"This expanded and revised edition explores and updates the cultural politics of the Walt Disney Company and how its ever-expanding list of products, services, and media function as teaching machines that shape children's culture into a largely commercialendeavor. The Disney conglomerate remains an important case study for understanding both the widening influence of free-market fundamentalism in the new millennium and the ways in which messages of...

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds,...

A Hudson Booksellers Staff Pick for the Best Books of 2013 One of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Spring Science Books A Bookshop Santa Cruz Staff Pick Dinosaurs, with their awe-inspiring size, terrifying claws and teeth, and otherworldly abilities, occupy a sacred place in our childhoods. They loom over museum halls, thunder through movies, and are a fundamental part of our collective imagination. In My Beloved Brontosaurus, the dinosaur fanatic...

The undead are everywhere. They're not just in movies and books, but in commercials, fetish clubs, and even in your breakfast cereal. Bloodsuckers have become some of the most recognizable bad guys in the modern world, and Eric Nuzum wanted to find out why. He was willing to do whatever it took -even drinking his own blood-in his quest to understand the vampire phenomenon. And he found the answer in Goth clubs, darkened parks, haunted houses, and...

"An interdisciplinary study examining the diverse meanings of the Warsaw Ghetto in American culture. Looks at how the ghetto has been represented in fine art, book illustrations, film, television, radio, theater, fiction, poetry, and comics"--Provided by publisher.

A long-overdue paean to the predominant musical form of the 70s and a thoughtful exploration of the culture that spawned it Disco may be the most universally derided musical form to come about in the past forty years. Yet, like its pop cultural peers punk and hip hop, it was born of a period of profound social and economic upheaval. In Turn the Beat Around, critic and journalist Peter Shapiro traces the history of disco music and culture. From the...

FOR THOSE WHO LOVE GREAT FICTION AND FOODPairing approximately 50 charming photographic re-creations of meals from classic and contemporary literature—all prepared, styled, and shot by the author—with relevant excerpts, Fictitious Dishes is an innovative gift book for literature lovers, foodies, as well as design and book junkies. Fictitious Dishes presents these imaginative pairings in an eye-catching format. Along with the excerpt from the...

Brings together, for the first time, the best of Gladwell's writing from The New Yorker in the past decade, including: the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill; the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz; spotlighting Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen; and the secrets of Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer." Gladwell also explores intelligence tests, ethnic profiling and "hindsight bias," and...

"Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg offers a visually rich, intimate, unprecedented look at the Justice and how she changed the world. From Ginsburg's refusal to let the slammed doors of sexism stop her to her innovative legal work, from her before-its-time feminist marriage to her perch on the nation's highest court--with the fierce dissents to match--get to know RBG as never before. As the country struggles with the unfinished...