Sherry Turkle

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Texas

Things We Think With

Autobiographical essays, framed by two interpretive essays by the editor, describe the power of an object to evoke emotion and provoke thought: reflections on a cello, a laptop computer, a 1964 Ford Falcon, an apple, a mummy in a museum, and other "things-to-think-with."

Evocative Objects

01b09151-1283-48d9-84d4-a81df7ae8f94-1

John Hooper

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Pennsylvania

Explores the history, culture, and religion of the Italian people, shedding new light on many aspects of Italian life.

The Italians

1846129e-542a-488e-838a-741bc22759f4-1

Chris Hedges

Bought  new, used 1 semester. Annotation and highlight marks

Missouri

The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

The author navigates America's divided culture--where a minority embraces film, theater, and books, while the majority cling to a world of fantasy and false certainty--to expose what he sees as an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion.

Empire of Illusion

9e702bd1-511c-4924-9eb7-e6184ac35356-1

Wolfram Eilenberger

California

Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

"[A] fascinating and accessible account . . . In his entertaining book, Mr. Eilenberger shows that his magicians' thoughts are still worth collecting, even if, with hindsight, we can see that some performed too many intellectual conjuring tricks." --Wall Street Journal

A grand narrative of the intertwining lives of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer, major philosophers whose ideas shaped the twentieth century

The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career, living hand to mouth as a critic. Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit, in search of spiritual clarity. Meanwhile, Heidegger, having managed to avoid combat in war by serving as a meteorologist, is carefully cultivating his career. Finally, Cassirer is working furiously on the margins of academia, applying himself to his writing and the possibility of a career at Hamburg University. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama, which will unfold across the next decade. The lives and ideas of this extraordinary philosophical quartet will converge as they become world historical figures. But as the Second World War looms on the horizon, their fates will be very different.

Time of the Magicians

41816968-5dbc-49d0-9f36-480b516427c0-1

George Lipsitz

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Massachusetts

The Popular, the National, the Global

A study of youth culture worldwide and its influence on popular cultural practices, national ideologies, and global markets.

Youthscapes

fe78ab08-4e20-4f5d-b2c4-bc4ecee60b25

#romance #love #family #relationships #culturalstudies

A Polemic

A polemic against love that is "engagingly acerbic ... extremely funny.... A deft indictment of the marital ideal, as well as a celebration of the dissent that constitutes adultery, delivered in pointed daggers of prose" (The New Yorker).

Who would dream of being against love? No one. Love is, as everyone knows, a mysterious and all-controlling force, with vast power over our thoughts and life decisions.

But is there something a bit worrisome about all this uniformity of opinion? Is this the one subject about which no disagreement will be entertained, about which one truth alone is permissible? Consider that the most powerful organized religions produce the occasional heretic; every ideology has its apostates; even sacred cows find their butchers. Except for love.

Hence the necessity for a polemic against it. A polemic is designed to be the prose equivalent of a small explosive device placed under your E-Z-Boy lounger. It won't injure you (well not severely); it's just supposed to shake things up and rattle a few convictions.

Against Love

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Stephanie McNeal

Minnesota

Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers

An unfiltered, colorful romp through the IRL world of influencers that spills the tea on the multibillion-dollar industry of content creation. If you’re anything like journalist Stephanie McNeal—aka, a millennial woman—you spend hours every day indulging in Instagram’s infinite scroll. The influencers on the platform aren’t just providing eye candy; these tastemakers impact how we cook, consume, parent, decorate, think, and live. But what exactly is going on behind the curtain of the perfectly curated Instagram grids we obsess over the most? Through intimate, funny, and vulnerable reporting, McNeal takes us through the looking glass and into the secretive real world of three major influencers: fashion and lifestyle juggernaut Caitlin Covington of Southern Curls & Pearls, runner and advocate Mirna Valerio, and OG “mommy blogger” Shannon Bird. Swipe Up For More! is based on three years of unprecedented, fly-on-the-wall access that offers a rare glimpse into how these influencers build their empires, struggle with the haters and snarkers, fight for creative control from the tech platforms that enable their businesses, parent in public, and try to look good while doing it. Along the way, McNeal answers burning questions, like: Why are there so many Mormon mommy influencers? What is it like to work for a popular influencer? What do they do with all the free swag? How do brand partnerships work? And how much money do they really make? Irresistible, juicy, and voyeuristic, Swipe Up For More! reveals all about the women some love to hate (and many actually, secretly, genuinely love).

Swipe up for More!

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Mimi Schippers

Wisconsin

Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock

"Schippers' account of the rock music subculture in Chicago between 1992 and 1995 is an ethnographic study based on casual interactions with a core group of rock fans, interviews with rock musicians, and field trips into bars and clubs of the Wicker Park area. The result provides fascinating, informative anecdotal information. Drawing from theorists Anthony Giddens, Candace West, Don Zimmerman, Judith Butler, and others, Schippers interprets performances, gestures, and language as well as values-both implied and explicitly stated-as maneuvers employed by members of that subculture to undermine expressions of (and attitudes reflecting) sexism and bigotry."-Choice "An astute analysis of rock music's gender politics that manages to be both perceptive and fun to read-a rare feat."- Arlene Stein, author of Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation Given the long history of feminism and its contested place in popular culture, important, practical questions arise: What effect, if any, have feminist ideas and practices had on the lives of young men and women who grew up with them? How do these individuals negotiate the realities of gender in their daily lives? Employing the crucial feminist insight that gender is a constantly shifting performance and not an essential quality related to sex, Mimi Schippers explores the gender roles, assumptions, and transgressions of the men and women involved in the alternative hard rock scene. She uses the innovative term gender maneuvering to explain how gender and sexuality are negotiated and always changing features of social relations. This process operates as a cultural practice and as an individual strategy of resistance to socially prescribed gender roles. Schippers conducted extensive interviews with fans as well as musicians, including Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Kim Thayil of Soundgarden, Donita Sparks and Jennifer Finch of L7, Kat Bjelland and Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland, Rose Marshack of Poster Children, Louise Post and Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt, and Liz Davis and Valerie Agnew of 7 Year Bitch. As it documents the development of a rock music genre that has so far received little academic attention, Rockin' out of the Box also demonstrates how this musical culture contributes to our understanding of the daily practices of gender relations among young people. Mimi Schippers is an assistant professor of sociology and women's studies at Tulane University.

Rockin' Out of the Box

514f6ea3-15c5-4fe5-b365-10d2379d9e89

Out Magazine Editors

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

New York

A Portrait of Gay and Lesbian Life

Candid and revealing photographs by today's leading photographers portray gays and lesbians from all segments of society, all professions, and all across the country--at work, at home, in sports, in media, in public, and in private. Concise captions and short "dispatches" by celebrated gay and lesbian writers illuminate more than 250 images, most in color.

Out in America

95d58c39-ce64-4f1f-8515-b9194fe1c00b-0

Leslie T. Chang

From Village to City in a Changing China

An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.

China has 130 million migrant workers--the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China's Pearl River Delta.

As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life--a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family's migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation.

A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America's shores remade our own country a century ago.

Factory Girls

5409fe8e-9a37-4123-8f8c-81d50141279b-1

Richard Lloyd

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City

Neo-Bohemia brings the study of bohemian culture down to the street level, while maintaining a commitment to understanding broader historical and economic urban contexts. Simultaneously readable and academic, this book anticipates key urban trends at the dawn of the twenty-first century, shedding light on both the nature of contemporary bohemias and the cities that house them. The relevance of understanding the trends it depicts has only increased, especially in light of the current urban crisis puncturing a long period of gentrification and new economy development, putting us on the precipice, perhaps, of the next new bohemia.

Neo-Bohemia

3c90827e-7f1d-4896-843f-4afe7867f93e-0

Shelf-kept. Smoke-free, pet-friendly home. 

Gigi Georges

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Five Maine Girls and the Unseen Story of Rural America





In Downeast, Gigi Georges follows five girls as they come of age in one of the most challenging and geographically isolated regions on the Eastern seaboard. Their stories reveal surprising truths about rural America and offer hope for its future. "It's almost impossible not to care about these fierce young women and cheer for their hard-won successes" (Kirkus) in this "heartfelt portrait" and "worthy tribute" (Publishers Weekly).

Nestled in Maine's far northeast corner, Washington County sits an hour's drive from the heart of famed and bustling Acadia National Park. Yet it's a world away. For Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie--five teenage girls caught between tradition and transformation in this remote region--it is home. Downeast follows their journeys of heartbreak and hope in uncertain times, creating a nuanced and unique portrait of rural America with women at its center.

Willow lives in the shadow of an abusive, drug-addicted father and searches for stability through photography and love. Vivian, a gifted writer, feels stifled by her church and town, and struggles to break free without severing family ties. Mckenna is a softball pitching phenom whose passion is the lobster-fishing she learned at her father's knee. Audrey is a beloved high school basketball star who earns a coveted college scholarship but questions her chosen path. Josie, a Yale-bound valedictorian, is determined to take the world by storm. 

All five girls know the pain and joy of life in a region whose rugged beauty and stoicism mask dwindling populations, vanishing job opportunities, and pervasive opioid addiction. As the girls reach adulthood, they discover that despite significant challenges, there is much to celebrate in "the valley of the overlooked." Their stories remind us of the value of timeless ideals: strength of family and community, reverence for nature's rule, dignity in cracked hands and muddied shoes, and the enduring power of home.

Revealed through the eyes of Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie, Downeast is based on four years of intimate reporting. The result is a beautifully rendered, emotionally startling, and vital book. Downeast will break readers' hearts yet offer them hope, providing answers to what the future may hold for rural America.

Downeast

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The Project on Disney

New Jersey

Work and Play at Disney World

This entertaining and playful book views Disney World as much more than the site of an ideal family vacation. Blending personal meditations, interviews, photographs, and cultural analysis, Inside the Mouse looks at Disney World's architecture and design, its consumer practices, and its use of Disney characters and themes. This book takes the reader on an alternative ride through "the happiest place on earth" while asking "What makes this forty-three-square-mile theme park the quintessential embodiment of American leisure?"
Turning away from the programmed entertainment that Disney presents, the authors take a peek behind the scenes of everyday experience at Disney World. In their consideration of the park as both private corporate enterprise and public urban environment, the authors focus on questions concerning the production and consumption of leisure. Featuring over fifty photographs and interviews with workers that strip "cast members" of their cartoon costumes, this captivating work illustrates the high-pressure dynamics of the typical family vacation as well as a tour of Disney World that looks beyond the controlled facade of themed attractions.
As projects like EuroDisney and the proposed Disney America test the strength of the Disney cultural monolith, Inside the Mouse provides a timely assessment of the serious business of supplying pleasure in contemporary U.S. culture. Written for the general reader interested in the many worlds of Disney, this engrossing volume will also find fans among students and scholars of cultural studies.


Inside the Mouse

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#paperback #textbook #culturalstudies #american #ethnology #folklore #nonfiction

Utah

The American West is a region, perhaps more than any other in the United States, that comes to us in visual terms. The grand landscapes, open vistas, and magisterial views have made the act of looking a defining feature of how we experience the West as an actual place. In Looking West, John D. Dorst examines a largely neglected pattern of seeing that stands in contrast to the universally familiar iconography.
When we engage in the act of looking, contends Dorst, we inevitably do so according to historically determined patterns--"discourses of seeing." It is a central premise of Looking West that over roughly the last one hundred years the American West, both as a physical location and as an imagined place, has been an important laboratory for the production of modern visual discourses.
Through a series of Western texts--folkloric, photographic, literary, and historical--Dorst outlines another pattern of looking West, one characterized by optical distortion, faulty vision, and the ambiguous intersection of spectatorship, display, and covert observation. He applies the insights gained from this analysis of discursive patterns to various cultural displays located in the contemporary West. In a series of ethnographic case studies--two folk art displays, a Western heritage theme park, and Devils Tower National Monument--he shows how this other discourse plays out at actual sites and institutions.
Dorst offers an account of visual practices that, though dressed in the images and narratives of the American West, are in fact characteristic of our modern consumer culture in general. This interdisciplinary combination of discursive analysis with ethnographic observation and material culture interpretation makes Looking West an original contribution to the fields of visual culture studies, American studies, and Western studies.

Looking West

eb076979-51be-4a7a-9c4b-baa27f2a5913-1

Ronald T. Takaki

A History of Multicultural America

A Different Mirror

7a333b7d-f854-4e12-a38e-4e6539c79e4b-1

Mark Greif

Damage to cover but pages are in good condition 

Kansas

Essays

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award The essays in Against Everything are learned, original, highly entertaining, and, from start to finish, dead serious, reinventing and reinvigorating what intellectuals can be and say and do. Key topics are the tyranny of exercise, the folly of food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of pop music, the rise and fall of the hipster, the uses of reality TV, the impact of protest movements, and the crisis of policing. Four of the selections address, directly and unironically, the meaning of life—how to find a philosophical stance to adopt toward one’s self and the world. Mark Greif manages to revivify the thought and spirit of the greatest of American dissenters, Henry David Thoreau, for our time and historical situation. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The Guardian • The Atlantic • New York Magazine • San Francisco Chronicle • Paris Review • National Post (Canada) Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Diamonson-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Against Everything

d3365cb8-16a6-4174-9c29-9fe70d8b3a35-1

Benito Ortolani

Textbook on Japanese theatre, light notation (see photos). Excellent condition, minimal shelfwear. History of production, adaptation, and study in Western countries.

Maryland

From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism - Revised Edition

From ancient ritualistic practices to modern dance theatre, this study provides concise summaries of all major theatrical art forms in Japan. It situates each genre in its particular social and cultural contexts, describing in detail staging, costumes, repertory and noteworthy actors.

The Japanese Theatre

2cb09e62-a0b7-49bf-8e44-c2b584c0e862-1

#paperback #culturalstudies #culturalanthropology #medical #annefadiman 

A study in the collision between Western medicine and the beliefs of a traditional culture focuses on a hospitalized child of Laotian immigrants whose belief that illness is a spiritual matter comes into conflict with doctors' methods.

Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

51510511-84c3-4786-b7f1-602c49656407-1

#paperback #culturalstudies #environmentalstudies #simplicity #footprint 

Michigan

Small Footprints on a Finite Earth

Imagine you are first in line at a potluck buffet. The spread includes not just food and water, but all the materials needed for shelter, clothing, healthcare, and education. How do you know how much to take? How much is enough to leave for your neighbors behind you--not just the six billion people, but the wildlife, and the as-yet-unborn?

In the face of looming ecological disaster, many people feel the need to change their own lifestyles as a tangible way of transforming our unsustainable culture. Radical Simplicity is the first book that guides the reader to a personal sustainability goal, then offers a process to monitor progress to a lifestyle that is equitable amongst all people, species, and generations. It employs three tools to help readers begin their customized journey to simplicity:

>It builds on steps from Your Money or Your Life so readers can design their own personal economics to save money, get free of debt, and align their work with their values.
It uses refined tools from Our Ecological Footprint so readers can measure how much nature is needed to supply all they consume and absorb their waste.
Combining lyrical narrative, compassionate advocacy, and absorbing science, Radical Simplicity is a practical, personal answer to twenty-first century challenges that will appeal as much to Cultural Creatives and students as to spiritual seekers, policy makers, and sustainability professionals.

Jim Merkel quit his job as a military engineer following the Exxon Valdez disaster and has since worked to develop tools for personal and societal sustainability. He founded the Global Living Project to further this work and conducts workshops around North America on this topic.

Radical Simplicity

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Nicole W. Jouve

Criticism as Autobiography

White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue

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#urbanlegend #culturalstudies gift inscription on front flyleaf otherwise clean.

Connecticut

The Colossal Book of Urban Legends

A collection of oft-repeated urban legends brings together the best of modern myths, from the stoned baby sitter who mistook a baby for a turkey to the fabulously expensive recipe for chocolate chip cookies

Too Good to be True

efcb1ff1-c558-4396-a24b-0937931050ab-1

Used textbook, great condition but does have a few markings and notes within.

Florida

Social Studies

Jan Harold Brunvand

South Dakota

Presents descriptions of hundreds of urban legends and their variations, themes, and scholarly approaches to the genre, including such tales as disappearing hitchhikers and hypodermic needles left in the coin slots of pay telephones.

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Sherry Turkle

Evocative Objects

John Hooper

The Italians

Chris Hedges

Empire of Illusion

Wolfram Eilenberger

Time of the Magicians

Sunaina Maira & Elisabeth Soep (eds)

Youthscapes

Laura Kipnis

Against Love

Stephanie McNeal

Swipe up for More!

Mimi Schippers

Rockin' Out of the Box

Out Magazine Editors

Out in America

Leslie T. Chang

Factory Girls

Richard Lloyd

Neo-Bohemia

Chris Hedges

Empire of Illusion

Gigi Georges

Downeast

The Project on Disney

Inside the Mouse

John D. Dorst

Looking West

Ronald T. Takaki

A Different Mirror

Mark Greif

Against Everything

Benito Ortolani

The Japanese Theatre

Anne Fadiman

Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Jim Merkel

Radical Simplicity

Nicole W. Jouve

White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue

Jan Harold Brunvand

Too Good to be True

Richard Lloyd

Neo-Bohemia

Jan Harold Brunvand

Encyclopedia of Urban Legends