Thursday, August 18, 2011

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.


Wednesday, August 17, 2011

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.


Tuesday, August 16, 2011

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.


Monday, August 15, 2011

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.


Saturday, August 13, 2011

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.


Friday, August 12, 2011

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
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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.


Wednesday, August 10, 2011

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.