Utopia PR

Utopia PR PDF Author: Adam Bender
Publisher: Adam Bender
ISBN: 1736096214
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Humor Book Winner in the 2021 IndieReader Discovery Awards A sci-fi satire about seeking work-life balance while doing public relations for an authoritarian president. PR extraordinaire Blake Hamner (the "n" is silent) put off his honeymoon for his big break: joining a major political campaign for president. Now, the "Hammer" struggles to make time for his marriage as Crisis Communications Manager for Our Leader, who since taking power has become increasingly mad and totalitarian. The Hammer starts to reconsider his career choices when one of Our Leader’s savage steel hounds attacks the Comms team at a press conference. He’d love to talk about his erratic job with his wife, Triple-N news anchor Maria Worthington, but they have a rule: the broadcast journalist doesn’t ask Blake for inside information about his work, and the spin doctor doesn’t use their relationship as leverage on what Maria reports. They say you shouldn’t keep things from each other in a marriage, but it’s OK—the only secrets between Blake and Maria are professional. When a revolutionary levels grave allegations against Our Leader—and accuses Blake of distributing disinformation and propaganda to cover it up—the PR rep who thought he could talk his way out of any crisis finds himself utterly trapped in a dystopian job. Praise for Utopia PR "In a tale that’s reminiscent of political farces such as the HBO TV series Veep, Bender employs a smooth, amusing, and straightforward prose style that’s briskly paced ... Its tone is irreverent, and readers looking for a quick chuckle will likely enjoy Bender’s winking comedy, which is punctuated with genuinely sweet, sincere moments." -- Kirkus Reviews "Sharp and witty, the novel Utopia PR is a free range political send-up set in a chaotic, perplexing, and familiar future world." -- Foreword Reviews "It is a fun and efficient book, but also scary: like all good fiction, it uses sarcasm to make readers think about the world outside." -- IndieReader "A lighthearted, uplifting vision into the dark times we’re facing." -- IndieMuse “Philadelphia writer Adam Bender’s new novel Utopia PR, a political satire set in a dystopian Washington, DC, offers a brisk and entertaining sendup of politics and the media, two machines driven by capitalism and ambition.” -- Broad Street Review "A dystopian novel laced with intrigue, science fiction, romance and humor ... I recommend this book to fans of dystopia who would appreciate a comedic writing style and the underlying themes of marital challenges, finding your purpose, diversity and manipulation through social media." -- Reedsy Discovery For fans of humorous science fiction, political satire, speculative fiction and dystopia; authors like John Scalzi, Christopher Moore, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, and Christopher Buckley; and books like: Catch-22, Thank You for Smoking, Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adam Bender is an award-winning journalist and author of speculative fiction that explores modern-day societal fears with a mix of action, romance and humor. He is the author of The Wanderer and the New West, Divided We Fall and We, The Watched.

Utopia PR

Utopia PR PDF Author: Adam Bender
Publisher: Adam Bender
ISBN: 1736096214
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book Here

Book Description
Humor Book Winner in the 2021 IndieReader Discovery Awards A sci-fi satire about seeking work-life balance while doing public relations for an authoritarian president. PR extraordinaire Blake Hamner (the "n" is silent) put off his honeymoon for his big break: joining a major political campaign for president. Now, the "Hammer" struggles to make time for his marriage as Crisis Communications Manager for Our Leader, who since taking power has become increasingly mad and totalitarian. The Hammer starts to reconsider his career choices when one of Our Leader’s savage steel hounds attacks the Comms team at a press conference. He’d love to talk about his erratic job with his wife, Triple-N news anchor Maria Worthington, but they have a rule: the broadcast journalist doesn’t ask Blake for inside information about his work, and the spin doctor doesn’t use their relationship as leverage on what Maria reports. They say you shouldn’t keep things from each other in a marriage, but it’s OK—the only secrets between Blake and Maria are professional. When a revolutionary levels grave allegations against Our Leader—and accuses Blake of distributing disinformation and propaganda to cover it up—the PR rep who thought he could talk his way out of any crisis finds himself utterly trapped in a dystopian job. Praise for Utopia PR "In a tale that’s reminiscent of political farces such as the HBO TV series Veep, Bender employs a smooth, amusing, and straightforward prose style that’s briskly paced ... Its tone is irreverent, and readers looking for a quick chuckle will likely enjoy Bender’s winking comedy, which is punctuated with genuinely sweet, sincere moments." -- Kirkus Reviews "Sharp and witty, the novel Utopia PR is a free range political send-up set in a chaotic, perplexing, and familiar future world." -- Foreword Reviews "It is a fun and efficient book, but also scary: like all good fiction, it uses sarcasm to make readers think about the world outside." -- IndieReader "A lighthearted, uplifting vision into the dark times we’re facing." -- IndieMuse “Philadelphia writer Adam Bender’s new novel Utopia PR, a political satire set in a dystopian Washington, DC, offers a brisk and entertaining sendup of politics and the media, two machines driven by capitalism and ambition.” -- Broad Street Review "A dystopian novel laced with intrigue, science fiction, romance and humor ... I recommend this book to fans of dystopia who would appreciate a comedic writing style and the underlying themes of marital challenges, finding your purpose, diversity and manipulation through social media." -- Reedsy Discovery For fans of humorous science fiction, political satire, speculative fiction and dystopia; authors like John Scalzi, Christopher Moore, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, and Christopher Buckley; and books like: Catch-22, Thank You for Smoking, Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adam Bender is an award-winning journalist and author of speculative fiction that explores modern-day societal fears with a mix of action, romance and humor. He is the author of The Wanderer and the New West, Divided We Fall and We, The Watched.

Tinkering toward Utopia

Tinkering toward Utopia PDF Author: David B. TYACK
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674044525
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
For over a century, Americans have translated their cultural anxieties and hopes into dramatic demands for educational reform. Although policy talk has sounded a millennial tone, the actual reforms have been gradual and incremental. Tinkering toward Utopia documents the dynamic tension between Americans' faith in education as a panacea and the moderate pace of change in educational practices. In this book, David Tyack and Larry Cuban explore some basic questions about the nature of educational reform. Why have Americans come to believe that schooling has regressed? Have educational reforms occurred in cycles, and if so, why? Why has it been so difficult to change the basic institutional patterns of schooling? What actually happened when reformers tried to reinvent schooling? Tyack and Cuban argue that the ahistorical nature of most current reform proposals magnifies defects and understates the difficulty of changing the system. Policy talk has alternated between lamentation and overconfidence. The authors suggest that reformers today need to focus on ways to help teachers improve instruction from the inside out instead of decreeing change by remote control, and that reformers must also keep in mind the democratic purposes that guide public education.

Utopia

Utopia PDF Author: David Bleich
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description


Utopia

Utopia PDF Author: David Ayers
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110434784
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Utopian hope and dystopian despair are characteristic features of modernism and the avant-garde. Readings of the avant-garde have frequently sought to identify utopian moments coded in its works and activities as optimistic signs of a possible future social life, or as the attempt to preserve hope against the closure of an emergent dystopian present. The fourth volume of the EAM series, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, casts light on the history, theory and actuality of the utopian and dystopian strands which run through European modernism and the avant-garde from the late 19th to the 21st century. The book’s varied and carefully selected contributions, written by experts from around 20 countries, seek to answer such questions as: · how have modernism and the avant-garde responded to historical circumstance in mapping the form of possible futures for humanity? · how have avant-garde and modernist works presented ideals of living as alternatives to the present? · how have avant-gardists acted with or against the state to remodel human life or to resist the instrumental reduction of life by administration and industrialisation?

Finding Utopia

Finding Utopia PDF Author: Paul H. Sutherland
Publisher: Utopia Press
ISBN: 0966106040
Category : Aboriginal Australians
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description
A soccer-loving brother and sister, along with the Aboriginal exchange student that lives with their family, travel to Australia to find out if it is Utopia, and learn a lot along the way.

Consuming the Romantic Utopia

Consuming the Romantic Utopia PDF Author: Eva Illouz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520917995
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
To what extent are our most romantic moments determined by the portrayal of love in film and on TV? Is a walk on a moonlit beach a moment of perfect romance or simply a simulation of the familiar ideal seen again and again on billboards and movie screens? In her unique study of American love in the twentieth century, Eva Illouz unravels the mass of images that define our ideas of love and romance, revealing that the experience of "true" love is deeply embedded in the experience of consumer capitalism. Illouz studies how individual conceptions of love overlap with the world of clichés and images she calls the "Romantic Utopia." This utopia lives in the collective imagination of the nation and is built on images that unite amorous and economic activities in the rituals of dating, lovemaking, and marriage. Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that, ultimately, every cliché of romance—from an intimate dinner to a dozen red roses—is constructed by advertising and media images that preach a democratic ethos of consumption: material goods and happiness are available to all. Engaging and witty, Illouz's study begins with readings of ads, songs, films, and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized. Combining extensive historical research, interviews, and postmodern social theory, Illouz brings an impressive scholarship to her fascinating portrait of love in America.

Utopia, Limited

Utopia, Limited PDF Author: Anahid Nersessian
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067442512X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
What is utopia if not a perfect world, impossible to achieve? Anahid Nersessian reveals a basic misunderstanding lurking behind that ideal. In Utopia, Limited she enlists William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to redefine utopianism as a positive investment in limitations. Linking the ecological imperative to live within our means to the aesthetic philosophy of the Romantic period, Nersessian’s theory of utopia promises not an unconditionally perfect world but a better world where we get less than we hoped, but more than we had. For the Romantic writers, the project of utopia and the project of art were identical. Blake believed that without limits, a work of art would be no more than a set of squiggles on a page, or a string of nonsensical letters and sounds. And without boundaries, utopia is merely an extension of the world as we know it, but blighted by a hunger for having it all. Nersessian proposes that we think about utopia as the Romantics thought about aesthetics—as a way to bind and thereby emancipate human political potential within a finite space. Grounded in an intellectual tradition that begins with Immanuel Kant and includes Theodor Adorno and Northrop Frye, Utopia, Limited lays out a program of “adjustment” that applies the lessons of art to the rigors of life on an imperiled planet. It is a sincere response to environmental devastation, offering us a road map through a restricted future.

Political Uses of Utopia

Political Uses of Utopia PDF Author: S. D. Chrostowska
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544316
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Utopia has long been banished from political theory, framed as an impossible—and possibly dangerous—political ideal, a flawed social blueprint, or a thought experiment without any practical import. Even the "realistic utopias" of liberal theory strike many as wishful thinking. Can politics think utopia otherwise? Can utopian thinking contribute to the renewal of politics? In Political Uses of Utopia, an international cast of leading and emerging theorists agree that the uses of utopia for politics are multiple and nuanced and lie somewhere between—or, better yet, beyond—the mainstream caution against it and the conviction that another, better world ought to be possible. Representing a range of perspectives on the grand tradition of Western utopianism, which extends back half a millennium and perhaps as far as Plato, these essays are united in their interest in the relevance of utopianism to specific historical and contemporary political contexts. Featuring contributions from Miguel Abensour, Étienne Balibar, Raymond Geuss, and Jacques Rancière, among others, Political Uses of Utopia reopens the question of whether and how utopianism can inform political thinking and action today.

The Village Against the World

The Village Against the World PDF Author: Dan Hancox
Publisher:
ISBN: 1781681309
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
One hundred kilometers from Seville, there is a small village, Marinaleda, that for the last thirty years has been at the center of a long struggle to create a communist utopia. In a story reminiscent of the Asterix books, Dan Hancox explores the reality behind the community where no one has a mortgage, sport is played in the Che Guevara stadium and there are monthly "Red Sundays" where everyone works together to clean up the neighbourhood. In particular he tells the story of the village mayor, Sanchez Gordillo, who in 2012 became a household name in Spain after leading raids on local supermarkets to feed the Andalucian unemployed.

The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature

The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature PDF Author: Gregory Claeys
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139828428
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Since the publication of Thomas More's genre-defining work Utopia in 1516, the field of utopian literature has evolved into an ever-expanding domain. This Companion presents an extensive historical survey of the development of utopianism, from the publication of Utopia to today's dark and despairing tendency towards dystopian pessimism, epitomised by works such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Chapters address the difficult definition of the concept of utopia, and consider its relation to science fiction and other literary genres. The volume takes an innovative approach to the major themes predominating within the utopian and dystopian literary tradition, including feminism, romance and ecology, and explores in detail the vexed question of the purportedly 'western' nature of the concept of utopia. The reader is provided with a balanced overview of the evolution and current state of a long-standing, rich tradition of historical, political and literary scholarship.