Modern American Lives

Modern American Lives PDF Author: Blaine T. Browne
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 0765629100
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
The individuals presented in these narrative biographies significantly, and sometimes decisively, impacted contemporary American life in a wide range of areas, including national politics, foreign policy, social and political activism, popular and literary culture, sports, and business. The combined biographical/thematic approach is designed to serve two purposes: to present more substantive biographical information, and to offer a fuller examination of key events and issues. The book is an ideal supplement for undergraduate courses on The United States Since 1945, as well as for courses on Modern America and 20th Century America.

Modern American Lives

Modern American Lives PDF Author: Blaine T. Browne
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 0765629100
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book Here

Book Description
The individuals presented in these narrative biographies significantly, and sometimes decisively, impacted contemporary American life in a wide range of areas, including national politics, foreign policy, social and political activism, popular and literary culture, sports, and business. The combined biographical/thematic approach is designed to serve two purposes: to present more substantive biographical information, and to offer a fuller examination of key events and issues. The book is an ideal supplement for undergraduate courses on The United States Since 1945, as well as for courses on Modern America and 20th Century America.

The Avatar

The Avatar PDF Author: Ivar Tabrizi
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 141201865X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
The story is based on the alleged discovery of Elvis Presley's reincarnation in Mangalam, a small village set amidst the backwaters of the Malabar Coast in India. The subsequent events when an Elvis-mad matron from Memphis, Tennessee comes to claim the child as her very own make for a very hilarious reading. The events start unfolding when the astrologer called into cast the child's birth horoscope declares the child to be an avatar, a great reincarnation. Everybody assumes the reincarnation to be that of Lord Krishna, the deity worshipped in the village. But the two precocious daughters of Sunita, the neighbour and a distant relation of the child's parents, create, without meaning to, a feeling that the child is actually a reincarnation of Elvis Presley. Neeli, the eldest of the two, editor of her college magazine and an aspiring journalist, manages to publish an article about the phenomenon in the "Memphis Tattler". Maggie Duckworth, a rich widow and fanatic in her devotion to Elvis, reads the article and lands in India to claim the child. She has Alonzo Bosworthy, a novice reporter from the tabloid, in tow to cover what she thinks will be a scoop. Besides, her ulterior motive is to chase out the present guardians of the Presley Foundation, with whom she had a long series of run-ins, and install the true heir to the throne of Graceland Mansions. The Mangalam villagers meanwhile have come to very different conclusions about the impending visit of the Americans. The village barber, a fanatic Maoist, is convinced that the Americans are actually CIA agents coming to take over what he imagines to be the oil wealth hidden under the village. He organizes the farm workers to protest against the visit. Meanwhile, a defrocked priest and his small coterie of Christian followers in the village maintain that the child is actually the second Christ come to redeem the world, and maintain a vigil outside the reincarnation's house. They are there to prevent the child being spirited away to the West. The barber's wild imagination had also infected the staid householders of the village and they want their cut of the oil wealth lying under their feet. Of course there is the village yokel suddenly transformed by a series of misunderstandings into a Greek scholar whose wild oratory is listened to by the villagers avidly but without understanding. By the time Maggie Duckworth arrives at the village she is met by all these forces, which she cannot fathom. Things are not helped by the avaricious nature of the reincarnation's father, Mr. Keshavan, who dreams of inheriting Presley's Graceland on behalf of his son. As if these things were not enough for Maggie Duckworth, Bosworthy manages to get himself arrested as a spy with designs on India's cultural heritage when he wanders into the village temple. The story goes on to its ultimate denouement as the Indian papers, slow on the uptake, now create a country- wide furor making the incident take on an international flavour with formal protests being lodged with the American Ambassador in India and nearly bringing the Indian Government down for kowtowing to the Americans. Sunita's two daughters though central to the theme are just onlookers and as bewildered as Maggie by the course of events they have unleashed. Babli, the younger one, is the agnostic with a healthy disrespect for the superstitions surrounding the village life. But she triggers off events leading to the acceptance of the child to be a reincarnation of Elvis.

Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism PDF Author: S. E. Gontarski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623563496
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Explores the multi-faceted and formative impact of Gilles Deleuze on the development and our understanding of modernist thought in its philosophical, literary, and more broadly cultural manifestations

The Who's The Who Sell Out

The Who's The Who Sell Out PDF Author: John Dougan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 144113672X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Released in the U.S. in January 1968, The Who Sell Out was, according to critic Dave Marsh, a complete backfire--the album sold well, but not spectacularly [and was] ultimately a nostalgic in-joke: Who but a pop intellectual could appreciate such a thing? Further rarifying its in-joke status was its unapologetic Englishness; 13 tracks stitched together in a mock pirate radio broadcast, without a DJ, with cool, anglocentric commercials to boot. In the 36 years since its release, Sell Out, though still not the best selling release in The Who's catalog, has been embraced by a growing number of fans who regard it as the band's best work, one of the few recordings of the late 1960s that best represents the ambitious aesthetic possibilities of the concept album without becoming mired in a bog of smug, self-aggrandizing, high art aspirations. Sell Out, powerfully and ecstatically, articulates the nexus of pop music and pop culture. As much as it is an expression of the band's expanding sonic palette, Sell Out also functions as a critique of the rock and roll lifestyle. Not the clichéd mantra of sex, drugs, and rock and roll but in the ways that commercial advertising fabricates a youth-oriented cultural reality by hawking pimple cream, deodorant, food, musical equipment, etc., and linking it with rock and roll. In this sense Sell Out is a reflective work, one that struggles with rock and roll as a cultural expression that aspires to aesthetic permanence while marketed as ephemera. From this conflict emerges a pop art masterpiece.

After the Ball

After the Ball PDF Author: Ian Whitcomb
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571299334
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
First published in 1972, Ian Whitcomb's After the Ball is an exuberant account of the origins and explosion of popular music, informed by the author's store of experience in the field as a pop sensation of The Sixties. 'Brash, learned, funny and perspicacious.... The author of this free-wheeling, diverting history was a student at Trinity College, Dublin, when he created a rock hit 'You Turn Me On,' and experienced a brief, bewildering season as a touring rock celebrity. This book... is his effort to explain that experience to himself, and, well-educated man that he is, he goes all the way back to the first pop bestseller (in sheet music, of course), 'After The Ball,' and all the way forward to the 1960s.' New Yorker 'One of the best books on popular music to come along in the last few years.... Whitcomb's own involvement with music constantly surfaces to make the book both revealing and highly enjoyable.' Seattle Times

Illegal Harmonies

Illegal Harmonies PDF Author: Andrew Ford
Publisher: Black Inc.
ISBN: 1921870214
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Listen. What do you hear? We are surrounded by sounds all the time, but we tend not to hear them; our brains are very good at editing what our ears pick up. If we stop for a moment to listen, there they are: the ticking clock, traffic noise, fragments of conversation, a passing plane. These are examples of what the American composer John Cage called “illegal harmony”. In response to the noisiest century in history, modern composers have consistently flown in the face of musical orthodoxy. As technology has changed at an unprecedented rate, so have musical styles – sometimes to the dismay of audiences and critics. In Illegal Harmonies, Andrew Ford charts the course of music in the concert hall and opera house over the last hundred years, linking it to developments in literature, theatre, cinema and the visual arts, and to popular music from Irving Berlin to the Beatles to rap. The result is a stimulating, provocative and informative cultural history. This revised third edition includes a new preface and extended epilogue, bringing the story into the twenty-first century. "Modern audiences need to learn how to listen and Andrew Ford might be just the man to do the teaching." - Australian Financial Review

Americanaland

Americanaland PDF Author: John Milward
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052811
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
A musical genre forever outside the lines With a claim on artists from Jimmie Rodgers to Jason Isbell, Americana can be hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. John Milward’s Americanaland is filled with the enduring performers and vivid stories that are at the heart of Americana. At base a hybrid of rock and country, Americana is also infused with folk, blues, R&B, bluegrass, and other types of roots music. Performers like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Gram Parsons used these ingredients to create influential music that took well-established genres down exciting new roads. The name Americana was coined in the 1990s to describe similarly inclined artists like Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and Wilco. Today, Brandi Carlile and I’m With Her are among the musicians carrying the genre into the twenty-first century. Essential and engaging, Americanaland chronicles the evolution and resonance of this ever-changing amalgam of American music. Margie Greve’s hand-embroidered color portraits offer a portfolio of the pioneers and contemporary practitioners of Americana.

The Rough Guide to Cult Pop

The Rough Guide to Cult Pop PDF Author: Paul Simpson
Publisher: Rough Guides
ISBN: 9781843532293
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This new Rough Guide is devoted to pop music, the tacky, catchy yet enduring music we grew up listening to when we should have been listening to something more profound. We celebrate the hits, the singers, the impresarios and the songs which have made up the soundtrack to our lives. So come along pop pickers, put on your blue suede shoes (or your tartan trousers or puffball skirt, it's your call) and take a stroll down Electric Avenue. Not aarf! Features include: bull; The Stars A celebration of those performers, from Robbie Williams to Andy Williams (and Madonna to Mungo Jerry), who have had us singing along or, in the case of Dean Friedman and Kajagoogoo, left us wondering what the world is coming to.

Zizek and Media Studies

Zizek and Media Studies PDF Author: M. Flisfeder
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137361514
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Film, media, and cultural theorists have long appealed to Lacanian theory in order to discern processes of subjectivization, representation, and ideological interpellation. Here, the contributors take up a Zizekian approach to studies of cinema and media, raising questions about power, ideology, sexual difference, and enjoyment.

African Americans and US Popular Culture

African Americans and US Popular Culture PDF Author: Kevern Verney
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136475346
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description
This volume is an authoritative introduction to the history of African Americans in US popular culture, examining its development from the early nineteenth century to the present. Kevern Verney examines: * the role and significance of race in all major forms of popular culture, including sport, film, television, radio and music * how the entertainment industry has encouraged racism through misrepresentations and caricatured images of African Americans. African Americans have made a unique contribution to the richness and diversity of US popular culture. Rooted in African society and traditions, black slaves in America created a dynamic culture which continues to evolve. Present day hip-hop and rap music are still shaped by the historical experience of slavery and the ongoing will to oppose oppression and racism. Any student of African-American history or cultural studies will find this a fascinating and highly useful book.