Download or read book A Necessary Spectacle written by Selena Roberts and published by Crown. This book was released on 2005 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Billie Jean King didn’t want to play Bobby Riggs. He baited and begged her for months while she ignored his catcalls and challenges. But after Margaret Court’s ignominious defeat in the so-called Mother’s Day Massacre, Billie knew what she had to do despite the personal and professional risks: take on the self-proclaimed male chauvinist pig and slay the myths about women and weakness. And so it was that King’s acquiescence led to the Battle of the Sexes, one of the most wildly surreal moments of the decadent 1970s. The worldwide event, showcasing three sets of tennis in a raucous Houston Astrodome, forever changed the social landscape for women. In A Necessary Spectacle, Selena Roberts, one of the country’s finest sportswriters and the only female sports columnist in the New York Times’ history, has created a masterful and entertaining journey through the 1970s and beyond, capturing the color and passion, tackiness and anger, prejudice and progress of an American culture in transition. At the heart of the story lies the intersection of two complex characters: Billie Jean King, the daughter of a homemaker and a firefighter who grew up in the Norman Rockwell tradition of the 1950s; and Bobby Riggs, the gambling son of a fundamentalist minister who won everlasting fame as a card-carrying sexist—not because he believed women to be inferior, but because he craved attention. Roberts enjoyed unprecedented access to the characters in this story, including numerous in-depth interviews with Billie Jean King and her former husband, Larry, as well as the friends and family of Bobby Riggs, who died in 1995. Essential details and insights also were provided through hours of conversation with key figures in the women’s rights movement and Title IX fight, including Gloria Steinem and Donna de Varona, and with tennis legends of the 1970s, such as Chris Evert, Margaret Court, Rosie Casals, and others. This book reveals the outsize personalities of Billie and Bobby; the intensity and intricacy of the Kings’ longtime marria≥ the simmering social revolution that pitted chauvinists against feminists and tennis players against each other; and a wrenching coming-out story recounted in intimate detail by Billie Jean King for the first time. By the end of the book, Roberts has traced the cultural continuum of Billie and Bobby’s night at the Astrodome. She relates its significance to the day Richard Williams began hitting bald tennis balls to his pigtailed daughters, Venus and Serena; to the glorious afternoon when more than 90,000 fans watched as the U.S. women’s soccer team won the 1999 World ∪ and, ultimately, to the present day’s second-generation battle to keep Title IX alive. The book’s poignant last scene between Billie and Bobby serves to remind us how much of an effect that 1973 match—and the passion it fueled for change—continues to have on American society, showing how necessary it was, and how necessary it remains. 1973. The Battle of the Sexes. It was the match that changed everything. In this riveting book by New York Times sports columnist Selena Roberts, the whole spectacle returns, larger than life and more important than ever. This story reaches beyond two outsize and utterly fascinating personalities who emerged during a simmering social revolution that pitted chauvinists against feminists. It also chronicles the complex, longtime marriage of Billie Jean and Larry King; the cavalcade of issues that rocked the 1970s, from equal pay to abortion rights; and a wrenching coming-out story recounted in intimate detail by Billie Jean King for the first time.
Download or read book Sensational written by Jodie Lynn Zdrok and published by Tor Teen. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteen-year-old Nathalie Baudin, ever-curious reporter at the Paris morgue, is no stranger to death—even discounting the supernatural visions that give her disturbing glimpses into the minds of killers. Paris, 1889. When the Exposition Universelle opens in Paris, Nathalie welcomes a much-needed break from the heartache of her friend's murder. The fair is full of sensational innovations, cultural displays, and marvelous inventions from around the world. But someone is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the guillotine with a gruesome display of their own: beheaded victims in some of the Exposition’s most popular exhibits. Haunted by the past and burdened with new secrets, Nathalie struggles to use her wits and her gift. Yet she and her friends must stop the killer before the macabre display features one of them... At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Society Of The Spectacle written by Guy Debord and published by Bread and Circuses Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.
Download or read book The Spectacle of Skill written by Robert Hughes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-11-29 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of his distinguished career, Robert Hughes wrote with brutal honesty about art, architecture, culture, religion—and himself. The Spectacle of Skill brings together some of his most unforgettable pieces, culled from nine of his most widely read and important books, alongside never-before-published pages from his unfinished second volume of memoirs. Showcasing Hughes’s enormous range, this indispensable anthology offers a uniquely cohesive view of both the critic and the man.
Download or read book Political Spectacle and the Fate of American Schools written by Mary Lee Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-02-02 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors argue that the most influential and well-known educational policy programs in the past 30 years are not based on democratic consensus, but are instead formulated by the political community as symbolic efforts meant to generate personal partisan gain.
Download or read book The Last Sure Thing written by Tom LeCompte and published by . This book was released on 2018-11-19 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The best thing in life is to win. The second best thing is to lose--at least you're still in the game." --Bobby RiggsHe lived by his own rules, and more often than not he broke them. Bobby Riggs was the original bad boy of tennis. Forever remembered as the motormouthed antagonist of Billie Jean King in the famous "Battle of the Sexes," he had a nose for action and an insatiable appetite for competition. The award-winning book The Last Sure Thing is the story of a hardscrabble kid in a highbrow, "sissy" game; the son of a fundamentalist minister who was a compulsive gambler; a self-proclaimed male chauvinist whose only mentors in the game were women; a short, wispy-haired fellow with a squeaky voice, a bad haircut, and horn-rimmed glasses who became, somehow, a sex symbol. Riggs' life reads like a history of the modern game. He played and beat legends such as Bill Tilden and Don Budge; rose up the amateur ranks to Wimbledon and world champion; barnstormed on the early pro tours; and then, by sheer force of his personality, became the center of the biggest spectacle in tennis history, a match that transcended sports to become one of the iconic events of its generation.For reviews or more information, go to amazon.com or check out www.bobbyriggs.com
Download or read book Spectacle written by Pamela Newkirk and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2016 NAACP Image Award Winner An award-winning journalist reveals a little-known and shameful episode in American history, when an African man was used as a human zoo exhibit—a shocking story of racial prejudice, science, and tragedy in the early years of the twentieth century in the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Devil in the White City, and Medical Apartheid. In 1904, Ota Benga, a young Congolese “pygmy”—a person of petite stature—arrived from central Africa and was featured in an anthropology exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Two years later, the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging the slight 103-pound, 4-foot 11-inch tall man with an orangutan. The attraction became an international sensation, drawing thousands of New Yorkers and commanding headlines from across the nation and Europe. Spectacle explores the circumstances of Ota Benga’s captivity, the international controversy it inspired, and his efforts to adjust to American life. It also reveals why, decades later, the man most responsible for his exploitation would be hailed as his friend and savior, while those who truly fought for Ota have been banished to the shadows of history. Using primary historical documents, Pamela Newkirk traces Ota’s tragic life, from Africa to St. Louis to New York, and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lived out the remainder of his short life. Illuminating this unimaginable event, Spectacle charts the evolution of science and race relations in New York City during the early years of the twentieth century, exploring this racially fraught era for Africa-Americans and the rising tide of political disenfranchisement and social scorn they endured, forty years after the end of the Civil War. Shocking and compelling Spectacle is a masterful work of social history that raises difficult questions about racial prejudice and discrimination that continue to haunt us today.
Download or read book The Spectacle of the False Flag written by Eric Wilson and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2015-03 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eric Wilson's work poses crucial challenges to social theory, unsettling our understanding of the nature of the liberal democratic state. In The Spectacle of the False Flag, he urges the reader to examine the, often unconsidered, deep state practices that confound conventional notions of the state as monolithic or uniform. This compelling volume traces deep state conflicts and convergences through central cases in the development of American political economic power-JFK/Dallas, LBJ/Gulf of Tonkin, and Nixon/Watergate.Rigorously documented and unflinchingly analyzed, The Spectacle of the False Flag provides a stunning example of a new criminological practice-one that takes the state seriously, making the inner workings of the state rather than its effects the primary object of study. Drawing upon a wealth of historical records and developing the theoretical insights of Guy Debord's writings on spectacular society, Wilson offers a glimpse into a necessary criminology to come.
Download or read book Making a Spectacle written by Jessica Glasscock and published by Black Dog & Leventhal. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 13th century Franciscan monks to Beyoncé in Black is King, Making a Spectacle charts the fascinating ascension of eyeglasses—from an unsightly but useful tool to fashion's must-have accessory. The power of glasses to convey a range of vivid messages about their wearers have made them into a billion-dollar business that appeals to cool kids and rock stars, and those who want to be like them, but the fashionable history of eyeglasses is fraught with anxiety and drama. At the beginning of the 20th century, the assessment in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar was that spectacles were "invariably disfiguring." Invisibility was the best option, and glasses were only to be put on once the lights at the opera went dark. While variations of that glasses-shaming sentiment appeared at regular intervals over the next 100 years or so, eyeglasses continued to evolve into an endless array of shapes, colors, purposes, and personalities. Once sunglasses took off in the 1930s, the magazine editorial made glasses a conspicuous part of the fashion narrative. Eyeglasses went to the ski slopes, the stables, the beach, the Havana hotel. Plastic innovations made a candy-colored rainbow of cat-eyes and "starlet" styles possible. Suddenly, everyone had the opportunity to look like Jackie O on vacation in Capri. Making a Spectacle traces contemporary high fashion frames back to their origins: the military aviator, the glam cat eye, the nerdly Oxford, the high-tech shield, the fanciful butterfly, the lowly rimless, and other styles all make an appearance. Featuring interviews with influential designers, makers, and purveyors of glasses including Adam Selman, Kerin Rose Gold, and l.a. Eyeworks, Making a Spectacle also takes a look at today's most cutting edge eyewear, showing the reader the latest and most innovative ways to see and be seen.
Download or read book Surpassing the Spectacle written by Carol Becker and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2002 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading social critic Carol Becker offers a timely analysis of the nature of art and its role in politics and society. Completed just before the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center catastrophe, this book is remarkably prescient of the new concerns that have now become foremost in our thoughts since the attack. Becker raises the question of the place of art and the function of public intellectuals in a society desperately in need of creativity and leadership. Visit our website for sample chapters!
Download or read book Within the Veil written by Pamela Newkirk and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2002-09 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A candid, front-line report on the continuing battle to integrate America's newsrooms and news coverage, now available in paperback.
Download or read book Myths and Milestones in the History of Sport written by S. Wagg and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The conventional history of sport, as conveyed by television and the sports press, has thrown up a great many apparent turning points, but knowledge of these apparently defining moments is often slight. This book offers readable, in-depth studies of a series of these watersheds in sport history and of the circumstances in which they came about.
Download or read book Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome written by Donald G. Kyle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The elaborate and inventive slaughter of humans and animals in the arena fed an insatiable desire for violent spectacle among the Roman people. Donald G. Kyle combines the words of ancient authors with current scholarly research and cross-cultural perspectives, as he explores * the origins and historical development of the games * who the victims were and why they were chosen * how the Romans disposed of the thousands of resulting corpses * the complex religious and ritual aspects of institutionalised violence * the particularly savage treatment given to defiant Christians. This lively and original work provides compelling, sometimes controversial, perspectives on the bloody entertainments of ancient Rome, which continue to fascinate us to this day.
Download or read book Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes written by Vincent Ilardi and published by American Philosophical Society. This book was released on 2007 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deals with the history of eyeglasses from their invention in Italy ca. 1286 to the appearance of the telescope three cent. later. "By the end of the 16th cent. eyeglasses were as common in western and central Europe as desktop computers are in western developed countries today." Eyeglasses served an important technological function at both the intellectual and practical level, not only easing the textual studies of scholars but also easing the work of craftsmen/small bus. During the 15th cent. two crucial developments occurred: the ability to grind convex lenses for various levels of presbyopia and the ability to grind concave lenses for the correction of myopia. As a result, eyeglasses could be made almost to prescription by the early 17th cent. Illus.
Download or read book Epics Spectacles and Blockbusters written by Sheldon Hall and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the history of the American blockbuster—the large-scale, high-cost film—as it evolved from the 1890s to today. The pantheon of big-budget, commercially successful films encompasses a range of genres, including biblical films, war films, romances, comic-book adaptations, animated features, and historical epics. In Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History authors Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale discuss the characteristics, history, and modes of distribution and exhibition that unite big-budget pictures, from their beginnings in the late nineteenth century to the present. Moving chronologically, the authors examine the roots of today's blockbuster in the "feature," "special," "superspecial," "roadshow," "epic," and "spectacle" of earlier eras, with special attention to the characteristics of each type of picture. In the first section, Hall and Neale consider the beginnings of features, specials, and superspecials in American cinema, as the terms came to define not the length of a film but its marketable stars or larger budget. The second section investigates roadshowing as a means of distributing specials and the changes to the roadshow that resulted from the introduction of synchronized sound in the 1920s. In the third section, the authors examine the phenomenon of epics and spectacles that arose from films like Gone with the Wind, Samson and Deliliah, and Spartacus and continues to evolve today in films like Spider-Man and Pearl Harbor. In this section, Hall and Neale consider advances in visual and sound technology and the effects and costs they introduced to the industry. Scholars of film and television studies as well as readers interested in the history of American moviemaking will enjoy Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters.
Download or read book Modernization as Spectacle in Africa written by Peter J. Bloom and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-09 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For postcolonial Africa, modernization was seen as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence and as crucial to the success of its newly established states. Since then, the rhetoric of modernization has pervaded policy, culture, and development, lending a kind of political theatricality to nationalist framings of modernization and Africans' perceptions of their place in the global economy. These 15 essays address governance, production, and social life; the role of media; and the discourse surrounding large-scale development projects, revealing modernization's deep effects on the expressive culture of Africa.
Download or read book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle written by Guy Debord and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2011-01-10 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1967, Guy Debord’s stinging revolutionary critique ofcontemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired acult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideasgenerated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord’s pitiless attackon commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everydaylife continues to burn brightly in today’s age of satellite televisionand the soundbite. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, publishedtwenty years later, Debord returned to the themes of his previousanalysis and demonstrated how they were all the more relevant in aperiod when the “integrated spectacle” was dominant. Resolutely refusingto be reconciled to the system, Debord trenchantly slices through thedoxa and mystification offered tip by journalists and pundits to showhow aspects of reality as diverse as terrorism and the environment, theMafia and the media, were caught up in the logic of the spectacularsociety. Pointing the finger clearly at those who benefit from the logicof domination, Debord’s Comments convey the revolutionary impulse atthe heart of situationism.
