Baxter's drawings and text are reminiscent of the 1930's adventure story illustrations and the "See Jane run" books, which is why you may feel like coloring them in when you look at them. But his irreverent and wildly funny work, with all its odd takes on life, will surprise you in how keenly it reflects the "real" world. And therein is the brilliance of Glen Baxter: his unhinged world turns out to be the one we all live in. Here is a welcome anthology of three of Baxter's out-of-print books: Atlas, The Impending Gleam, and Jodhpurs in the Quantocks.
Over four decades and a multitude of books, “Colonel” Glen Baxter has built a world and a language all his own—slightly familiar, decidedly abnormal, irresistibly funny. Have you felt the terror of a failed Szechuan dinner? Have you seen what happens at precisely 6:15? Do you know where the beards are stored? Either way, this is the book for you. Baxter’s drawings are a delicious stew of pulp adventure novels, highbrow hjinks, and outright absurdity: lonesome cowboys confront the latest in modern art, brave men tremble before moussaka, schoolgirls hoard hashish, and the world’s fruits are in constant peril. Wimples abound. This new selection of Baxter’s work brings together highlights from the full sweep of his long career, and is sure to enchant both confirmed Baxterians and those iin dire need of an introduction. This NYRC edition is a hardcover with printed endpapers, debossed cover design, and extra-thick paper.
Published to accompany the Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibition, held at New Art Gallery, Wallsall, 4 May - 1 July 2007, Nottingham Castle, 14 July - 16 September 2007, Leeds City Art Gallery, 21 September - 11 November 2007, Aberystwyth Art Gallery, 17 November 2007 - 13 January 2008 and Tullie House, Carlisle, 19 January - 16 March 2008.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ideas that most Americans lived by started to fragment. Mid-century concepts of national consensus, managed markets, gender and racial identities, citizen obligation, and historical memory became more fluid. Flexible markets pushed aside Keynesian macroeconomic structures. Racial and gender solidarity divided into multiple identities; community responsibility shrank to smaller circles. In this wide-ranging narrative, Daniel Rodgers shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain. Age of Fracture offers a powerful reinterpretation of the ways in which the decades surrounding the 1980s changed America. Through a contagion of visions and metaphors, on both the intellectual right and the intellectual left, earlier notions of history and society that stressed solidity, collective institutions, and social circumstances gave way to a more individualized human nature that emphasized choice, agency, performance, and desire. On a broad canvas that includes Michel Foucault, Ronald Reagan, Judith Butler, Charles Murray, Jeffrey Sachs, and many more, Rodgers explains how structures of power came to seem less important than market choice and fluid selves. Cutting across the social and political arenas of late-twentieth-century life and thought, from economic theory and the culture wars to disputes over poverty, color-blindness, and sisterhood, Rodgers reveals how our categories of social reality have been fractured and destabilized. As we survey the intellectual wreckage of this war of ideas, we better understand the emergence of our present age of uncertainty.
The Red Umbrella is a moving tale of a 14-year-old girl's journey from Cuba to America as part of Operation Pedro Pan—an organized exodus of more than 14,000 unaccompanied children, whose parents sent them away to escape Fidel Castro's revolution. In 1961, two years after the Communist revolution, Lucía Álvarez still leads a carefree life, dreaming of parties and her first crush. But when the soldiers come to her sleepy Cuban town, everything begins to change. Freedoms are stripped away. Neighbors disappear. And soon, Lucía's parents make the heart-wrenching decision to send her and her little brother to the United States—on their own. Suddenly plunked down in Nebraska with well-meaning strangers, Lucía struggles to adapt to a new country, a new language, a new way of life. But what of her old life? Will she ever see her home or her parents again? And if she does, will she still be the same girl? The Red Umbrella is a touching story of country, culture, family, and the true meaning of home. “Captures the fervor, uncertainty and fear of the times. . . . Compelling.” –The Washington Post “Gonzalez deals effectively with separation, culture shock, homesickness, uncertainty and identity as she captures what is also a grand adventure.” –San Francisco Chronicle
