Search Results: Returned 3 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 3
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-- How America went haywire :2017., General, Random House Call No: 306.09 A544f Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what's happening in our country today - this post-factual, "fake news" moment we're all living through - is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Over the course of five centuries - from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials - our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies - every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, read this book. Kurt Andersen is the author of the novels Heyday, Turn of the Century, and True Believers. He contributes to Vanity Fair and The New York Times, and is host and co-creator of Studio 360, the public radio show and podcast. He lives in Brooklyn"--Provided by publisher.
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By Burr, Ty2012., Pantheon Call No: 306.48 B968g Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "How--and why--do we focus on those individuals we come to call stars? How does stardom both reflect and mask the person behind it? How have the image of stardom and our stars' images changed over the past hundred years? What does celebrity mean if people can become famous simply for being famous? Ty Burr answers these questions in this lively, wonderfully anecdotal history of stardom--both its blessings and its curses, for the star and the stargazer alike. From Florence Lawrence, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin, to Archie Leach (a.k.a. Cary Grant), Ruby Stevens (a.k.a. Barbara Stanwyck), and Marion Morrison (a.k.a. John Wayne), to Jim Belushi, Tom Cruise, and Julia Roberts, to such no-cal stars of today as the Kardashians and the new online celebrity (i.e., you and me), Burr takes us on a brilliantly insightful and entertaining journey through the modern fame game at its flashiest, its most indulgent, occasionally its most tragic and, ultimately, its most culturally revealing"--
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2018., The New Press Call No: 973.93 B621s Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Almost everything has been invoked to account for Trump’s victory and the rise of the alt-right, from job loss to racism to demography—everything, that is, except popular culture. In The Sky Is Falling bestselling cultural journalist Peter Biskind dives headlong into two decades of popular culture—from superhero franchises such as the Dark Knight, X-Men, and the Avengers and series like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones to thrillers like Homeland and 24—and emerges to argue that these shows are saturated with the values that are currently animating our extreme politics. Where once centrist institutions and their agents—cops and docs, soldiers and scientists, as well as educators, politicians, and “experts” of every stripe—were glorified by mainstream Hollywood, the heroes of today’s movies and TV, whether far right or far left, have overthrown this quaint ideological consensus. Many of our shows dramatize extreme circumstances—an apocalypse of one sort or another—that require extreme behaviour to deal with, behaviour such as revenge, torture, lying, and even the vigilante violence traditionally discouraged in mainstream entertainment. In this bold, provocative, and witty investigation, Biskind shows how extreme culture now calls the shots. It has become, in effect, the new mainstream.
