Coco Carlomagno is the well-respected, if somewhat easily startled, Chief of Police in Buenos Aires. Alberta is his more sensible cousin. Together they crack the cases that confound this puzzling city. Coco's nerves are all a-jangle. Deep in a cemetery in Buenos Aires, the tomb of the famous, much-lamented tango singer Anibal Manzana has everyone baffled. It is talking! Could it be haunted? Luckily Coco has his commonsensical cousin Alberta on hand to help. Can they unravel this ghostly riddle?
What has the omnipresence of the telephone done to interpersonal communication? How has the portable radio/tape player--whether "Walkman" or "box"--challenged our notions of privacy and personal space? What happens to our aesthetic ideals when an ancient art treasure is moved to a pollution-free environment and an exact replica is put in its place at the original site? How has the use of the "instant replay" in sports broadcasting affected the value of sportsmanship? What are the implications of the fact that a computer engineer has begun to market a tombstone that can deliver a recorded message from the deceased to the survivors? These are but a few of the questions Gary Gumpert asks in this provocative and entertaining assessment of how the communications media and its related technology have altered, reinforced, deemphasized, and redefined our society's values and beliefs. In a world and a society less reliant on the media, values were generally resolved and taught through the traditional institutions of family, school, and church. As Gumpert notes, however, the coming of the electronic age has made us much more reliant on "media relationships" for support and reaction in defining our values. Uncovering hidden media dependencies we tend to suppress, the book abounds in original insights on topics ranging from the intrusion of Muzak into the doctor-patient relationship to the way new audio technology has transformed our perceptions of a great performance. Although values tend to endure, Gumpert observes, they have never been static or constant. With the advent of the new media, he contends, values are being "rocked and tested" at a rate that boggles the mind. This book is a lively meditation on where we have been and where we might be going.
SHORT-LISTED: CBCA Book of the Year, Younger Readers, 2019 This is a story about a boy called Pender and a kangaroo called Brindabella, about how they became friends, and all the things that happened to them because of it. Pender and his father live in an old house made of honey-coloured stone in the bush by the river, with only the company of his father's paintings and the loyal dog, Billy-Bob. Then, on one winter morning, a gunshot amongst the trees changes everything. When Pender rescues Brindabella from the pouch of her murdered mother, an unusual friendship blossoms between the lonely boy and the orphaned joey. But Brindabella is no ordinary kangaroo. And though Pender has saved her life, the untameable wildness of the bush--and freedom--call to her... Lyrical and unforgettable, Brindabella explores the brutal beauty of the Australian bush.
"In Suspended Conversations Martha Langford breathes life into photographic albums. These travelogues, memoirs, thematic collections, and family sagas embody the intimate preoccupations of their compilers and the great events of a golden photographic age, 1860 to 1960. Langford also traces the influence of photograph albums on the installations, photo narratives, and photo sequences of contemporary artists. Whether dealing with art, museum archives, or the family heirloom, Suspended Conversations bring photography into the great conversation about how we remember our stories and send them into the future."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound." In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, and life and death. Blending cultural studies and the history of communication technology, Sterne follows modern sound technologies back through a historical labyrinth. Along the way, he encounters capitalists and inventors, musicians and philosophers, embalmers and grave robbers, doctors and patients, deaf children and their teachers, professionals and hobbyists, folklorists and tribal singers. The Audible Past tracks the connections between the history of sound and the defining features of modernity: from developments in medicine, physics, and philosophy to the tumultuous shifts of industrial capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, modern technology, and the rise of a new middle class. A provocative history of sound, The Audible Past challenges theoretical commonplaces such as the philosophical privilege of the speaking subject, the visual bias in theories of modernity, and static descriptions of nature. It will interest those in cultural studies, media and communication studies, the new musicology, and the history of technology.
The second volume in Joel Feinberg's series The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Offense to Others focuses on the "offense principle," which maintains that preventing shock, disgust, or revulsion is always a morally relevant reason for legal prohibitions. Feinberg clarifies the concept of an "offended mental state" and further contrasts the concept of offense with harm. He also considers the law of nuisance as a model for statutes creating "morals offenses," showing its inadequacy as a model for understanding "profound offenses," and discusses such issues as obscene words and social policy, pornography and the Constitution, and the differences between minor and profound offenses.
Return to the radically new and intriguing world of Ravnica as a jaded—and ghostly—lieutenant fights to save the city to which he is inextricably bound The streets of Ravnica run red with blood. Guild fights guild and horrifying monsters ravage the city, destroying all who stand in their way. But as Ravnica crumbles, a method emerges from the madness. It becomes clear that the city's chaos was calculated. But by whom? Something must be done. And unfortunately for Agrus Kos, being a member of the undead doesn't mean you don't have a job to do.
This fascinating work explores the meaning of death in the digital age, showing readers the new ways digital technology allows humans to approach, prepare for, and handle their ultimate destiny. With DeadSocialTM one can create messages to be published to social networks after death. Facebook's "If I Die" enables users to create a video or text message for posthumous publication. Twitter _LIVESON accounts will keep tweeting even after the user is gone. There is no doubt that the digital age has radically changed options related to death, dying, grieving, and remembering, allowing people to say goodbye in their own time and their own unique way. Drawing from a range of academic perspectives, this book is the only serious study to focus on the ways in which death, dying, and memorialization appear in and are influenced by digital technology. The work investigates phenomena, devices, and audiences as they affect mortality, remembrances, grieving, posthumous existence, and afterlife experience. It examines the markets to which the providers of such services are responding, and it analyzes the degree to which digital media is changing views and expectations related to death. Ultimately, the contributors seek to answer an even more important question: how digital existences affect both real-world perceptions of life's end and the way in which lives are actually lived.
"We need more novels that deepen our understanding of these later stages of a woman's life and put wings of hope on our hearts. The book soars, her best so far, a transcendent read." —Julia Alvarez, internationally bestselling and award-winning author To be free, we must learn to fly. Tere Sanchez has always known who she was: a professor, a wife, a mother, and a friend. But when her husband dies unexpectedly, she finds herself completely broken. Taking a leave from the university, Tere hopes that she can mourn her husband and get back on her feet, but instead, she spends a year consumed by grief. Until the day she levitates. Suddenly, Tere's life is thrown into disarray, and the repeated incidents of levitation not only make her question her sanity, but also put her in danger. She decides she will do anything to stop them. So when she's reminded that her family is related to the renowned levitating mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila, she leaves the refuge of her home and travels to Spain, hoping to find answers. But Saints can be elusive, and not all answers are easily found. Tere will soon have to decide whether to remain shrouded in her grief, or open her heart to a world where we need no wings to fly... From the award-winning author of The Storyteller's Death comes a riveting, multicultural story about what it means to love, heal, and take flight.
