Winner of the 2017 Ursa Major Award for Best Non-Fiction Work! Furry fandom is a recent phenomenon, but anthropomorphism is an instinct hard-wired into the human mind: the desire to see animals on a more equal footing with people. It’s existed since the beginning of time in prehistoric cave paintings, ancient gods and tribal rituals. It lives on today—not just in the sports mascots and cartoon characters we see everywhere, but in stage plays, art galleries, serious literature, performance art—and among furry fans who bring their make-believe characters to life digitally, on paper, or in the carefully crafted fursuits they wear to become the animals of their imagination. In Furry Nation, author Joe Strike shares the very human story of the people who created furry fandom, the many forms it takes—from the joyfully public to the deeply personal— and how Furry transformed his own life.
Fur Nation traces the interwoven relationships between sexuality, national identity, and colonialism. Chantal Nadeau shows how Canada, a white settler colony, bases its existence and its nationhood on a complex sexual economy based on women wrapped in fur. Nadeau traces the centrality of fur through a series of intriguing case studies, including: * Hollywood's take on the 330 year history of the Hudson Bay Company, founded to exploit Canada's rich fur resources * the life of a postwar fur fashion photographer * a 1950s musical called Fur Lady * the battle between Brigitte Bardot's anti-fur activists and the fur industry. Nadeau highlights the connection between 'fur ladies' - women wearing, exploiting or promoting furs - and the beaver, symbol of Canada and nature's master builder. She shows how, in postcolonial Canada, the nation is sexualised around female reproduction and fur, which is both a crucial factor in economic development, and a powerful symbol through which the nation itself is conceived and commodified. Fur Nation demonstrates that, for Canada, fur really is the fabric of a nation.
Fur Nation traces the interwoven relationships between sexuality, national identity, and colonialism. Chantal Nadeau shows how Canada, a white settler colony, bases its existence and its nationhood on a complex sexual economy based on women wrapped in fur. Nadeau traces the centrality of fur through a series of intriguing case studies, including: * Hollywood's take on the 330 year history of the Hudson Bay Company, founded to exploit Canada's rich fur resources * the life of a postwar fur fashion photographer * a 1950s musical called Fur Lady * the battle between Brigitte Bardot's anti-fur activists and the fur industry. Nadeau highlights the connection between 'fur ladies' - women wearing, exploiting or promoting furs - and the beaver, symbol of Canada and nature's master builder. She shows how, in postcolonial Canada, the nation is sexualised around female reproduction and fur, which is both a crucial factor in economic development, and a powerful symbol through which the nation itself is conceived and commodified. Fur Nation demonstrates that, for Canada, fur really is the fabric of a nation.
This in-depth exploration of culture, media, and protest follows South Korea’s transition from the Korean War to the start of the political struggles and socioeconomic transformations of the Park Chung Hee era. Although the post–Korean War years are commonly remembered as a time of crisis and disarray, Charles Kim contends that they also created a formative and productive juncture in which South Koreans reworked pre-1945 constructions of national identity to meet the political and cultural needs of postcolonial nation-building. He explores how state ideologues and mainstream intellectuals expanded their efforts by elevating the nation’s youth as the core protagonist of a newly independent Korea. By designating students and young men and women as the hope and exemplars of the new nation-state, the discursive stage was set for the remarkable outburst of the April Revolution in 1960. Kim’s interpretation of this seminal event underscores student participants’ recasting of anticolonial resistance memories into South Korea’s postcolonial politics. This pivotal innovation enabled protestors to circumvent the state’s official anticommunism and, in doing so, brought about the formation of a culture of protest that lay at the heart of the country’s democracy movement from the 1960s to the 1980s. The positioning of women as subordinates in the nation-building enterprise is also shown to be a direct translation of postwar and Cold War exigencies into the sphere of culture; this cultural conservatism went on to shape the terrain of gender relations in subsequent decades. A meticulously researched cultural history, Youth for Nation illuminates the historical significance of the postwar period through a rigorous analysis of magazines, films, textbooks, archival documents, and personal testimonies. In addition to scholars and students of twentieth-century Korea, the book will be welcomed by those interested in Cold War cultures, social movements, and democratization in East Asia.
New York Times Bestseller * Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * Winner of the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award * Michael L. Printz Medal honor winner From the pen of Sir Terry Pratchett, author of the beloved and bestselling Discworld fantasy series, comes an epic adventure of survival that mixes hope, humor, and humanity. When a giant wave destroys his village, Mau is the only one left. Daphne—a traveler from the other side of the globe—is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Separated by language and customs, the two are united by catastrophe. Slowly, they are joined by other refugees. And as they struggle to protect the small band, Mau and Daphne defy ancestral spirits, challenge death himself, and uncover a long-hidden secret that literally turns the world upside down. Sir Terry also received a prestigious Printz Honor from the American Library Association for his novel Dodger.
A Nation of Women provides a history of the significance of gender in Lenape/Delaware encounters with Europeans, and a history of women in these encounters.
From New York Times bestseller and Hugo Award-winner John Scalzi, an extraordinary retelling of the SF classic Little Fuzzy ZaraCorp holds the right to extract unlimited resources from the verdant planet Zarathustra—as long as the planet is certifiably free of native sentients. So when an outback prospector discovers a species of small, appealing bipeds who might well turn out to be intelligent, language-using beings, it's a race to stop the corporation from "eliminating the problem," which is to say, eliminating the Fuzzies—wide-eyed and ridiculously cute small, and furry—who are as much people as we are. Other Tor Books The Android’s Dream Agent to the Stars Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded Fuzzy Nation Redshirts 1. Lock In 2. Head On The Interdepency Sequence 1. The Collapsing Empire 2. The Consuming Fire Old Man's War Series 1. Old Man’s War 2. The Ghost Brigades 3. The Last Colony 4. Zoe’s Tale 5. The Human Division 6. The End of All Things At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Furry fandom--an adult social group interested in anthropomorphic animals in art, literature and culture--has grown since the 1980s to include an estimated 50,000 "furries." Their largest annual convention drew more than 6,000 attendees in 2015, including 1,000 dressed in "fur suits" or mascot-type animal costumes. Conventions typically include awards, organizations, art, literature and movies, encompassing a wide range of creative pursuits beyond animal costuming. This study of the furry subculture presents a history of the oft-misunderstood group and lists all conventions around the world from 1989 through 2015, including organizers, guests of honor and donations to charity.
The Columbine school shooting caused the United States to ramp up the national discussion of school bullying and the hasty implementation of many new anti-bullying rules and "zero-tolerance" policies. Some of these policies have led to serious unintended consequences. In this timely book, Susan Eva Porter, a seasoned and licensed school professional, explains how our current bully language, school policies, and anti-bully activists are trying to address the problem of school bullying in ways that actually make problems worse. Some policies treat children as adults and adults as children. Unnecessary strife among all parties involved, and the impeded social development of the children involved, can be a byproduct of popular policies. Especially in middle-school years, children are in a stage of development that involves testing boundaries and learning to relate to others. They need to gain resilience that will enable them to function well as adults. Bullying is often addressed in ways that arrest the social development of both the "bully" and the "victim." Porter, an expert in child development, sets a new standard for our understanding of America's approach to bullying, and how we can dramatically improve outcomes, in this easy-to-understand book. Bully Nation should be read by school administrators, counselors, policymakers, teachers, psychologists, and parents. It is a much needed analysis with common-sense solutions to one of our nation's most mis-addressed problems.
Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories. Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.
