption is that it be conspicuous — and conspicuously unnecessary. “No merit would accrue,” Veblen commented, “from the consumption of the bare necessities of life.” And clearly neither the “affordable $50,000 stereo” promised by one RR advertiser, nor the $189.95 hunk of buffalo meat touted by another is exactly a necessity — bare or clothed.

Still, great wealth is not without its responsibilities — as the greatly wealthy feel compelled to remind the rest of us as often as they can. Indeed, the RR sees its mission as an educational one — promoting itself as a guide for the newly wealthy who haven’t yet figured out what to do with their looming surpluses of cash. “Many celebrities, athletes [are] relatively new to money,” Sedler notes, and RR wants to help them learn a certain minimal kind of frugality. “We’ve all heard the stories of a baseball player making several million a year and then something happens and he’s broke two years later,” Sedler notes sadly. “That’s a serious problem — spending money, thinking it’s endless. You need to be trained as to how you spend that money.” Just how pushing $200 buffalo steaks will train people how to spend money wisely is left unclear.

Sedler even suggests, subtly, that the Robb Report might function as a sort of supplement to the work ethic — spurring readers to greater heights of productivity. But only for the already rich. “It’s not a dream book, in the sense of someone who doesn’t have money who wants to dream about owning some of these things,” Sedler tells me. “It’s a dream book for someone who’s already a millionaire dreaming about things they can find in Robb Report that he or she wants to buy when they have many more millions.”

For those who’ve fallen a few hundred thousand short of their first million, though, RR is less a dream book than a nightmare. If these people can afford to spend $70,000 on a goddamn Hummer, why can’t they buy themselves even a smidgen of taste? Now, I’m hardly free from avarice. Far from it. I sometimes find myself transported into a sort of techno-consumerist-trance by the “fetish” section in Wired, and I flip through computer catalogs with the same enthusiasm I used to show for Victoria’s Secret. But RR’s kind of porn leaves me cold. Flipping through its pages, wincing at each new example of crass hyper-materialism, I find myself suddenly overcome with leftist indignation, ready to take to the streets with signs and slogans. 2-4-6-8! Your stupid Shar-Peis aren’t so great! 3-5-7-9! That Bang and Olufsen should be mine!

Or I could do something far more damaging. I could subscribe to the filthy thing — and throw its demographics all to hell.