Alvarez, "has permeated Western culture like a dye that cannot be washed out." Although the aims of this compelling, compassionate work are broadly cultural and literary, the narrative is rooted in personal experience: it begins with a long memoir of Sylvia Plath, and ends with an account of the author's own suicide attempt. Within this dramatic framework, Alvarez launches his enquiry into the final taboo of human behavior, and traces changing attitudes towards suicide from the perspective of literature. He follows the black thread leading from Dante through Donne and the romantic agony, to the Savage God at the heart of modern literature.

    Now offering a brilliant solution to a question that has challenged archeologists for centuries, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon is an exciting story of detection as well as a lavishly illustrated & vividly written description of a little-known civilization. In this remarkable volume, Stephanie Dalley, a world expert on ancient Babylonian language, gathers in one place for the first time all the material on this enigmatic wonder. Tracing the history of the Garden, she describes how deciphering an ancient Assyrian text--& comparing it to sculpture in the British Museum--provided the clues that enabled her to pin down where the Garden was positioned (it was not the Babylon we know today) & to describe in detail what it may have looked like. The author also offers a groundbreaking description of the technology behind the Hanging Garden's water supply, highlighting a very early occurrence of the "water-raising screw." Thru her reconstruction of the Garden, Dalley is also able to follow its influence on later garden design. Unscrambling the many legends that have built up around the Garden, including questions about the roles played by Semiramis & Nebuchadnezzar, this intriguing volume shows why this Garden, with its remarkable innovations, deserves its place alongside the Pyramids & the Colossus of Rhodes as one of the most astonishing technical achievements of the ancient world.

    Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror explores all of these enduring characters, chronicling both the mythology behind the films and offering behind-the-scenes insights into how the films were created. Universal Studios Monsters is the most complete record of the horror films of this legendary studio, with biographies of major personalities who were responsible for the most notable monster melodramas in film history. The stories of these films and their creators are told through interviews with surviving actors and studio employees. A lavish photographic record, including many behind-the-scenes shots, completes the story of how these classics were made. This is a volume no fan of imaginative cinema will want to be without.

    During World War II, six million Jews—as well as other targeted groups including Poles, the handicapped, and homosexuals—were systematically murdered by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Although the weight and heft of The Holocaust Chronicle cannot capture the immensity of its subject, the book’s 768 pages suggest that the Holocaust is a topic that must be openly confronted. Written and fact-checked by top scholars, the chronicle offers:A 3,000-item timeline pinpointing specific events that contributed to the Holocaust, such as Nazi Germany occupation during World War II, the sealing of urban ghettos in Europe, and the deportation of millions of Jews to death camps.Nearly 2,000 photographs chronicling the Holocaust in starkly visual terms, including images of the massacre of more than 33,000 Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar and pictures from the liberation of Auschwitz and other concentration camps.Fourteen chapter-opening essays that put the most important years of the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath into perspective, beginning with Hitler’s rise to power and ending with the convictions of such Nazi officials as Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg Trial.More than 250 sidebars detailing the significant places, issues, events, and people of the Holocaust, including Anne Frank and Heinrich Himmler.An extensive prologue and epilogue that discuss the buildup to and aftermath of the Holocaust.* This is an alternate cover of Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures (ISBN-13: 9781680228328), content is the same. *

    The name dinosaur was coined in 1842 by an English anatomist Richard Owen, a highly ambitious, machiavellian schemer and villain of Deborah Cadbury's The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World. Her hero is Gideon Mantell, a practising doctor, who found and first described many of the bones of the beasts that subsequently became known as dinosaurs. Full of quotes from contemporary sources, The Dinosaur Hunters brilliantly evokes the Dickensian world of early Victorian science and society. From Mary Anning, the self-taught fossil hunter of Lyme Regis to the academic and deeply eccentric Dean Buckland of Oxford University, the story tells of reputations made and lost as self-help, self-promotion, over-wheening pride, folly and social climbing all played their part in the emerging story of the geological past. The dinosaurs, although central to the story, are also a vehicle for the much larger, more interesting and important story about the struggle to understand the meaning of fossils and what they tell us about prehistory. Deborah Cadbury, an award-winning TV science producer and acclaimed author of The Feminisation of Nature has thoroughly researched her topic and steeped herself in the intricacies of the scientific debates of the time. With black and white illustrations, extensive notes, a bibliography and index, the result is one of the best popular science histories. --Douglas Palmer.

    In Media Unlimited, a remarkable and original look at our media-glutted, speed-addicted world, Todd Gitlin makes us stare, as if for the first time, at the biggest picture of all. From video games to elevator music, action movies to reality shows, Gitlin evokes a world of relentless sensation, instant transition, and nonstop stimulus. He shows how all media, all the time fuels celebrity worship, paranoia, and irony; and how attempts to ward off the onrush become occasions for yet more media. Far from signaling a "new information age," the media torrent, as Gitlin argues, encourages disposable emotions and casual commitments, and threatens to make democracy a sideshow.Both a startling analysis and a charged polemic, Media Unlimited reveals the unending stream of manufactured images and sounds as a defining feature of our civilization and a perverse culmination of Western hopes for freedom.

    Cultural critic George Case explores how the Occult craze permanently changed American society, creating the cultural framework for the political power of the religious right, false accusations of Satanic child abuse, and today’s widespread rejection of science and rationality. An insightful blend of pop culture and social history, “Here’s to My Sweet Satan” lucidly explains how the most technological society on earth became enthralled by the supernatural.

    This inventive graphic work seamlessly weaves their four biographies into one fast-paced adventure of drunken binges, orgies, parties, and fun. The story begins at a London pub one sorry Christmas and is told through the eyes of Martin, a wannabe hellraiser sitting at the end of the bar alone, drinking himself into oblivion. He’s joined in turn by Burton, Harris, Reed, and O’Toole, who take Martin on tours of their tumultuous childhoods, rises to stardom, and chaotic personal lives.

    From the marketing of a “make do and mend” aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition. The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth. In coruscating prose—with subjects ranging from Ken Loach’s documentaries, Turner Prize–shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver’s cooking—Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.

    The Pinch revolves around a single enchanted day containing years, during which the antics of a group of Jewish mystics threaten to ravage the life of general store proprietor Pinchas Pin with miracles, and his nephew Muni's ardor for an alluring tightrope walker collides with his passion for chronicling the wonders of North Main Street. Their stories, gleaned by a hapless bookseller from a fabulist history book, transform the fate of the neighborhood.

    Neophytes to Japan studies will find Warriors of Legend an accessible way to learn about this fascinating country. Those who know quite a lot about Japan already will find their understanding enhanced by the way the book analyzes the nuances of Tokyo's history and Japanese society. The book also argues that Sailor Moon is a unique series in that it was both internationally popular and strongly structured by the culture of the city of Tokyo and post-Economic Bubble Japan.

    There's no way we're going to sleep, not after the film we just saw. Fear is one of the most primal human emotions, and one of the hardest to reason with and dispel. So why do we scare ourselves? It seems almost mad that we would frighten ourselves for fun, and yet there are thousands of books, films, and games designed to do exactly that.As Darryl Jones shows in Sleeping with the Lights On, the horror genre is vast, ranging from vampires, ghosts, and werewolves to mad scientists, Satanists, and deranged serial killers. The cathartic release of scaring ourselves has made its appearance everywhere from Shakespearean tragedies to internet memes. Exploring the key tropes of the genre, including its monsters, its psychological chills, and its love affair with the macabre, Jones explains why horror stories disturb us, and how society responds to literary and film representations of the gruesome and taboo. Should the enjoyment of horror be regarded with suspicion? What kind of a distinction should we make between the commonly reviled carnage of the contemporary horror genre and the culturally acceptable bloodbaths of ancient Greek tragedies?Analyzing how horror has been used throughout history to articulate the fears and taboos of the current generation, Jones considers the continuing evolution of the genre today. As horror is marketed to mainstream society in the form of romantic vampires and blockbuster hits, it maintains its shadowy presence on the edges of respectability, as banned films and violent Internet phenomena push us to question both our own preconceptions and the terrifying capacity of human nature.

    What you say. What you think/ignore/buy/don't buy... Welcome to One City-Population: Everyone-where EVERYTHING you do matters. You've lived here your whole life, whether you know it or not.Ethan Nichtern, the charismatic and creative force behind New York's upstart Interdependence Project is your guide to the beauty that is everywhere in the urban jungle-in the rattling of subway trains, the screechings of traffic, the hum and drone of millions scurrying for work, food, sustenance, art, culture, and meaning. There may be no greater setting for exploring the great truth that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. expounded: "Whatever effects one directly, effects all indirectly."One City melds Dr. King's message with modern Buddhist wisdom to offer a new way of understanding what binds us all together-no matter where we are, no matter who. With its pop-culture savvy, humor, and literary liveliness, One City will speak to--and even, it's fair to say, help define--the spiritually-inclined, conscious Next Generation.

    This book, based on years of interviews with body modifiers throughout the United States, is both sympathetic and critical and provides the most comprehensive look at this phenomenon. From punk rock to "modern primitives," from queer sadomasochism to cyberpunks, sociologist Victoria Pitts provides insight into the full range of body modification subcultures. Whether by turning themselves into female punks, neo-tribal "primitives" or science fiction cyborgs, body modifiers are engaged in the project of "reclaiming" their bodies from the machine of modern life. Pitts explores the connections between body modification and contemporary struggles over sex and gender, and widespread attitudes about identity, consumption, and the body.

    It was America in the 1950s, and the world was not so much a stage as a setpiece for TV, the new national phenomenon. It was a decade of design, a time when how things looked - and how we looked - mattered. This text portrays a visual culture reflecting and reflected in the powerful new medium of television. Looking closely at a number of celebrated instances in which the principles of design dominated the public arena and captivated the popular imagination, Karal Ann Marling gives us an in-depth picture of the taste and sensibility of the postwar era.