Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

Doing Nothing

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Pennsylvania

Essays on culture literature and feminism

Taking a long look

Chris Hedges

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

California

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

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Eric Marcus

The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights

Covering the years from 1945 through 1990, this critically acclaimed book weaves together the personal stories of individuals from a variety of backgrounds to provide a richly rewarding history of the dramatic campaign for gay and lesbian rights. "Both inspiring and heart-wrenching".--New York Times Book Review. 30 photographs.

Making History

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Under the sign of Saturn

Susan Lederer

Florida

Penetrating the Secrets of Nature

As science penetrates the secrets of nature, with each discovery generating new questions, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein will sound its note of warning. Many scientific developments have provoked references to Frankenstein, a story that, for nearly two centuries, has gripped our imaginations and haunted our nightmares. How can society balance the benefits of medical discoveries against the ethical or spiritual questions posed?

Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature accompanies a traveling exhibit of the same name. This lavishly illustrated volume begins by highlighting Shelley's novel and the context in which she conceived it. It next focuses on the redefinition of the Frankenstein myth in popular culture. Here, the fate of the monster becomes a moral lesson illustrating the punishment for ambitious scientists who seek to usurp the place of God by creating life. The final section examines the continuing power of the Frankenstein story to articulate present-day concerns raised by new developments in biomedicine such as cloning and xenografting (the use of animal organs in human bodies), and the role scientists and citizens play in determining acceptable limits of scientific and medical advances.

Frankenstein

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John Hooper

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

The Italians

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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

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Margret Grebowicz

New Hampshire

Uses the whale song to explore how environmental problems like noise pollution and climate change affect social relations between animals as well as humans.

Whale Song

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#hardcover #christian #culture #culturalstudies #prophetic #churchhistory #war #culturewar 

Texas

Culture at the Crossroads

Is Western civilization in an accelerating decline? And if it continues will it eventually weaken and cause us to come to the end of cultured civilization as we now know it? "Yes," says David Jeremiah, and in his book, I NEVER THOUGHT I'D SEE THE DAY! he details numerous signs of this cultural decay including: America held hostage by Iran Marriage becoming obsolete Creeping socialism The invisibility of culture's enemies Increase in "spiritual warfare" America turning its back on Israel Atheist attack on religion Can this downward spiral be reversed? Yes, but only if one person at a time returns to God with our heart, our manner of life, our dedication to genuine worship of God, in serving God by helping others, in our giving, and in prayer.

I Never Thought I'd See the Day!

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#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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Michael Pollan

Light shelf wear and slight crease in spine (see photos). 

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Minnesota

A Natural History of Transformation

Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food Rules, and How to Change Your Mind, explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen in Cooked. "Having described what's wrong with American food in his best-selling The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), New York Times contributor Pollan delivers a more optimistic but equally fascinating account of how to do it right. . . . A delightful chronicle of the education of a cook who steps back frequently to extol the scientific and philosophical basis of this deeply satisfying human activity." —Kirkus (starred review) Cooked is now a Netflix docuseries based on the book that focuses on the four kinds of "transformations" that occur in cooking. Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney and starring Michael Pollan, Cooked teases out the links between science, culture and the flavors we love. In Cooked, Pollan discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements—fire, water, air, and earth—to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer. Each section of Cooked tracks Pollan’s effort to master a single classic recipe using one of the four elements. A North Carolina barbecue pit master tutors him in the primal magic of fire; a Chez Panisse–trained cook schools him in the art of braising; a celebrated baker teaches him how air transforms grain and water into a fragrant loaf of bread; and finally, several mad-genius “fermentos” (a tribe that includes brewers, cheese makers, and all kinds of picklers) reveal how fungi and bacteria can perform the most amazing alchemies of all. The reader learns alongside Pollan, but the lessons move beyond the practical to become an investigation of how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships. Cooking, above all, connects us. The effects of not cooking are similarly far reaching. Relying upon corporations to process our food means we consume large quantities of fat, sugar, and salt; disrupt an essential link to the natural world; and weaken our relationships with family and friends. In fact, Cooked argues, taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable. Reclaiming cooking as an act of enjoyment and self-reliance, learning to perform the magic of these everyday transformations, opens the door to a more nourishing life.

Cooked

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#paperback #CulturalStudies #teaching #literature #sociology #context #theory #essays

Iowa

Cultural and Cross-Cultural Studies and the Teaching of Literature

This book of essays offers perspectives for college teachers facing the perplexities of today's focus on cultural issues in literature programs. The book presents ideas from 19 scholars and teachers relating to theories of culture-oriented criticism and teaching, contexts for these activities, and specific, culture-focused texts significant for college courses. The articles and their authors are as follows: (1) "Cultural Criticism: Past and Present" (Mary Poovey); (2) "Genre as a Social Institution" (James F. Slevin); (3) "Teaching Multicultural Literature" (Reed Way Dasenbrock); (4) "Translation as a Method for Cross-Cultural Teaching" (Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier); (5) "Teaching in the Television Culture" (Judith Scot-Smith Girgus and Cecelia Tichi); (6) "Multicultural Teaching: It's an Inside Job" (Mary C. Savage); (7) "Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of 'the' Native Woman" (Norma Alarcon); (8) "Current African American Literary Theory: Review and Projections" (Reginald Martin); (9) "Talking across Cultures" (Robert S. Burton); (10) "Walter Mitty in China: Teaching American Fiction in an Alien Culture" (H. W. Matalene); (11) "Text, Context, and Teaching Literature by African American Women" (Sandra Jamieson); (12) "Sethe's 'Big, Bad' Love" (Chauncey A. Ridley); (13) "Baldwin, Bebop, and 'Sonny's Blues'" (Pancho Savery); (14) "Filiative and Affiliative Textualization in Chinese American Literature" (David Leiwei Li); (15) "The Unheard: Vietnamese Voices in the Literature Curriculum" (Renny Christopher); (16) "Narrative Theory in Naguib Mahfouz's 'The Children of Gebelawi'" (Suzanne Evertsen Lundquist); and (17) "The Mixed Blood Writer as Interpreter and Mythmaker" (Patricia Riley). (SR)

Understanding Others

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Julia Alvarez

South Carolina

Coming of Age in the USA

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a “phenomenal, indispensable” (USA Today) exploration of the Latina “sweet fifteen” celebration, by the bestselling author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies. The quinceañera, a celebration of a Latina girl’s fifteenth birthday, has become a uniquely American trend. This lavish party with ball gowns, multi-tiered cakes, limousines, and extravagant meals is often as costly as a prom or a wedding. But many Latina girls feel entitled to this rite of passage, marking a girl’s entrance into womanhood, and expect no expense to be spared, even in working-class families. Acclaimed author Julia Alvarez explores the history and cultural significance of the “quince” in the United States, and the consequences of treating teens like princesses. Through her observations of a quince in Queens, interviews with other quince girls, and the memories of her own experience as a young immigrant, Alvarez presents a thoughtful and entertaining portrait of a rapidly growing multicultural phenomenon, and passionately emphasizes the importance of celebrating Latina womanhood.

Once upon a Quinceanera

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In a story that travels beyond borders and between families, acclaimed Dominican novelist and poet Julia Alvarez reflects on the joys and burdens of love—for her parents, for her husband, and for a young Haitian boy known as Piti. In this intimate true account of a promise kept, Alvarez takes us on a journey into experiences that challenge our way of thinking about history and how it can be reimagined when people from two countries—traditional enemies and strangers—become friends.

A Wedding in Haiti

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Missouri

An Afghan American Story

A passionate personal journey through two cultures in conflict Shortly after militant Islamic terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, Tamim Ansary of San Francisco sent an e-mail to twenty friends, telling how the threatened U.S. reprisals against Afghanistan looked to him as an Afghan American. The message spread, and in a few days it had reached, and affected, millions of people-Afghans and Americans, soldiers and pacifists, conservative Christians and talk-show hosts; for the message, written in twenty minutes, was one Ansary had been writing all his life. West of Kabul, East of New York is an urgent communiqueacute; by an American with "an Afghan soul still inside me," who has lived in the very different worlds of Islam and the secular West. The son of an Afghan man and the first American woman to live as an Afghan, Ansary grew up in the intimate world of Afghan family life, one never seen by outsiders. No sooner had he emigrated to San Francisco than he was drawn into the community of Afghan expatriates sustained by the dream of returning to their country -and then drawn back to the Islamic world himself to discover the nascent phenomenon of militant religious fundamentalism. Tamim Ansary has emerged as one of the most eloquent voices on the conflict between Islam and the West. His book is a deeply personal account of the struggle to reconcile two great civilizations and to find some point in the imagination where they might meet.

West of Kabul, East of New York

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Anne Fadiman

Like new softcover, from fsg classics. With new afterword by the author. Winner of national book classic circle award for nonfiction. Book is from 2012. Reading group guide avialable from book website printed on book. 

Alaska

A Among child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures

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

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

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

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

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Vijay Prashad

Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity

Selected as One of the Village Voice's Favorite 25 Books of 2001 In this landmark work, historian Vijay Prashad refuses to engage the typical racial discussion that matches people of color against each other while institutionalizing the primacy of the white majority. Instead he examines more than five centuries of remarkable historical evidence of cultural and political interaction between Blacks and Asians around the world, in which they have exchanged cultural and religious symbols, appropriated personas and lifestyles, and worked together to achieve political change.

Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting

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John Storey

Theories and Methods

Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture

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Mark Greif

Massachusetts

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

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#paperback #culturalstudies #sociology #essays #ideology #academic #research #critical

Social Experience and Cultural Studies

The aim of this book is to extend the political and the intellectual concerns of cultural studies to include the realm of social experience. From rap to rave, from menswear to 'Marie Claire', from rock to sex tourism, each essay tackles issues of ideology, bodies, power and gender in contemporary popular culture.

Back to Reality

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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.

Browse by categories

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Tom Lutz

Doing Nothing

Vivian Gornick

Taking a long look

Chris Hedges

Empire of Illusion

Eric Marcus

Making History

Susan Sontag

Under the sign of Saturn

Susan Lederer

Frankenstein

John Hooper

The Italians

John D. Dorst

Looking West

Margret Grebowicz

Whale Song

David Jeremiah

I Never Thought I'd See the Day!

Laura Kipnis

Against Love

Michael Pollan

Cooked

Joseph F. Trimmer (Introduction by); Tilly Warnock (Editor)

Understanding Others

Julia Alvarez

Once upon a Quinceanera

Julia Alvarez

A Wedding in Haiti

Chris Hedges

Empire of Illusion

Tamim Ansary

West of Kabul, East of New York

Anne Fadiman

Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Jan Harold Brunvand

Too Good to be True

Vijay Prashad

Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting

John Storey

Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture

Mark Greif

Against Everything

Angela McRobbie

Back to Reality

Gigi Georges

Downeast