Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story


Cass Warner Sperling - 1993
    The first family biography of Hollywood's Warners draws on letters and interviews to follow four brothers from their immigrant beginnings to their position as prime shapers of American entertainment, capturing the excitement and tension of Hollywood's evolution.

The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel


Deirdre David - 2000
    Rider Haggard, whose work has recently attracted new attention from scholars and students. Contributors engage with topics such as industrial culture, religion and science and the broader issues of the politics of gender, sexuality and race. The Companion includes a chronology and a comprehensive Guide to Further Reading.

Southern Honor: Ethics And Behavior In The Old South


Bertram Wyatt-Brown - 1982
    Explains the importance of the concept of honor in Southern society and examines family relationships, courtship, marriage, miscegenation, dueling, and slave insurrections.

A Circle of Children


Mary MacCracken - 1974
    It is the inspiring, ultimately triumphant story of her no-holds-barred war against the darkness of their lives, and how she searched for, and found, the individual keys to free them."

Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out


Aph Ko - 2019
    Through a subtle and extended examination of Jordan Peele's hit 2017 movie Get Out, Ko shows the many ways that white supremacist notions of animality and race exist through the consumption and exploitation of flesh. She demonstrates how a critical historical and social understanding of anti-Blackness can provide the pathway to genuine liberation. Highly readable, richly illustrated, and full of startling insights, Racism as Zoological Witchcraft is a brilliant example of the emerging discipline of Black veganism by one of its leading voices.

Inventing the Victorians


Matthew Sweet - 2001
    As Sweet shows us in this brilliant study, many of the concepts that strike us as terrifically new - political spin-doctoring, extravagant publicity stunts, hardcore pornography, anxieties about the impact of popular culture upon children - are Victorian inventions. Most of the pleasures that we imagine to be our own, the Victorians enjoyed first: the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the amusement arcade, the crime novel and the sensational newspaper report. They were engaged in a well-nigh continuous search for bigger and better thrills. If Queen Victoria wasn't amused, then she was in a very small minority . . .Matthew Sweet's book is an attempt to re-imagine the Victorians; to suggest new ways of looking at received ideas about their culture; to distinguish myth from reality; to generate the possibility of a new relationship between the lives of nineteenth-century people and our own.

Untwisted: The Story of My Life


Paul Jennings - 2020
    Sometimes, rather than making you laugh or cry out in surprise, a story will instead leave you wondering about human fragility... In the telling of his own tale, children's author and screenwriter Paul Jennings demonstrates how seemingly small events can combine into a compelling drama. As if assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, he puts together fragments, memories and anecdotes to reveal the portrait of a complex and weathered soul. 'Untwisted' is revealing, moving and very funny. It will appeal to all students of creative writing and all those who wonder about the origins and outcomes of success – and, of course, to Paul's many fans around the world.

Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey


Alison Gernsheim - 1963
    More than 200 photos depict aristocrats and the middle class as well as Oscar Wilde, Lillie Langtry, Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria, and others. Commentary and annotations describe and identify the costumes.

The Old Gods Laugh


Frank Yerby - 1964
    In this novel charged with blood and fire, with white hot passions, and with the clash of army against army, brother against brother, Frank Yerby shows again why he is one of Americas's most popular novelists.

The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus


Jean-Denis Bredin - 1983
    Here he began a twelve-year ordeal that included imprisonment on Devil's Island, trial, and long delayed pardon. This book is an account of the Dreyfus Affair, the scandal that rocked 19th century France.

Robert Frost: A Life


Jay Parini - 1998
    Jay Parini spent over twenty years interviewing friends of Robert Frost and working in the poet's archives at Dartmouth, Amherst, and elsewhere to produce this definitive and insightful biography of both the public and private man. While he depicts the various stages of Frost's colorful life, Parini also sensitively explores the poet's psyche, showing how he dealt with adversity, family tragedy, and depression. By taking the reader into the poetry itself, which he reads closely and brilliantly, Parini offers an insightful road map to Frost's remarkable world.

Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities


Chad Broughton - 2015
    When he learns of Maytag's plans to shutter its refrigerator plant, a move decried by a young Senator Obama, Broughton begins a decade-long dive into the drama that envelops both Galesburg, Illinois, where townspeople are losing their $15.14-an-hour livelihood, and Reynosa, Mexico, where the same jobs will pay $1.10 and come with a cost. The results are both epic and surprising. The pitfalls of such a project are many, but Broughton avoids pity and screed, delivering a story that is beautifully detailed and rich in human and historic dimension. Most of us talk about a global economy with a vague sense of what that really means. With Boom, Bust, Exodus Broughton has defined it indelibly." --Ann Marie Lipinski, Curator, Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Harvard UniversityIn 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 34,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.In Boom, Bust, Exodus, Chad Broughton offers a ground-level look at the rapid transition to a globalized economy, from the perspective of those whose lives it has most deeply affected. We live in a commoditized world, increasingly divorced from the origins of the goods we consume; it is easy to ignore who is manufacturing our smart phones and hybrid cars; and where they come from no longer seems to matter. And yet, Broughton shows, the who and where matter deeply, and in this book he puts human faces to the relentless cycle of global manufacturing.It is a tale of two cities. In Galesburg, where the empty Maytag factory still stands, a hollowed out version of the American dream, the economy is a shadow of what it once was. Reynosa, in contrast, has become one of the exploding post-NAFTA "second-tier cities" of the developing world, thanks to the influx of foreign-owned, export-oriented maquiladoras--an industrial promised land throbbing with the energy of commerce, legal and illegal.And yet even these distinctions, Broughton shows, cannot be finely drawn: families in Reynosa also struggle to get by, and the city is beset by violence and a ruthless drug war. Those left behind in the post-Industrial decline of Galesburg, meanwhile, do not see themselves as helpless victims: they have gone back to school, pursued new careers, and learned to adapt and even thrive. In an era of growing inequality and a downsized middle class, Boom, Bust, Exodus gives us the voices of those who have borne the heaviest burdens of the economic upheavals of the past three decades. A deeply personal work grounded in solid scholarship, this important, immersive, and affecting book brings home the price and the cost of globalization.

The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970


John Darwin - 2009
    The British Empire, he argues, was much more than a group of colonies ruled over by a scattering of British expatriates until eventual independence. It was, above all, a global phenomenon. Its power derived rather less from the assertion of imperial authority than from the fusing together of three different kinds of empire: the settler empire of the 'white dominions'; the commercial empire of the City of London; and 'Greater India' which contributed markets, manpower and military muscle. This unprecedented history charts how this intricate imperial web was first strengthened, then weakened and finally severed on the rollercoaster of global economic, political and geostrategic upheaval on which it rode from beginning to end.

The Way of the Storyteller


Ruth Sawyer - 1942
    First published in 1942, this classic work is unique in its blend of literary history, criticism, analysis, personal anecdote, and how-to instructions. Sawyer examines storytelling as a folk art and a still-living art, tracing its evolution from the earliest narrative impulses that developed as stories were written down. With simple suggestions, she instructs the reader in the art of storytelling and freeing the creative imagination by disciplining the mind. Sawyer's guide also includes an engaging selection of international stories sure to enchant both children and adults. The Way of the Storyteller also is an invaluable resource with a comprehensive reading and story list.

The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination


Robert Coles - 1989
    The Call of Stories presents a study of how listening to stories promotes learning and self-discovery.