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A New York Times Notable Book: "An elegantly written, strikingly intelligent novel" about wrestling with the past and the future in a reunified Germany ( Newsday). Shot in Germany in the late 1960s, Dix Greenwood's first film, Summer, 1921, is revered as an antiwar classic. Thirty years later and after more than a decade of silence, Dix returns to Berlin on a residency that he hopes will rekindle his genius. He encounters a newly reunited Germany, full of promise yet mired in the past—much like Dix himself. To this day, he is haunted by the mystery of Jana Sorb, the actress who disappeared during the making of Summer, 1921 and has long since been presumed dead. When Jana suddenly reappears...
Radio 4's Book of the Week A Financial Times Book of the Year Shortlisted for the 2020 Financial Times / McKinsey Business Book of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award 'The story of the original data science hucksters of the 1960s is hilarious, scathing and sobering - what you might get if you crossed Mad Men with Theranos' David Runciman The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge--decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine it has no past but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Ma...
The birth of rock 'n roll ignited a firestorm of controversy--one critic called it "musical riots put to a switchblade beat"--but if it generated much sound and fury, what, if anything, did it signify? As Glenn Altschuler reveals in All Shook Up, the rise of rock 'n roll--and the outraged reception to it--in fact can tell us a lot about the values of the United States in the 1950s, a decade that saw a great struggle for the control of popular culture. Altschuler shows, in particular, how rock's "switchblade beat" opened up wide fissures in American society along the fault-lines of family, sexuality, and race. For instance, the birth of rock coincided with the Civil Rights movement and brough...
Black Power Music! Protest Songs, Message Music, and theBlack Power Movement critically explores the soundtracks of the Black Power Movement as forms of "movement music." That is to say, much of classic Motown, soul, and funk music often mirrored and served as mouthpieces for the views and values, as well as the aspirations and frustrations, of the Black Power Movement. Black Power Music! is also about the intense interconnections between Black popular culture and Black political culture, both before and after the Black Power Movement, and the ways in which the Black Power Movement in many senses symbolizes the culmination of centuries of African American politics creatively combined with, and ingeniously conveyed through, African American music. Consequently, the term "Black Power music" can be seen as a code word for African American protest songs and message music between 1965 and 1975. "Black Power music" is a new concept that captures and conveys the fact that the majority of the messages in Black popular music between 1965 and 1975 seem to have been missed by most people who were not actively involved in, or in some significant way associated with, the Black Power Movement.
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NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND THE LOS ANGELES TIMES • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK “A literary triumph that transcends its war story. . . its greatness will stand the test of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “A master American novelist.” —Vanity Fair A Dangerous Friend is a thrilling narrative roiling with intrigue, mayhem, and betrayal. Here is the story of conscience and its consequences among those for whom Vietnam was neither the right fight nor the wrong fight but the only fight. The exotic tropical surroundings, the coarsening and corrupting effects of a colonial regime, the visionary delusions of the American democratizers, all play their part. A few civilians...
This reader's guide provides uniquely organized and up-to-date information on the most important and enjoyable contemporary English-language novels. Offering critically substantiated reading recommendations, careful cross-referencing, and extensive indexing, this book is appropriate for both the weekend reader looking for the best new mystery and the full-time graduate student hoping to survey the latest in magical realism. More than 1,000 titles are included, each entry citing major reviews and giving a brief description for each book.
This wide-ranging collection of essays seeks to challenge the ‘common-sense’ assumption that entertainment activities have no function but to fill up otherwise empty moments. As such it builds on the term – coined by the Victorians – ‘Recreation’, and argues that in the entertainments people pursue they do not simply divert themselves, but actively create and re-create their identities. The collection shows this process can only take place for those who enjoy the benefits of leisure; hence, in the medieval period leisure and entertainments are largely confined to the wealthy minority. In periods of rapid social change, like 19th century Britain, the inter-linked question of ident...
Jonathan Yardley called A Family Trust "his longest, his most ambitious and his best a book with serious purposes that manages to entertain at the same timerich in carefully observed details, in quick, sharp perceptions that reveal more than one at first understands fine, satisfying, rewarding book, the work of a mature and accomplished novelist," upon the book's initial publication in 1978. The passing of Amos Rising, town elder and editor of The Dement Intelligencer, leaves the Rising family without a patriarch and the town with a hole in its center. The ambitions and talents of the Risings, the changing face of the town and the life of the spirited, intelligent, and attractive Dana Rising fill the pages of this extraordinary novel. Ward Just's A Family Trust is about the public face and private souls of America's Heartland in the same way his other novels are about Germany, Vietnam, or Washington D.C. The time has come to bring A Family Trust back into print.