An Innocent Generation is an inspired tour de force that delves into the waters of politics, theology, history, and philosophy. In this book, Chiarot offers a uniquely poignant social commentary: the current generation, whether consciously or subconsciously, has taken a Nietzscheian approach to dealing with guilt. Rather than internalizing guilt and dealing with it, we have been taught to outsource our guilt. This unnatural process is at the root of many current societal ills. Chiarot chases the consequences of this paradigm shift down alleys that leads him to the door steps of everyone from Thomas Hobbes and John Calvin to Lady Gaga and Rip Van Winkle. Clever prose, careful analysis, and witty anecdotes make this both an enjoyable and educational read.
When children of color enter their classrooms each year, many often encounter low expectations, disconnection, and other barriers to their success. In The Innocent Classroom, Alexs Pate traces the roots of these disparities to pervasive negative stereotypes, which children are made aware of before they even walk through the school door. The cumulative weight of these stereotypes eventually takes shape as guilt, which inhibits students' engagement, learning, and relationships and hurts their prospects for the future. If guilt is the primary barrier for children of color in the classroom, then the solution, according to Pate, is to create an Innocent Classroom that neutralizes students' guilt and restores their innocence. To do so, readers will embark on a relationship "construction project" in which they will deepen their understanding of how children of color are burdened with guilt; discover students' "good," or the motivation behind their behaviors, and develop strategic responses to that good; and nurture, protect, and advocate for students' innocence. Ultimately, students will reclaim their innocence and begin to make choices that will lead to their success. Teachers will renew their commitment to their students. And the current ineffective system can give way to one that reflects a more enlightened understanding of who our children are—and what they are capable of.
Winner, Outstanding Book Award, Association for Theatre in Higher Education Winner, Grace Abbott Best Book Award, Society for the History of Children and Youth Winner, Book Award, Children's Literature Association Winner, Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize, New England American Studies Association Winner, IRSCL Award, International Research Society for Children's Literature Runner-Up, John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, American Studies Association Honorable Mention, Book Award, Society for the Study of American Women Writers Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein argues that the concept of "childhood innocence" has been central to U.S. racial formation since the mid-nineteenth century. Children--white ones imbued with innocence, black ones excluded from it, and others of color erased by it--figured pivotally in sharply divergent racial agendas from slavery and abolition to antiblack violence and the early civil rights movement. Bernstein takes up a rich archive including books, toys, theatrical props, and domestic knickknacks which she analyzes as "scriptive things" that invite or prompt historically-located practices while allowing for resistance and social improvisation. Integrating performance studies with literary and visual analysis, Bernstein offers singular readings of theatrical productions from blackface minstrelsy to Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz literary works by Joel Chandler Harris, Harriet Wilson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett; material culture including Topsy pincushions, Uncle Tom and Little Eva handkerchiefs, and Raggedy Ann dolls; and visual texts ranging from fine portraiture to advertisements for lard substitute. Throughout, Bernstein shows how "innocence" gradually became the exclusive province of white children--until the Civil Rights Movement succeeded not only in legally desegregating public spaces, but in culturally desegregating the concept of childhood itself. Check out the author's blog for the book here.
The gospel of Christ is the gospel of life, and the Christian's defining reality. Yet the shedding of innocent blood, primarily through abortion, has now marked an entire generation. Innocent Blood explores a series of questions so as to reveal vital connections between the gospel and the call to defend the unborn. These questions include: What does the Bible mean when it says that "life is in the blood"? What does the Bible say about blood-guilt? How is it that we are all stained by it and accountable for it even though few of us have taken a human life? What remedy does God provide for the guilt of shedding innocent blood? What are we to do when confronted with the shedding of innocent blood, and where does our courage to take action come from? What is the link between protecting the innocent and proclaiming good news to the guilty? Not a book on social issues per se, nor a book on missions, Innocent Blood integrates the two and calls us to courageously challenge the powers of death with the gospel of life.
“Writing in a fervently literary style that flirts openly with the traditions of Salinger, Plath, and Fitzgerald, Hernández is a diamond-sharp satirist and a bracingly fresh chronicler of the heartbreak of trying to grow up. Honest and absurd, funny and tragic, wild and lovely, this novel describes modern coming-of-age with poetic precision.”* The Devil Wears Prada meets The Bell Jar in this story of a wide-eyed Ivy League grad who discovers that his dream of “making it” at leading New York City fashion magazine Régine may well be his undoing. Elián San Jamar knew from childhood that he was destined for a better life than the one his working-class multiracial parents share in Texas—a life inspired by Régine’s pages. A full ride to Yale opens the door to a more glamorous world, and he quickly befriends Madeline and Dorian, both scions of incredible wealth and privilege. With their help, he reinvents himself, and after four decadent years he graduates as Ethan St. James. But reality hits hard when Ethan arrives at Régine and is relegated to the lowest rung of the ladder. Mordantly funny and emotionally ruthless, An Innocent Fashion is the saga of a true millennial—naïve, idealistic, struggling with his identity and sexuality—trying to survive in an industry, and in a city, notorious for attracting new graduates only to chew them up and spit them out. Oscillating between melodrama and whip-smart sarcasm, pretentiousness and heartbreaking vulnerability, increasingly disillusioned with Régine and Madeline and Dorian, Ethan begins to unravel. As the narratives of his conflicted childhood, cloistered collegiate experience, and existential crisis braid together, this deeply moving coming-of-age novel for the twenty-first century spirals toward a devastating realization: You can follow your dreams, but what happens if your dreams are just not enough? *Kirkus Reviews (starred)
From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults Back in 2008, Mark Bauerlein was a voice crying in the wilderness. As experts greeted the new generation of “Digital Natives” with extravagant hopes for their high-tech future, he pegged them as the “Dumbest Generation.” Today, their future doesn’t look so bright, and their present is pretty grim. The twenty-somethings who spent their childhoods staring into a screen are lonely and purposeless, unfulfilled at work and at home. Many of them are even suicidal. The Dumbest Generation Grows Up is an urgently needed update on the Millennials, explaining their not-so-quiet desperation and, more important, the threat that their ignorance poses to the rest of us. Lacking skills, knowledge, religion, and a cultural frame of reference, Millennials are anxiously looking for something to fill the void. Their mentors have failed them. Unfortunately, they have turned to politics to plug the hole in their souls. Knowing nothing about history, they are convinced that it is merely a catalogue of oppression, inequality, and hatred. Why, they wonder, has the human race not ended all this injustice before now? And from the depths of their ignorance rises the answer: Because they are the first ones to care! All that is needed is to tear down our inherited civilization and replace it with their utopian aspirations. For a generation unacquainted with the constraints of human nature, anything seems possible. Having diagnosed the malady before most people realized the patient was sick, Mark Bauerlein surveys the psychological and social wreckage and warns that we cannot afford to do this to another generation.
One afternoon, a twelve-year-old girl goes missing near her village. The local police tell her mother and the villagers she has been taken by a wild animal. Five years later, young government employee Amantle Bokaa finds a box bearing the label 'Neo Kakang; CRB 45/94'. It contains evidence of human involvement in the affair. So begins an illegal and undercover struggle for justice and retribution. Botswanan High Court Judge Unity Dow's second novel is a gripping story of how groups of 'little people' come together to identify the prime suspects' the 'big men' who are beneath contempt, but above the law.
The ideal of childhood innocence is perhaps the most cherished concept of modern Western culture, all the more so because it seems to be under siege. Pictures have always been crucial to that ideal, and now they promise to transform it.Pictures of Innocence begins by tracing the visual history of ideal childhood: the pictorial invention of childhood innocence in eighteenth-century portraits, its diffusion in nineteenth-century popular paintings and illustration, and its culmination in today's best-selling and most widely practiced forms of photography. It deals with pictures of many sorts, ranging from eighteenth-century portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds to greeting cards by Anne Geddes, from the controversial photographs of Lewis Carroll to those of Sally Mann.The book then turns to the crisis in the ideal of childhood innocence. Ever since its invention, photography has unsettled the certainties of ideal childhood, not only by revealing its inherent tensions, but also by showing how the uses and interpretations of photography can eroticize children. These increasingly acute difficulties have recently provoked a dramatic reaction in the form of sweeping child pornography laws.At an intersection between the history of ideas, art, popular culture, censorship, and law, Pictures of Innocence shows how we are in the midst of a radical redefinition of childhood itself, a turbulent change in fundamental cultural values inaugurated by images.
It’s election season, and this year New Orleans—hot, sticky, squalid—is hosting the Republican National Convention. J. D. Callahan is a political operative backing an unpopular centrist candidate, the sitting vice president, Hilda Smith. Enter Armstrong George, a “dangerous lunatic” of a populist rival whose appearance on the scene has split the convention. The Republican party is in disarray—but this is only the beginning. Bomb scares, corrupt politicians, and a sexy, gun-toting gossip columnist all conspire to derail J. D.’s plans—and possibly the convention itself. The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear is a biting, hilarious satire of political culture from one of our savviest writers on the subject.
