This is a great, thought-provoking set of essays that suffers from age, despite the lasting relevance of its core arguments. My main gripe was that Barthes' method of choosing bits of contemporary pop culture to illustrate his arguments is of course destined to become dated, and so a few of the chapters when over my head. I'm just not familiar with Chaplin or the Dominici Trial, and I don't know who or what the Abbé Pierre is. However, the central arguments were easy to grasp despite this, and I can't really hold m own ignorance against Barthes.

Secondly, all shock value is lost because the structuralist ideas presented by Barthes have since become very commonplace in academia and the humanities. Again, I can't really blame Barthes for this - if anything it shows how influential he was that now, the conditioning effects of children's toys are well-known and debated, for example, or that the underlying ideology of the 'woman-as-mother' symbol is widely acknowledged and contested.

So even though these complaints are not really the fault of Barthes, I can only rate this book as 'OK' because it failed to deliver the cognitive revolution it promised, and lacked shock value. Also, it would have been better had the longer essay on mythology been truncated slightly and moved to the beginning of the book.