Search Results: Returned 9 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 9
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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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c2006., Crown Forum Call No: 940.5 B515m Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your LibraryClick here to watch Click here to view More...
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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.
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-- Our obsession with the future.[2015], Seven Stories Press Call No: 973.93 N667t Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A roller-coaster tour through our obsession with the future - and what's at stake when we neglect our present. Tech bloggers livecast the launch of the latest Kindle, crowds form serpentine lines outside of Apple stores on the eve of new iPhone releases, stock markets surge and recede on rumours of what Intel and Microsoft have in the pipeline, and, on college campuses across the country, universities offer master's degrees in Future Studies. Meet futurist consultants who preach the need for constant change, to a fourth-generation New Jersey dairy farmer grappling with the increasing complexities of a once-bucolic industry, to a group of Stanford undergraduates pulling all-nighters in an effort to produce the next must-have app. Through these characters and others, Niedzviecki shows how future-obsession and future-anxiety are affecting real people. Print run 20,000.
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2019., Random House Call No: 973.93 T649t Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A breakout writer at The New Yorker examines the fractures at the center of contemporary culture with verve, deftness, and intellectual ferocity--for readers who've wondered what Susan Sontag would have been like if she had brain damage from the internet.
