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Author: Morris Dickstein
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-09-06
Total Pages: 625
ISBN-13: 0393338762
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA cultural history of the 1930s explores the anxiety, despair, and optimism of the period, exploring how the period culture provided a dynamic lift to the country's morale.
Author: John F. Kasson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-04-14
Total Pages: 250
ISBN-13: 0393244180
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"[An] elucidating cultural history of Hollywood’s most popular child star…a must-read." —Bill Desowitz, USA Today For four consecutive years she was the world’s box-office champion. With her image appearing in periodicals and advertisements roughly twenty times daily, she rivaled FDR and Edward VIII as the most photographed person in the world. Her portrait brightened the homes of countless admirers, among them J. Edgar Hoover, Andy Warhol, and Anne Frank. Distinguished cultural historian John F. Kasson shows how, amid the deprivation and despair of the Great Depression, Shirley Temple radiated optimism and plucky good cheer that lifted the spirits of millions and shaped their collective character for generations to come.
Author: Morris Dickstein
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2009-09-14
Total Pages: 624
ISBN-13: 0393076911
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award "The definitive book about Depression culture for our time." —San Francisco Chronicle Hailed as one of the best books of 2009 by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, this vibrant portrait of 1930s culture masterfully explores the anxiety and hope, the despair and surprising optimism of distressed Americans during the Great Depression. Morris Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer called "one of our best and most distinguished critics of American literature," has brought together a staggering range of material-from epic Dust Bowl migrations to zany screwball comedies, elegant dance musicals, wildly popular swing bands, and streamlined Deco designs. Exploding the myth that Depression culture was merely escapist, Dickstein concentrates on the dynamic energy of the arts, and the resulting lift they gave to the nation's morale. A fresh and exhilarating analysis of one of America's most remarkable artistic periods, with Dancing in the Dark Dickstein delivers a monumental critique. A New York Times Notable Book, Los Angeles Times Favorite Book, San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2009, and Huffington Post Best Book.
Author: Stuart Cohen
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 218
ISBN-13: 1567923402
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHoused at the Library of Congress, the archives of the Farm Security Administration constitute an essential visual record of American life from the late 1920s through the onset of the Second World War. Guided by the adroit hands and watchful eyes of the master photo editor Roy Stryker, the FSA archive includes the work of dozens of photographers, from acknowledged giants like Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Lange to Marion Post Wolcott and Russell Lee, whose names and work may be less familiar. Stryker's approach to his photographers' assignments was a bracing mix of structure and improvisation. He sent his artists across the country to shoot for a few weeks, mostly in small towns and rural areas. They worked from what Stryker called shooting scripts - laundry lists of possible subjects and situations - but were always free to explore their own perspectives on a locale, its inhabitants, and their activities. When negatives and prints arrived, Stryker would guide his artists with suggestions, advice, and sharp-eyed criticism, all designed to elicit their best work. This book collects work from nine of these trips - Evans in Louisana and Alabama, Shahn in West Virginia, Lange in California, and others - uniting them with Stryker's shooting scripts, letters, and other relevant archival documents. What emerges, beyond the images themselves, is a complex and vital overview of the FSA at work, not just the work, but how the work evolved and matured under Stryker's guidance. The book concludes with photographs of New Orleans, the only city photographed in depth by the FSA artists. Reproduced in duotone, the 175 photographs in The Likes of Us, all printed from the original negatives at the Library of Congress, offer a rare opportunity not only to see a choice selection of famous and little-known images but also to understand the working of one of the government's most original and creative pre-war initiatives.
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2007-12-26
Total Pages: 338
ISBN-13: 1429904658
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes Barbara Ehrenreich's fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species' attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports. Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future. "Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead."—Terry Eagleton, The Nation
Author: F Scott Fitzgerald
Publisher:
Published: 2021-01-13
Total Pages: 166
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSet in the 1920's Jazz Age on Long Island, The Great Gatsby chronicles narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. First published in 1925, the book has enthralled generations of readers and is considered one of the greatest American novels.
Author: Morris Dickstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-08-10
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 1400826667
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a famous passage in The Red and the Black, the French writer Stendhal described the novel as a mirror being carried along a roadway. In the twentieth century this was derided as a naïve notion of realism. Instead, modern writers experimented with creative forms of invention and dislocation. Deconstructive theorists went even further, questioning whether literature had any real reference to a world outside its own language, while traditional historians challenged whether novels gave a trustworthy representation of history and society. In this book, Morris Dickstein reinterprets Stendhal's metaphor and tracks the different worlds of a wide array of twentieth-century writers, from realists like Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, through modernists like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, to wildly inventive postwar writers like Saul Bellow, Günter Grass, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Philip Roth, and Gabriel García Márquez. Dickstein argues that fiction will always yield rich insight into its subject, and that literature can also be a form of historical understanding. Writers refract the world through their forms and sensibilities. He shows how the work of these writers recaptures--yet also transforms--the life around them, the world inside them, and the universe of language and feeling they share with their readers. Through lively and incisive essays directed to general readers as well as students of literature, Dickstein redefines the literary landscape--a landscape in which reading has for decades been devalued by society and distorted by theory. Having begun with a reconsideration of realism, the book concludes with several essays probing the strengths and limitations of a historical approach to literature and criticism.
Author: Morris Dickstein
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-02-23
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 1631490389
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWidely admired as the definitive cultural history of the 1960s, this groundbreaking work finally reappears in a new edition. The turbulent 1960s, almost from its outset, produced a dizzying display of cultural images and ideas that were as colorful as the psychedelic T-shirts that became part of its iconography. It was not, however, until Morris Dickstein's landmark Gates of Eden, first published in 1977, that we could fully grasp the impact of this raucous decade in American history as a momentous cultural epoch in its own right, as much as Jazz Age America or Weimar Germany. From Ginsberg and Dylan to Vonnegut and Heller, this lasting work brilliantly re-creates not only the intellectual and political ferment of the decade but also its disillusionment. What results is an inestimable contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century American culture.
Author: Cristina García
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2011-06-08
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 0307798003
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post
Author: Burton W. Peretti
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2011-03-23
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 0812221575
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIllustrated with archival photographs of the clubs and the characters who frequented them, this book is a dark and dazzling study of New York's bygone nightlife.
