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Author: Virginia Postrel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439135320
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Today we have greater wealth, health, opportunity, and choice than at any time in history. Yet a chorus of intellectuals and politicians laments our current condition -- as slaves to technology, coarsened by popular culture, and insecure in the face of economic change. The future, they tell us, is dangerously out of control, and unless we precisely govern the forces of change, we risk disaster. In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel explodes the myths behind these claims. Using examples that range from medicine to fashion, she explores how progress truly occurs and demonstrates that human betterment depends not on conformity to one central vision but on creativity and decentralized, open-ended trial and error. She argues that these two opposing world-views -- "stasis" vs. "dynamism" -- are replacing "left" and "right" to define our cultural and political debate as we enter the next century. In this bold exploration of how civilizations learn, Postrel heralds a fundamental shift in the way we view politics, culture, technology, and society as we face an unknown -- and invigorating -- future.
Author: Virginia Postrel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439135320
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Get Book Here
Book Description
Today we have greater wealth, health, opportunity, and choice than at any time in history. Yet a chorus of intellectuals and politicians laments our current condition -- as slaves to technology, coarsened by popular culture, and insecure in the face of economic change. The future, they tell us, is dangerously out of control, and unless we precisely govern the forces of change, we risk disaster. In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel explodes the myths behind these claims. Using examples that range from medicine to fashion, she explores how progress truly occurs and demonstrates that human betterment depends not on conformity to one central vision but on creativity and decentralized, open-ended trial and error. She argues that these two opposing world-views -- "stasis" vs. "dynamism" -- are replacing "left" and "right" to define our cultural and political debate as we enter the next century. In this bold exploration of how civilizations learn, Postrel heralds a fundamental shift in the way we view politics, culture, technology, and society as we face an unknown -- and invigorating -- future.
Author: David Stradling
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801445101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Stradling shows how New York's varied landscape and abundant natural resources have played a fundamental role in shaping the state's culture and economy.
Author: Wystan Hugh Auden
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571107186
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 527
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Book Description
Auden speaks of the poet and his craft as well as literary figures and their works and observations on life in general.
Author: Marc Bennetts
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0753520257
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
In 1991, the collapse of the USSR seemed to signal the death of the Russian football industry, as the money, the players and the fans left. But now the oligarchs who profited from the post-Soviet turmoil are supporting the nation's football clubs and their dreams of glory, resulting in unprecedented success. Along this journey into the heart of Russian football, Marc Bennetts meets the managers, oligarchs, players, pundits and fans that define the Russian Premier league, now the fastest-growing and most intriguing football league in the world. From Andrei Arshavin and the national team's adventures at Euro 2008 to the symbolism of a club from war-torn Chechnya lifting the Russian FA Cup, Football Dynamo uncovers shocking revelations about corruption, hooliganism and racism, but also the true beauty of the game and the country.
Author: Virginia Postrel
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061852864
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Whether it's sleek leather pants, a shiny new Apple computer, or a designer toaster, we make important decisions as consumers every day based on our sensory experience. Sensory appeals are everywhere, and they are intensifying, radically changing how Americans live and work. The twenty-first century has become the age of aesthetics, and whether we realize it or not, this influence has taken over the marketplace, and much more. In this penetrating, keenly observed book, Virginia Postrel makes the argument that appearance counts, that aesthetic value is real. Drawing from fields as diverse as fashion, real estate, politics, design, and economics, Postrel deftly chronicles our culture's aesthetic imperative and argues persuasively that it is a vital component of a healthy, forward-looking society. Intelligent, incisive, and thought-provoking, The Substance of Style is a groundbreaking portrait of the democratization of taste and a brilliant examination of the way we live now.
Author: Carolyn Dawn Lake
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : French literature
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
Author: Richard Daniel Lehan
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299208745
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
In this intellectual and literary history of American, British, and Continental novels of realism and naturalism from 1850 to 1950, Richard Lehan argues that literary naturalism is a narrative mode that creates its own reality. Employing this strategy allows and encourages intertextuality - one novel talking or responding to another.
Author: Analicia Sotelo
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
ISBN: 1571319778
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 104
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Book Description
Selected by Ross Gay as winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize, Analicia Sotelo’s debut collection of poems is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman. In Virgin, Sotelo walks the line between autobiography and mythmaking, offering up identities like dishes at a feast. These poems devour and complicate tropes of femininity—of naiveté, of careless abandon—before sharply exploring the intelligence and fortitude of women, how “far & wide, / how dark & deep / this frigid female mind can go.” A schoolgirl hopelessly in love. A daughter abandoned by her father. A seeming innocent in a cherry-red cardigan, lurking at the margins of a Texas barbeque. A contemporary Ariadne with her monstrous Theseus. A writer with a penchant for metaphor and a character who thwarts her own best efforts. “A Mexican American fascinator.” At every step, Sotelo’s poems seduce with history, folklore, and sensory detail—grilled meat, golden habañeros, and burnt sugar—before delivering clear-eyed and eviscerating insights into power, deceit, relationships, and ourselves. Here is what it means to love someone without truly understanding them. Here is what it means to be cruel. And here is what it means to become an artist, of words and of the self. Blistering and gorgeous, Virgin is an audacious act of imaginative self-mythology from one of our most promising young poets.
Author: Duco van Oostrum
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789051838770
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
In the wake of feminist and poststructuralist contributions to literary study, how can we read images of women in literature written by men? Is it possible to read anything other than appropriation or misrepresentation in these male portraits of women? Starting with these questions, Van Oostrum looks for openings in a debate that seems to be firmly locked into traditional gender roles. While contemporary literary theory works hard to dismantle oppressive binaries, questions about the representation of an other' often lead back to a dizzying number of rigid identities. Through an examination of Henry Adams's and Henry James's attempts to write about American women, Van Oostrum tries to have it both ways, at once holding on to gendered cultural identity and at the same time challenging a stable personality. Using the sentimental fiction written by women in the 1850s, James and Adams write about the new women' of the turn of the 20th century. Traversing multiple oceans, they increasingly entangle concepts of gender and nationality, othering' not only women but the culture of Europe and the South Seas as well. An analogous movement of a male translation of female American sentimental fiction intersected with national identities, the author argues, takes place in two Dutch novels of the late 19th century. By looking through a Dutch lens at American literature, this book on possible gender crossings shows cultural identities always to be on the move. Crossing from the male author to the female subject on such an international landscape, the author tries to navigate a place for women within and beyond literature written by men.
Author: Henry Adams
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 562
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Book Description
One of the most well-known and influential autobiographies ever written, The Education of Henry Adams is told in the third person, as if its author were watching his own life unwind. It begins with his early life in Quincy, the family seat outside of Boston, and soon moves on to primary school, Harvard College, and beyond. He learns about the unpredictability of politics from statesmen and diplomats, and the newest discoveries in technology, science, history, and art from some of the most important thinkers and creators of the day. In essentially every case, Adams claims, his education and upbringing let him down, leaving him in the dark. But as the historian David S. Brown puts it, this is a “charade”: The Education’s “greatest irony is its claim to telling the story of its author’s ignorance, confusion, and misdirection.” Instead, Adams uses its “vigorous prose and confident assertions” to attack “the West after 1400.” For instance, industrialization and technology make Adams wonder “whether the American people knew where they were driving.” And in one famous chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he contrasts the rise of electricity and the power it brings with the strength and resilience of religious belief in the Middle Ages. The grandson and great-grandson of two presidents and the son of a politician and diplomat who served under Lincoln as minister to Great Britain, Adams was born into immense privilege, as he knew well: “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he.” After growing up a Boston Brahmin, he worked as a journalist, historian, and professor, moving in early middle age to Washington. Although Adams distributed a privately printed edition of a hundred copies of The Education for friends and family in 1907, it wasn’t published more widely until 1918, the year he died. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1919, and in 1999 a Modern Library panel placed it first on its list of the best nonfiction books published in the twentieth century. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
