Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance (Dress, Body, Culture)

Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance (Dress, Body, Culture) Review

Shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award 2000.

In the 1970s, often to the consternation of parents and siblings, certain progressive young Arab women voluntarily donned the veil. The movement, which rapidly expanded and continues to gather momentum, has sparked controversy within Islamic culture, as well as reactions ranging from perplexity to outrage from those outside it. Western feminist commentators have been particularly vociferous in decrying the veil, which they glibly interpret as a concrete manifestation of patriarchal oppression.

However, most Western observers fail to realize that veiling, which has a long and complex history, has been embraced by many Arab women as both an affirmation of cultural identity and a strident feminist statement. Not only does the veil de-marginalize women in society, but it also represents an expression of liberation from colonial legacies. In short, contemporary veiling is more often than not about resistance. By voluntarily removing themselves from the male gaze, these women assert their allegiance to a rich and varied tradition, and at the same time preserve their sexual identity. Beyond this, however, the veil also communicates exclusivity of rank and nuances in social status and social relations that provide telling insights into how Arab culture is constituted. Further, as the author clearly demonstrates, veiling is intimately connected with notions of the self, the body and community, as well as with the cultural construction of identity, privacy and space.

This provocative book draws on extensive original fieldwork, anthropology, history and original Islamic sources to challenge the simplistic assumption that veiling is largely about modesty and seclusion, honor and shame.

Painful People and How to Deal With Them

Painful People and How to Deal With Them Review

Are you living with a narcissist? Are you working for a psychopath? Is your best friend a bit of a limpet? Or are you just paranoid? Worried? Good. Then this book is for you. With his unique blend of humour and insight, author Joseph Dunn explains why there are so many painful people in the world and, more importantly, why there is hope for them. He shows us ways of approaching and understanding the behaviour of the people we must deal with in our everyday life, whether we live, work or play with them Examining every kind of personality type, from the Actress through to the Zealot, he reveals how we carry pain ourselves, inflict it on others, and what we can do about it. By the time you finish this book he promises that you will know about painful people, not be one! You'll enjoy recognising aspects of your own character and those of your friends and colleagues in this informative, perceptive and refreshingly witty book. 'Witty and extremely perceptive' Spectator 'An accessible and enjoyable read for those looking for an introduction to psychotherapy' Changes. Other books by Joseph Dunn Midlife - The Lazy Person's Guide Think Like a Shrink.

Sport and Modern Social Theorists: Theorizing Homo Ludens

Sport and Modern Social Theorists: Theorizing Homo Ludens Review

This innovative and exciting new collection examines the contributions of major social theorists towards our critical understanding of modern sport. Written by leading social analysts of sport from across the world, the chapters include critical examinations of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Adorno, Gramsci, Habermas, Merton, C.Wright Mills, Goffman, Giddens, Elias, Bourdieu and Foucault. This book will appeal to students and scholars of sport studies, cultural studies, modern social theory, and to social scientists generally.

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (Sexual Cultures)

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (Sexual Cultures) Review

2007 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, LGBT Studies

Richard Wright. Ralph Ellison. James Baldwin. Literary and cultural critic Robert Reid-Pharr asserts that these and other post-World War II intellectuals announced the very themes of race, gender, and sexuality with which so many contemporary critics are now engaged. While at its most elemental Once You Go Black is an homage to these thinkers, it is at the same time a reconsideration of black Americans as agents, and not simply products, of history. Reid-Pharr contends that our current notions of black American identity are not inevitable, nor have they simply been forced onto the black community. Instead, he argues, black American intellectuals have actively chosen the identity schemes that seem to us so natural today.

Turning first to the late and relatively obscure novels of Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, Reid-Pharr suggests that each of these authors rejects the idea of the black as innocent. Instead they insisted upon the responsibility of all citizens—even the most oppressed—within modern society. Reid-Pharr then examines a number of responses to this presumed erosion of black innocence, paying particular attention to articulations of black masculinity by Huey Newton, one of the two founders of the Black Panther Party, and Melvin Van Peebles, director of the classic film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.

Shuttling between queer theory, intellectual history, literary close readings, and autobiography, Once You Go Black is an impassioned, eloquent, and elegant call to bring the language of choice into the study of black American literature and culture. At the same time, it represents a hard-headed rejection of the presumed inevitability of what Reid-Pharr names racial desire in the production of either culture or cultural studies.

Shut Up and Deal: A Novel

Shut Up and Deal: A Novel Review

Shut Up and Deal: A Novel Feature

• ISBN13: 9780385489409
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

The vignettes in Shut Up and Deal are a bizarre mingling of Damon Runyon and David Mamet. Mickey, the book's narrator, is always playing cards with people who have monikers such as Uptown Raoul, Hot Mama Earl, Johnny World, and Vinnie the Greek, and he himself generally wears at these card games something like "yellow pants and a green double-breasted jacket from the seventies and a green and yellow flowered shirt with dark sunglasses" in order to sucker the unsuspecting mark into maybe thinking that he is not such a good poker player and that his money can be easily won, which it usually cannot. Yet the dialogue, relecting life on the professional poker circuit, is stark and brutal, as in Mickey's advice to a dilettante who is considering following in his footsteps: "All I can tell you is that it's lonely out there, real fuckin' lonely, and your play doesn't matter so much as how tough you are and whether or not you fall apart."

The plot, like poker itself, is a transitory affair. "I been playing for over six years now," says Mickey, the narrator of Shut Up and Deal, "and I still try and start each day as a new day, pick myself off the floor and get focused." This works fine when you're sitting at the poker table, where no given hand means anything in the context of any other given hand, but readers who enjoy traditional narrative, where events have a causal relationship to the events immediately preceding, will face a stiff challenge in the unrelenting cycle of hands won and lost with no visible grander scheme of things in which player--and reader--might take solace. --Ron Hogan In 1987, there was legalized poker in Nevada and in one county of California. Author Jesse May was seventeen years old and already hooked. By 1996, poker could be legally played in casinos in over twenty states of the union and five countries in Europe. Legalization changed the face of poker, and as the game came of age, so did May, who by 1989 had dropped out of the University of Chicago after one year due to irreconcilable differences between Tuesday- and Thursday-morning classes and Monday- and Wednesday-night poker games.

Based on his experiences in the strange world of poker, May's debut novel Shut Up and Deal is the story of a nontraditional '90s slacker, a dropout with an incurable obsession and incredible stamina, who makes a career in a profession where the only goals are to stay in action and to not go broke. In Shut Up and Deal, a professional poker player takes readers along on his adventures over several years in and out of casinos and card rooms in locales such as Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and Amsterdam.

Told in a catching, likeable voice, this story offers up one rip-roaring poker-table drama after another, with narrator Mickey ultimately finding himself in a spot that jeopardizes his entire bankroll and calls into question his morals, such as they are. In rhythmic, high-octane prose that is as addictive as the game it describes, Shut Up and Deal zooms in on the swirling, feverish microcosm of the contemporary poker world from its very first line and never cuts away.

Sport in Industrial America 1850-1920 (American History Series)

Sport in Industrial America 1850-1920 (American History Series) Review

Riess examines the evolution of sport from its rural and urban origins as a less-than-respectable entertainment for the lower classes, through its antebellum upsurge when, with the development of a new sport ideology, it attained respectability--penetrating and finally remaking popular culture.

Using a topical approach, Riess looks at sport from several vantage points, analyzing the interaction between sport and the rise of modern cities; the impact of sport on immigration, race, class, and gender; how sport became accessible through technological innovations; how it became integral to various educational and social movements; the coming of the professional sports figure; sport's links to politics and organized crime; and the role of women in sport. Highlighted with colorful anecdotes, the narrative unfurls a pageant of celebrities and unknowns, players, spectators, and entrepreneurs--all engaged in the drama that is American sport.

The Prime-Time Presidency: The West Wing and U.S. Nationalism

The Prime-Time Presidency: The West Wing and U.S. Nationalism Review

Contrasting strong women and multiculturalism with portrayals of a heroic white male leading the nation into battle, The Prime-Time Presidency explores the NBC drama The West Wing, paying particular attention to its role in promoting cultural meaning about the presidency and U.S. nationalism. Based in a careful, detailed analysis of the "first term" of The West Wing's President Josiah Bartlett, this criticism highlights the ways the text negotiates powerful tensions and complex ambiguities at the base of U.S. national identity--particularly the role of gender, race, and militarism in the construction of U.S. nationalism. Unlike scattered and disparate collections of essays, Trevor Parry-Giles and Shawn J. Parry-Giles offer a sustained, ideologically driven criticism of The West Wing. The Prime-time Presidency presents a detailed critique of the program rooted in presidential history, an appreciation of television's power as a source of political meaning, and television's contribution to the articulation of U.S. national identity.

Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action (Lexington Studies in Political Communication)

Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action (Lexington Studies in Political Communication) Review

Covering a broad range of rhetorical perspectives, Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action presents a thorough, accessible, and well-grounded introduction to rhetorical criticism. Throughout the text, sample essays written by noted experts provide students with models for writing their own criticism. In addition to covering traditional modes of rhetorical criticism, the volume presents less commonly discussed rhetorical perspectives (for example, close-textual analysis, mythic criticism, framing analysis, ideographic criticism, concept oriented criticism, and critical rhetoric), exposing student to a wide range of material. Featuring nineteen chapters, all written by leading rhetoric scholars, the volume offers the most comprehensive introduction to rhetorical criticism available. Features: The chapters are written by a nationally recognized scholar in that area, giving students the best and most current research for each perspective. Each chapter includes an original sample essay that gives students a model of rhetorical criticism for their own assignments. Each author comments on his or her writing process to demonstrate the personal nature of criticism. This unique emphasis allows students to appreciate that writing criticism is not a simple formulaic process. Every chapter features a 'Potentials and Pitfalls' section that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the rhetorical perspective being discussed.

Arab Television Today

Arab Television Today Review

There is a great deal at stake for everyone in the future of Arab television. Political and social upheavals in this central but unsettled region are increasingly played out on television screens and in the tussles over programming that take place behind them. Al-Jazeera is of course only one player among a still-growing throng of satellite channels, which now include private terrestrial stations in some Arab states.  It is an industry urgently needing to be made sense of; this book does exactly this in a very readable and authoritative way, through exploring and explaining the evolving structures and content choices in both entertainment and news of contemporary Arab television. It shows how owners, investors, journalists, presenters, production companies, advertisers, regulators and media freedom advocates influence each other in a geolinguistic marketplace that encompasses the Arab region itself and communities abroad.
 
Probing internal and external interventions in the Arab television landscape, the book offers a timely and compelling sequel to Naomi Sakr's 'Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East', which won the Middle Eastern Studies Book Prize in 2003.   
 

Linking Literacy and Popular Culture: Finding Connections for Lifelong Learning

Linking Literacy and Popular Culture: Finding Connections for Lifelong Learning Review

This comprehensive,theoretically grounded and empirically tested approach to teaching popular culture in schools promotes academic and critical literacy development among students. Ideal for preservice teachers, practicing teachers and teacher educators who, given the current demographic shifts among the teaching and student populations, are increasingly challenged to find ways to meaningfully and authentically connect with diverse students in schools.

Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies)

Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies) Review

By embracing a rapidly changing digital world, the so-called millennial adolescent is proving quite adept at breaking down age-old distinctions among disciplines, between high- and low-brow media culture, and within print and digitized text types. Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World explores the significance of digital technologies and media in youthÂ’s negotiated approaches to making meaning within a broad array of self-defined literacy practices. Organized around a series of case studies, this book blends theories of an attention economy, generational differences, communication technologies, and neoliberal enactive texts with actual accounts of adolescentsÂ’ use of instant messaging, shape-shifting portfolios, critical inquiry, and media production.

The Raw Deal: How Myths and Misinformation About the Deficit, Inflation, and Wealth Impoverish America

The Raw Deal: How Myths and Misinformation About the Deficit, Inflation, and Wealth Impoverish America Review

Americans have fallen for the ticker tape. We watch our portfolios, happily or nervously. We know there were a few bad apples at Enron and World Com, but we also know:
* The advent of mutual funds, low-cost brokerages, and the Internet has meant that the stock market is now more transparent, honest, and accessible to the small investor than ever before;
* 401(k)s give the individual responsibility and control over their retirement savings, and that makes us more responsible citizens;
* Federal deficits are bad for the economy, especially, somehow, when they're linked to social spending; and
* Controlling inflation is the most important task of our economic policy.

But as economist Ellen Frank shows us, what we know is wrong. Over the past twenty years, Americans have been fed a mash of confusing financial and economic information. This information has distorted popular understanding of how the economy really operates and camouflaged the transformation of economic policy from a tool for improving the living standards of all to a tool for securing the perquisites of those with financial wealth.

The Life of the Cosmos

The Life of the Cosmos Review

Lee Smolin offers a new theory of the universe that is at once elegant, comprehensive, and radically different from anything proposed before. Smolin posits that a process of self organization like that of biological evolution shapes the universe, as it develops and eventually reproduces through black holes, each of which may result in a new big bang and a new universe. Natural selection may guide the appearance of the laws of physics, favoring those universes which best reproduce. The result would be a cosmology according to which life is a natural consequence of the fundamental principles on which the universe has been built, and a science that would give us a picture of the universe in which, as the author writes, "the occurrence of novelty, indeed the perpetual birth of novelty, can be understood."

Smolin is one of the leading cosmologists at work today, and he writes with an expertise and force of argument that will command attention throughout the world of physics. But it is the humanity and sharp clarity of his prose that offers access for the layperson to the mind bending space at the forefront of today's physics.

Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility (Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century)

Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility (Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century) Review

We know more about the physical body—how it begins, how it responds to illness, even how it decomposes—than ever before. Yet not all bodies are created equal, some bodies clearly count more than others, and some bodies are not recognized at all. In Missing Bodies, Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore explore the surveillance, manipulations, erasures, and visibility of the body in the twenty-first century. The authors examine bodies, both actual and symbolic, in a variety of arenas: pornography, fashion, sports, medicine, photography, cinema, sex work, labor, migration, medical tourism, and war. This new politicsof visibility can lead to the overexposure of some bodies—Lance Armstrong, Jessica Lynch—and to the near invisibility of others—dead Iraqi civilians, illegal immigrants, the victims of HIV/AIDS and "natural" disasters.

Missing Bodies presents a call for a new, engaged way of seeing and recovering bodies in a world that routinely, often strategically,obscures or erases them. It poses difficult, even startling questions: Why did it take so long for the United States media to begin telling stories about the "falling bodies" of 9/11? Why has the United States government refused to allow photographs or filming of flag-draped coffins carrying the bodies of soldiers who are dying in Iraq? Why are the bodies of girls and women so relentlessly sexualized? By examining the cultural politics at work in such disappearances and inclusions of the physical body the authors show how the social, medical and economic consequences of visibility can reward or undermine privilege in society.

Sports Matters: Race, Recreation, and Culture

Sports Matters: Race, Recreation, and Culture Review

"Most of the contributions strongly project the authors' perceptions of the role of race on their subjects, and essays should elicit lively discussions in the classroom."
—CHOICE

Frederick Douglass liked to say of West Indian boxer Peter Jackson that "Peter is doing a great deal with his fists to solve the Negro question." His comment reflects the possibilities for social transformation that he saw in the emerging modern sports culture. Indeed, as the twentieth century developed, sports have become an important cultural terrain over which various racial groups have contested, defined, and represented their racial, national, and inter-ethnic identities.

Sports Matters brings critical attention to the centrality of race within the politics and pleasures of the massive sports culture that developed in the U.S. during the past century and a half. The contributors collected here address such issues as popular representations of blacks in sports. They consider baseball—from Nisei players in Oregon to Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles. And they look at the use of warrior imagery in representations of Native American athletes and the evolution of black expressive style within basketball.

Sports Matters challenges our presumptions about sports, illuminating in the process the complexities of race and gender as they relate to popular culture.

Contributors include Amy Bass, John Bloom, Annie Gilbert Coleman, Gena Caponi, Montye Fuse, Randy Hanson, Michiko Hase, George Lipsitz, Keith Miller, Sharon O'Brien, Connie Razza, Sam Regalado, Greg Rodriguez, Julio Rodriguez, Michael Willard, and Henry Yu.

Johns Hopkins Patients' Guide to Uterine Cancer (John Hopkins Medicine)

Johns Hopkins Patients' Guide to Uterine Cancer (John Hopkins Medicine) Review

Johns Hopkins Patients' Guide to Uterine Cancer (John Hopkins Medicine) Feature

• ISBN13: 9780763774608
• Condition: Used - Like New
• Notes: 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

The Johns Hopkins Patients Guide to Uterine Cancer is a concise, easy-to-follow how to guide that puts you on a path to wellness by explaining uterine cancer treatments from start to finish. It guides you through the overwhelming maze of treatment decisions, simplifies the complicated schedule that lies ahead, and provides valuable tools to help you to put together your plan of care. Empower yourself with accurate, understandable information that will give you the ability to confidently participate in the decision making about your care and treatment.

Empire and The Literature of Sensation: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the Americas)

Empire and The Literature of Sensation: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the Americas) Review

Mid-nineteenth-century American literature teems with the energy and excitement characteristic of the nation's era of expansion. It also reveals the intense anxiety and conflict of a country struggling with what it will mean, socially and culturally, to incorporate previously held Spanish territories. Empire and the Literature of Sensation is a critical anthology of some of the most popular and sensational writings published before the Civil War. It is a collection of transvestite adventures, forbidden love, class conflict, and terrifying encounters with racial "others."

Most of the accounts, although widely distributed in nineteenth-century newspapers, pamphlets, or dime store novels, have long been out of print. Reprinted here for the first time are novelettes by two superstars of the cheap fiction industry, Ned Buntline and George Lippard. Also included are selections from one of the first dime novels as well as the narratives of Leonora Siddons and Sophia Delaplain, both who claim in their autobiographical pamphlets to have cross-dressed as men and participated in the Texas rebellion and Cuban filibustering.

Originally written for entertainment and enormously popular in their day, these sensational thrillers reveal for today's audiences how the rhetoric of empire was circulated for mass consumption and how imperialism generated domestic and cultural instability during the period of the American literary renaissance.