Axiom's End

Axiom's End PDF Author: Lindsay Ellis
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250256747
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The alternate history first contact adventure Axiom's End is an extraordinary debut from Hugo finalist and video essayist Lindsay Ellis. Truth is a human right. It’s fall 2007. A well-timed leak has revealed that the US government might have engaged in first contact. Cora Sabino is doing everything she can to avoid the whole mess, since the force driving the controversy is her whistleblower father. Even though Cora hasn’t spoken to him in years, his celebrity has caught the attention of the press, the Internet, the paparazzi, and the government—and with him in hiding, that attention is on her. She neither knows nor cares whether her father’s leaks are a hoax, and wants nothing to do with him—until she learns just how deeply entrenched her family is in the cover-up, and that an extraterrestrial presence has been on Earth for decades. Realizing the extent to which both she and the public have been lied to, she sets out to gather as much information as she can, and finds that the best way for her to uncover the truth is not as a whistleblower, but as an intermediary. The alien presence has been completely uncommunicative until she convinces one of them that she can act as their interpreter, becoming the first and only human vessel of communication. Their otherworldly connection will change everything she thought she knew about being human—and could unleash a force more sinister than she ever imagined.

Axiom's End

Axiom's End PDF Author: Lindsay Ellis
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250256747
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Get Book

Book Description
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The alternate history first contact adventure Axiom's End is an extraordinary debut from Hugo finalist and video essayist Lindsay Ellis. Truth is a human right. It’s fall 2007. A well-timed leak has revealed that the US government might have engaged in first contact. Cora Sabino is doing everything she can to avoid the whole mess, since the force driving the controversy is her whistleblower father. Even though Cora hasn’t spoken to him in years, his celebrity has caught the attention of the press, the Internet, the paparazzi, and the government—and with him in hiding, that attention is on her. She neither knows nor cares whether her father’s leaks are a hoax, and wants nothing to do with him—until she learns just how deeply entrenched her family is in the cover-up, and that an extraterrestrial presence has been on Earth for decades. Realizing the extent to which both she and the public have been lied to, she sets out to gather as much information as she can, and finds that the best way for her to uncover the truth is not as a whistleblower, but as an intermediary. The alien presence has been completely uncommunicative until she convinces one of them that she can act as their interpreter, becoming the first and only human vessel of communication. Their otherworldly connection will change everything she thought she knew about being human—and could unleash a force more sinister than she ever imagined.

What Nostalgia Was

What Nostalgia Was PDF Author: Thomas Dodman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022649294X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.

The Hours Have Lost Their Clock

The Hours Have Lost Their Clock PDF Author: Grafton Tanner
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1913462544
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The Hours Have Lost Their Clock charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, Grafton Tanner charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. Nostalgia is the defining emotion of our age. Political leaders promise a return to yesteryear. Old movies are remade and cancelled series are rebooted. Veterans reenact past wars, while the displaced across the world long for home. But who is behind this collective ache for a home in the past? Do we need to eliminate nostalgia, or just cultivate it better? And what is at stake if we make the wrong choice? Moving from the fight over Confederate monuments to the birth of homeland security to the mourning of species extinction, Grafton Tanner traces nostalgia’s ascent in the twenty-first century, revealing its power as both a consequence of our unstable time and a defense against it. With little faith in a future of climate change and economic anxiety, many have turned to nostalgia to weather the present, while powerful elites exploit it for their own gain. An exploration into the politics of loss and yearning, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock is an urgent call to take nostalgia seriously. The very future depends on it.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia PDF Author: Helmut Illbruck
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810128373
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Helmut Illbruck traces the concept of nostalgia from the earliest uses of the term in the seventeenth century to today as it evolves with different meanings and intensities in the discourses of medicine, literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. Following nostalgia’s troubled relations to the philosophical project of the Enlightenment, Illbruck’s study builds a cumulative argument about nostalgia’s modern significance that often revises and thoroughly enriches our understanding of cultural, literary, and intellectual history. Illbruck concludes with an attempt at a reinterpretation and defense of nostalgia, which seduces us to read and think with, rather than against, nostalgia’s wistful yearning for the past. Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease is a comprehensive, insistent, and profound interdisciplinary investigation of the history of an idea. It should appeal to readers interested in the cultural makings of the Enlightenment and modernity or in the histories of medicine, literature, and philosophy.

The Future of Nostalgia

The Future of Nostalgia PDF Author: Svetlana Boym
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786724870
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Can one be nostalgic for the home one never had? Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? Can we know what we are nostalgic for? In the seventeenth century, Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a trek through the Alps would cure nostalgia. In 1733 a Russian commander, disgusted with the debilitating homesickness rampant among his troops, buried a soldier alive as a deterrent to nostalgia. In her new book, Svetlana Boym develops a comprehensive approach to this elusive ailment. Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities -- St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague-and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstam, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, from love letters on Kafka's grave to conversations with Hitler's impersonator, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.

Intimations of Nostalgia

Intimations of Nostalgia PDF Author: Hviid Jacobsen, Michael
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1529214777
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Nostalgia, a complex and multi-layered emotion, has gained interest since the turn of the century in both society and academic circles. Written by an international group of scholars, this volume investigates the relationship between nostalgia and contemporary social issues from a multidisciplinary perspective. From history and political theory to marketing and media, each chapter discusses the way nostalgia has been presented within a disciplinary context and shows how it has evolved over time as a topic of research. Casting light on many recent changes in society and culture, this is an important contribution to the study of nostalgia and emotions.

Stalin's Millennials

Stalin's Millennials PDF Author: Tinatin Japaridze
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793641870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
This book examines Joseph Stalin’s increasing popularity in the post-Soviet space, and analyzes how his image, and the nostalgia it evokes, is manipulated and exploited for political gain. The author argues that, in addition to the evil dictator and the Georgian comrade, there is a third portrayal of Stalin—the one projected by the generation that saw the tail end of the USSR, the post-Soviet millennials. This book is not a biography of one of the most controversial historical figures of the past century. Rather, through a combination of sociopolitical commentary and autobiographical elements that are uncommon in monographs of this kind, the attempt is to explore how Joseph Stalin’s complex legacies and the conflicting cult of his irreconcilable tripartite of personalities still loom over the region as a whole, including Russia and, perhaps to an even deeper extent, Koba’s native land—now the independent Republic of Georgia, caught between its unreconciled Soviet past and the potential future within the European Union.

Nostalgia for the Future

Nostalgia for the Future PDF Author: Charles Piot
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226669661
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Since the end of the cold war, Africa has seen a dramatic rise in new political and religious phenomena, including an eviscerated privatized state, neoliberal NGOs, Pentecostalism, a resurgence in accusations of witchcraft, a culture of scamming and fraud, and, in some countries, a nearly universal wish to emigrate. Drawing on fieldwork in Togo, Charles Piot suggests that a new biopolitics after state sovereignty is remaking the face of one of the world’s poorest regions. In a country where playing the U.S. Department of State’s green card lottery is a national pastime and the preponderance of cybercafés and Western Union branches signals a widespread desire to connect to the rest of the world, Nostalgia for the Future makes clear that the cultural and political terrain that underlies postcolonial theory has shifted. In order to map out this new terrain, Piot enters into critical dialogue with a host of important theorists, including Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Deleuze, and Mbembe. The result is a deft interweaving of rich observations of Togolese life with profound insights into the new, globalized world in which that life takes place.

Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia

Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia PDF Author: Nancy Martha West
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813919591
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The advertising campaigns launched by Kodak in the early years of snapshot photography stand at the center of a shift in American domestic life that goes deeper than technological innovations in cameras and film. Before the advent of Kodak advertising in 1888, writes Nancy Martha West, Americans were much more willing to allow sorrow into the space of the domestic photograph, as evidenced by the popularity of postmortem photography in the mid-nineteenth century. Through the taking of snapshots, Kodak taught Americans to see their experiences as objects of nostalgia, to arrange their lives in such a way that painful or unpleasant aspects were systematically erased. West looks at a wide assortment of Kodak's most popular inventions and marketing strategies, including the "Kodak Girl," the momentous invention of the Brownie camera in 1900, the "Story Campaign" during World War I, and even the Vanity Kodak Ensemble, a camera introduced in 1926 that came fully equipped with lipstick. At the beginning of its campaign, Kodak advertising primarily sold the fun of taking pictures. Ads from this period celebrate the sheer pleasure of snapshot photography--the delight of handling a diminutive camera, of not worrying about developing and printing, of capturing subjects in candid moments. But after 1900, a crucial shift began to take place in the company's marketing strategy. The preservation of domestic memories became Kodak's most important mission. With the introduction of the Brownie camera at the turn of the century, the importance of home began to replace leisure activity as the subject of ads, and at the end of World War I, Americans seemed desperately to need photographs to confirm familial unity. By 1932, Kodak had become so intoxicated with the power of its own marketing that it came up with the most bizarre idea of all, the "Death Campaign." Initiated but never published, this campaign based on pictures of dead loved ones brought Kodak advertising full circle. Having launched one of the most successful campaigns in advertising history, the company did not seem to notice that selling a painful subject might be more difficult than selling momentary pleasure or nostalgia. Enhanced with over 50 reproductions of the ads themselves, 16 of them in color, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia vividly illustrates the fundamental changes in American culture and the function of memory in the formative years of the twentieth century.

The Origins of Nostalgia

The Origins of Nostalgia PDF Author: Svetlana Boym
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501389947
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
This collection of previously unpublished autobiographical and semi-autobiographical “snippets of experience” written by Svetlana Boym in the final period of her life capture her penchant for seamlessly melding, poetically and dream-like, the intensively personal with the everyday and the world-historical. They illuminate the formative conditions for the thinking which she was to develop into her majestic work on nostalgia. Importantly, these pieces fill in gaps in understanding the genesis and scope of her take on the world. For readers both familiar with her work and for those new to it, The Origins of Nostalgia will enable our own cultural past as well as that of the former Soviet Union to be viewed in a different light.