Once Upon an American Dream
Once Upon an American Dream

Author: Andrew Lainsbury

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Branded a "cultural Chernobyl" and the "tragic kingdom," the Euro Disney Resort has been on its own thrill ride since opening in 1992. The much publicized version of the Magic Kingdom gave Europeans alcohol-free "mocktails," surly employees, even colors too muted for the Disney image. Facing financial disaster, was it any wonder that Disney execs found themselves wishing upon a star for answers? After so many knee-jerk criticisms of Euro Disney, this book combines firsthand experience and research to shed new light on claims that the park is nothing more than a form of American cultural imperialism. Andrew Lainsbury, a former Euro Disney employee who knows what the park meant to its visitors, goes beyond media bites and academic scorn to examine Europe's love/hate relationship with Euro Disneyland and some of the undiscussed issues surrounding it. Once Upon an American Dream is a story of global capitalism on a grand scale. Lainsbury has plumbed company archives and interviewed key players to give readers the real view from Le Chateau de la Belle au Bois Dormant (Sleeping Beauty's Castle). He cracks open the Euro Disney controversy to reveal the park not as a tragic experiment in exporting American culture but the result of European efforts to import a popular form of American entertainment. Lainsbury tells how the Walt Disney Company came to build a European park and locate it in France, how political negotiations affected its design and development, how it was promoted to continental audiences, and what caused its widely publicized financial woes before being rescued by a real prince from Saudi Arabia. He reveals what it took to win back the hearts of skeptical Europeans—such as serving wine, selling flashy merchandise, and placating disgruntled workers. Finally, he looks into the magic mirror to speculate on the role of Euro Disney and the Walt Disney Company in the twenty-first century. Ultimately, Lainsbury shows that cultural imperialism is not an exclusively American phenomenon but a global corporate strategy—and that global corporatism, by needing to be responsive to consumers, is so complex that it may not be as monolithic as feared. Once Upon an American Dream is a fairy tale for our times, reminding us that, for all the critical huffing and puffing, the creation and marketing of pleasure is what Euro Disneyland is all about.

A Cultural History of the Disney Fairy Tale
A Cultural History of the Disney Fairy Tale

Author: Tracey L. Mollet

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-11-21

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 3030501493

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book charts the complex history of the relationship between the Disney fairy tale and the American Dream, demonstrating the ways in which the Disney fairy tale has been reconstructed and renegotiated alongside, and in response to important changes within American society. In all of its fairy tales of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Walt Disney studios works to sell its audiences the national myth of the United States at any one historical moment. With analyses of films and television programmes such as The Little Mermaid (1989), Frozen (2013), Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Once Upon a Time (2011-2018), Mollet argues that by giving its fairy tale protagonists characteristics associated with ‘good’ Americans, and even by situating their fairy tales within America itself, Disney constructs a vision of America as a utopian space.

An American Dream
An American Dream

Author: Norman Mailer

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 2015-02-17

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 081298613X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this wild battering ram of a novel, which was originally published to vast controversy in 1965, Norman Mailer creates a character who might be a fictional precursor of the philosopher-killer he would later profile in The Executioner’s Song. As Stephen Rojack, a decorated war hero and former congressman who murders his wife in a fashionable New York City high-rise, runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal a world of pure appetite and relentless cruelty. One part Nietzsche, one part de Sade, and one part Charlie Parker, An American Dream grabs the reader by the throat and refuses to let go. Praise for An American Dream “Perhaps the only serious New York novel since The Great Gatsby.”—Joan Didion, National Review “A devil’s encyclopedia of our secret visions and desires . . . the expression of a devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life “A work of fierce concentration . . . perfectly, and often brilliantly, realistic [with] a pattern of remarkable imaginative coherence and intensity.”—Harper’s “At once violent, educated, and cool . . . This is our history as Hawthorne might have written it.”—Commentary Praise for Norman Mailer “[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.”—The New York Times “A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”—The New Yorker “Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”—The Washington Post “A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life “Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”—The New York Review of Books “The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”—Chicago Tribune “Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”—The Cincinnati Post

Once upon a Dream
Once upon a Dream

Author: Nora Roberts

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2000-11-01

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9780515129472

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

#1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts presents four romantic stories of impossible dreams come true... In Nora Roberts’s “In Dreams,” a beautiful young woman is drawn to a castle in the forests of Ireland and becomes the link to a stranger’s past—and the curse that has trapped him forever in the eternity of his own dreams. In Jill Gregory’s “The Sorcerer’s Daughter,” the fate of a captive wizard depends on his lovely daughter—and the intentions of a spellcast adventurer who dreams of a priceless treasure, and a love that could be the greatest reward of all. In Ruth Ryan Langan’s “The Enchantment,” two strangers seek refuge in an abandoned estate on a storm-swept night—only to discover that their most elusive dreams of romance are as enchanted, and as real, as true love itself. In Marianne Willman’s “The Bridge of Sighs,” an American art appraiser becomes haunted by dreams of a lonely young girl while visiting Venice—a vision that illuminates a tragic past, and a future of endless love.

Once Upon a Dream
Once Upon a Dream

Author: Liz Braswell

Publisher: Disney Electronic Content

Published: 2016-04-05

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1484707656

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What if the sleeping beauty never woke up? Once Upon a Dream marks the second book in a new YA line that reimagines classic Disney stories in surprising new ways. It should be simple--a dragon defeated, a slumbering princess in a castle, a prince poised to wake her. But when the prince falls asleep as his lips touch the fair maiden's, it is clear that this fairy tale is far from over. With a desperate fairy's last curse controlling her mind, Princess Aurora must escape from a different castle of thorns and navigate a dangerously magical landscape--created from her very own dreams. Aurora isn't alone--a charming prince is eager to join her quest, and old friends offer their help. But as Maleficent's agents follow her every move, Aurora struggles to discover who her true allies are and, moreover, who she truly is. Time is running out. Will the sleeping beauty be able to wake herself up?

Sergio Leone
Sergio Leone

Author: Oreste De Fornari

Publisher: Gremese Editore

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The great American Western would never be the same after Italian director Sergio Leones spaghetti-western revolution.

American Dream Machine
American Dream Machine

Author: Matthew Specktor

Publisher: Tin House Books

Published: 2014-04-15

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1935639455

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The story of two talent agents and their three troubled boys, heirs to Hollywood royalty; a sweeping narrative about fathers and sons, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood and, by extension, American life. American Dream Machine is the story of an iconic striver, a classic self-made man in the vein of Jay Gatsby or Augie March. It's the story of a talent agent and his troubled sons, two generations of Hollywood royalty. It's a sweeping narrative about parents and children, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood, and by extension, American life. Beau Rosenwald—overweight, not particularly handsome, and improbably charismatic—arrives in Los Angeles in 1962 with nothing but an ill-fitting suit and a pair of expensive brogues. By the late 1970s he has helped found the most successful agency in Hollywood. Through the eyes of his son, we watch Beau and his partner go to war, waging a seismic battle that redraws the lines of an entire industry. We watch Beau rise and fall and rise again, in accordance with the cultural transformations that dictate the fickle world of movies. We watch Beau's partner, the enigmatic and cerebral Williams Farquarsen, struggle to contain himself, to control his impulses and consolidate his power. And we watch two generations of men fumble and thrive across the LA landscape, learning for themselves the shadows and costs exacted by success and failure. Mammalian, funny, and filled with characters both vital and profound, American Dream Machine is a piercing interrogation of the role—nourishing, as well as destructive—that illusion plays in all our lives.

Endangered American Dream
Endangered American Dream

Author: Edward N. Luttwak

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-05-11

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 1439130361

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

One of America's most thoughtful and provocative strategists exposes the economic and cultural assumptions that have driven the U.S. to the brink of social and financial collapse. Edward Luttwak reveals a forceful new policy that can reverse America's decline.

In the Shadow of the American Dream
In the Shadow of the American Dream

Author: David Wojnarowicz

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1480489603

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From life in the streets and love in the alleys to fame in the spotlight and an untimely death—raw, biting, and brilliant selections from the personal journals of one of the most uniquely creative artists of the late twentieth century When his life ended at age thirty-seven—a casualty of the AIDS epidemic that took so many before their time—David Wojnarowicz had long since established himself as one of America’s most vital artists and activists. In the Shadow of the American Dream is a stunning collection of riveting and revealing chapters from Wojnarowicz’s extensive personal diaries—thirty volumes’ worth of memories and lucid observations, some bitter, some sweet—that the author began writing when he was seventeen and continued until his death two decades later. Here is a brilliant chronicle of an artist’s emergence—a young man’s still achingly fresh memories of his unhappy adolescence and his glorious discovery of self. Wojnarowicz recalls his life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side with no shame or regret, and shares his hitchhiking journeys across the country. He talks of art and love and sex—embracing who he is fully and accepting his heartbreaking fate without pathos—while providing fascinating glimpses into the vibrant and colorful New York art scene and poignant views of life and death among the AIDS community. At once frightening and courageous, joyous and disturbing, enlightening and honest, In the Shadow of the American Dream is a treasured addition to the enduring literary legacy of David Wojnarowicz and a true testament to his unique brilliance.