Popular category: 5638 books
The Empire’s Old Clothes
What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
In this powerful cultural critique, Ariel Dorfman explores the political and social implications of the smiling faces that inhabit familiar books, comics, and magazines. He reveals the ideological messages conveyed in works of popular culture such as the Donald Duck comics, the Babar children’s...
Pulphead
Essays
Language: English
Release Date: October 25, 2011
A New York Times Notable Book for 2011
One of Entertainment Weekly's Top 10 Nonfiction Books of the Year 2011
A Time Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction book of 2011
A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011
One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011
A sharp-eyed, uniquely humane tour of America's...
Simon
The Genius in My Basement
Language: English
Release Date: February 28, 2012
Alexander Masters tripped over his first book subject on a Cambridge sidewalk, and the result was the multi-award-winning bestseller Stuart: A Life Backwards. His second, he’s found under his floorboards.
One of the greatest mathematical prodigies of the twentieth century, Simon Norton stomps...
by Sander Gilman
Language: English
Release Date: January 11, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: January 11, 2013
Drawing on a wealth of medical and historical materials, Sander Gilman sketches details of the anti-Semitic rhetoric about the Jewish body and mind, including medical and popular depictions of the Jewish voice, feet, and nose. Case studies illustrate how Jews have responded to such public misconceptions...
Devil's Music, Holy Rollers and Hillbillies
How America Gave Birth to Rock and Roll
Language: English
Release Date: June 5, 2016
Rock music today is universal and its popular history is well known. Yet few know how and why it really came about. Taking a fresh look at events long overlooked or misunderstood, this book tells how some of the most disenfranchised people in a free and prosperous nation strove to make themselves...
Mirror, Mirror
The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 2014
Everyone deplores narcissism, especially in others. The vain are by turns annoying or absurd, offending us whether they are blissfully oblivious or proudly aware of their behavior. But are narcissism and vanity really as bad as they seem? Can we avoid them even if we try? In Mirror, Mirror, Simon...
You Never Call! You Never Write!
A History of the Jewish Mother
Language: English
Release Date: April 2, 2007
In You Never Call, You Never Write, Joyce Antler provides an illuminating and often amusing history of one of the best-known figures in popular culture--the Jewish Mother. Whether drawn as self-sacrificing or manipulative, in countless films, novels, radio and television programs, stand-up comedy,...
by warren susman
Language: English
Release Date: October 17, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: October 17, 2012
Bringing together for the first time the best of twenty-five years of unique critical work, Warren Susman takes us on a startling tour through the conflicts and events which have transformed the social, political, and cultural face of America in this century. Probing a rich panoply of images from...
A TV Guide to Life
How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know From Watching Television
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2008
Read Jeff Alexander's posts on the Penguin Blog.
A couch potato’s book of wisdom— 100% commercial free!
Some say that entire generations of Americans are being raised by the television…like that’s a bad thing. Not so, says author Jeff Alexander, long-time television writer, advocate...
American Culture, American Tastes
Social Change and the 20th Century
Language: English
Release Date: October 3, 2012
Americans have a long history of public arguments about taste, the uses of leisure, and what is culturally appropriate in a democracy that has a strong work ethic. Michael Kammen surveys these debates as well as our changing taste preferences, especially in the past century, and the shifting perceptions...
by John Michael Greer
Language: English
Release Date: June 10, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: June 10, 2010
Discover everything you ever wanted to know about secret societies like the Freemasons, the historical mystery of Atlantis, why King Arthur, Leonardo da Vinci and Hitler are key figures, plus conspiracy theories, forgotten sciences and ancient wisdom. A complete and informative A to Z for one of the...
Radical Happiness
Moments of Collective Joy
Language: English
Release Date: December 5, 2017
A passionate call to rediscover the political and emotional joy that emerges when we share our lives
In an era of increasing individualism, we have never been more isolated and dispirited. A paradox confronts us. While research and technology find new ways to measure contentment and popular...
by Michelle Orange
Language: English
Release Date: February 12, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: February 12, 2013
Michelle Orange uses the lens of pop culture to decode the defining characteristics of our media-drenched times
In This Is Running for Your Life, Michelle Orange takes us from Beirut to Hawaii to her grandmother's retirement home in Canada in her quest to understand how people behave in a world...
The Quick, the Dead and the Revived
The Many Lives of the Western Film
Language: English
Release Date: June 22, 2016
For well more than a century, Western films have embodied the United States’ most fundamental doctrine—expansionism—and depicted, in a uniquely American way, the archetypal battle between good and evil. Westerns also depict a country defined and re-defined by complex crises. World War II transformed...