Written in response to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster of 1931 in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, The Book of the Dead is an important part of West Virginia's cultural heritage and a powerful account of one of the worst industrial catastrophes in American history. The poems collected here investigate the roots of a tragedy that killed hundreds of workers, most of them African American. They are a rare engagement with the overlap between race and environment in Appalachia. Published for the first time alongside photographs by Nancy Naumburg, who accompanied Rukeyser to Gauley Bridge in 1936, this edition of The Book of the Dead includes an introduction by Catherine Venable Moore, whose writing on the topic has been anthologized in Best American Essays.
Screen Savers II is John DiLeo's three-part grab bag of classic movies, beginning with his extensive essays about ten remarkable and underappreciated movies, as in the first Screen Savers, and representing a variety of genres and stars such as Barbara Stanwyck, James Stewart, Ginger Rogers, and DiLeo favorite Joel McCrea. Part Two collects and categorizes posts from DiLeo's classic-film blog screensaversmovies.com, containing his musings on classics revisited, sleepers and stinkers, films old and new, plus his memorial tributes to Hollywood notables. Part Three might be called a delayed bonus round to DiLeo's 1999 quiz book, with all-new matching quizzes. Can you identify the films in which a character writes a book titled Hummingbird Hill; Fred Astaire dances with Betty Hutton; a character named Sean Regan is important but never seen?
Cosmic rays, exotic villainess, alternate dimensions, monsters & mayhem! In the early days comic books' golden age, the heroic Blue Bolt battles the beautiful femme fatale villainess, the Green Sorceress, and her strange army below the surface of Earth! Created by Captain America co-creator, Joe Simon. Includes comic book stories that mark the first team-up byline of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Blue Bolt: The First Ten Stories is a time capsule of comic greats in the early golden age of comics. Full color.
In the second volume of his epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Atkinson tells the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy.
Stupid is the new smart—but it wasn’t always so Popular culture has divorced itself from the life of the mind. Who has time for great books or deep thought when there is Jersey Shore to watch, a txt 2 respond 2, and World of Warcraft to play? At the same time, those who pursue the life of the mind have insulated themselves from popular culture. Speaking in insider jargon and writing unread books, intellectuals have locked themselves away in a ghetto of their own creation. It wasn’t always so. Blue Collar Intellectuals vividly captures a time in the twentieth century when the everyman aspired to high culture and when intellectuals descended from the ivory tower to speak to the everyman. Author Daniel J. Flynn profiles thinkers from working-class backgrounds who played a prominent role in American life by addressing their intellectual work to a mass audience. Blue Collar Intellectuals tells the fascinating story of the unschooled hobo who migrated from skid row anonymity to White House chats with the president and prime-time TV specials. Blue Collar Intellectuals tells the fascinating story of: •The scandalous teacher-student romance that spawned a half-century labor of love in writing the history of the world. •The Ivy League Ph.D. who held neither a high school nor college degree, and fittingly launched a renaissance in reading the great books outside of formal schools. •The scholarship student who experienced the free market firsthand waiting tables and peddling socks, and who became one of capitalism’s most influential exponents. •The impoverished outcast who became the poet of the pulps, elevating millions of readers along with heretofore marginal genres. Guiding us through a world now vanished, Flynn causes us to look anew at our own digital age and its nostrums: Video gaming is just a new form of literacy, Reality shows . . . Challenge our emotional intelligence, and Who cares if Johnny can’t read? The value of books is overstated. Blue Collar Intellectuals shows us how much everyone intellectual and everyman alike has suffered from mass culture’s crowding out of higher things and the elite’s failure to engage the masses.
In Conjure wife, Norman Saylor learns that his wife is a sorceress. In Our Lady of Darkness, horror writer Franz Westen searches for the paranormal in San Francisco.
