Download or read book American Mania When More is Not Enough written by Peter C. Whybrow and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006-04-17 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A doctor's bold analysis of the cultural disease that afflicts us all. Despite an astonishing appetite for life, more and more Americans are feeling overworked and dissatisfied. In the world's most affluent nation, epidemic rates of stress, anxiety, depression, obesity, and time urgency are now grudgingly accepted as part of everyday existence they signal the American Dream gone awry. Peter C. Whybrow, director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, grounds the extraordinary achievements and excessive consumption of the American nation in an understanding of the biology of the brain's reward system offering for the first time a comprehensive and physical explanation for the addictive mania of consumerism. American Mania presents a clear and novel vantage point from which to understand the most pressing social issues of our time, while offering an informed approach to refocusing our pursuit of happiness. Drawing upon rich scientific case studies and colorful portraits, "this fascinating and important book will change the way you think about American life" (Karen Olson, Utne Reader).
Download or read book American Mania When More is Not Enough written by Peter C. Whybrow and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2006-04-17 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A doctor's bold analysis of the cultural disease that afflicts us all. Despite an astonishing appetite for life, more and more Americans are feeling overworked and dissatisfied. In the world's most affluent nation, epidemic rates of stress, anxiety, depression, obesity, and time urgency are now grudgingly accepted as part of everyday existence they signal the American Dream gone awry. Peter C. Whybrow, director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, grounds the extraordinary achievements and excessive consumption of the American nation in an understanding of the biology of the brain's reward system offering for the first time a comprehensive and physical explanation for the addictive mania of consumerism. American Mania presents a clear and novel vantage point from which to understand the most pressing social issues of our time, while offering an informed approach to refocusing our pursuit of happiness. Drawing upon rich scientific case studies and colorful portraits, "this fascinating and important book will change the way you think about American life" (Karen Olson, Utne Reader).
Download or read book Bipolar Expeditions written by Emily Martin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-08 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bipolar Expeditions' is an ethnographic inquiry into mania and depression in their American cultural and historical contexts. The text explores the complex darkness and stigma associated with those deemed 'mad.
Download or read book Fad Mania written by Cynthia Overbeck Bix and published by Twenty-First Century Books. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: College students crammed into phone booths. Couples dancing until they drop. Daredevils swallowing one live goldfish after another. Streakers dashing naked down the street. Planking and flash mobs and robotic pets. These are just some of the crazy fads that have caught hold in the United States over the last century. Where do these ideas come from and why do they catch people's imagination? Fads reflect the mood and spirit of a particular time, and they offer insight into a nation's culture. The 1950s, for example, was a time of economic prosperity and technological development. Americans expressed their delight in new inventions in many creative ways. One popular craze on college campuses was to stuff as many people as possible into a phone booth. On one campus, twenty-five people managed to squeeze into a single booth! In earlier decades, marked by the Depression and World War II, dance marathon frenzy caught on. Promoters lured couples with promises of fame and monetary prizes for those who could dance for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours. And great ideas never die. Almost one hundred years later, dance marathons came back. One creative variation, the flash mob dance, attracts spontaneous performances that range from flash mob wedding dances to “Gangnam Style" K-Pop flash mobs in cities all over the world. Fad Mania! explores a century of American crazes, offering an entertaining and informative look at the major historical events of each decade and the fads that defined them. As you learn more about smiley buttons and Webkinz, you may just be able to predict this decade's next craze!
Download or read book Memorial Mania written by Erika Doss and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-09-07 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In Memorial Mania, Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express—and claim—those issues in visibly public contexts. Doss shows how this desire to memorialize the past disposes itself to individual anniversaries and personal grievances, to stories of tragedy and trauma, and to the social and political agendas of diverse numbers of Americans. By offering a framework for understanding these sites, Doss engages the larger issues behind our culture of commemoration. Driven by heated struggles over identity and the politics of representation, Memorial Mania is a testament to the fevered pitch of public feelings in America today.
Download or read book Mania for Freedom written by John Mac Kilgore and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841. While this statement may read like an innocuous truism today, the claim would have been controversial in the antebellum United States when enthusiasm was a hotly contested term associated with religious fanaticism and poetic inspiration, revolutionary politics and imaginative excess. In analyzing the language of enthusiasm in philosophy, religion, politics, and literature, John Mac Kilgore uncovers a tradition of enthusiasm linked to a politics of emancipation. The dissenting voices chronicled here fought against what they viewed as tyranny while using their writings to forge international or antinationalistic political affiliations. Pushing his analysis across national boundaries, Kilgore contends that American enthusiastic literature, unlike the era's concurrent sentimental counterpart, stressed democratic resistance over domestic reform as it navigated the global political sphere. By analyzing a range of canonical American authors--including William Apess, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman--Kilgore places their works in context with the causes, wars, and revolutions that directly or indirectly engendered them. In doing so, he makes a unique and compelling case for enthusiasm's centrality in the shaping of American literary history.
Download or read book Mania written by Ronald K. L. Collins and published by Top Five Books LLC. This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the time Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death on the banks of the Hudson River in August 1944, it was clear that the hard-partying teenage companion to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs might need to reevaluate his life. A two-year stint in a reformatory straightened out the wayward youth but did little to curb the wild ways of his friends. MANIA tells the story of this remarkable group—who strained against the conformity of postwar America, who experimented with drink, drugs, sex, jazz, and literature, and who yearned to be heard, to remake art and society in their own libertine image. What is more remarkable than the manic lives they led is that they succeeded—remaking their own generation and inspiring the ones that followed. From the breakthrough success of Kerouac's On the Road to the controversy of Ginsberg's Howl and Burroughs' Naked Lunch, the counterculture was about to go mainstream for the first time, and America would never be the same again. Based on more than eight years’ writing and research, Ronald Collins and David Skover—authors of the highly acclaimed The Trials of Lenny Bruce—bring the stories of these artists, hipsters, hustlers, and maniacs to life in a dramatic, fast-paced, and often darkly comic narrative.
Download or read book Bottlemania written by Elizabeth Royte and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Second only to soda, bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in the country. The brands have become so ubiquitous that we're hardly conscious that Poland Spring and Evian were once real springs, bubbling in remote corners of Maine and France. Only now, with the water industry trading in the billions of dollars, have we begun to question what it is we're drinking. In this intelligent, accomplished work of narrative journalism, Elizabeth Royte does for water what Michael Pollan did for food: she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that bring it from distant aquifers to our supermarkets. Along the way, she investigates the questions we must inevitably answer. Who owns our water? How much should we drink? Should we have to pay for it? Is tap safe water safe to drink? And if so, how many chemicals are dumped in to make it potable? What happens to all those plastic bottles we carry around as predictably as cell phones? And of course, what's better: tap water or bottled?
Download or read book American Palestine written by Hilton Obenzinger and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1999-11-14 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 19th century, American tourists, scholars, evangelists, writers and artists flocked to Palestine. Focusing on works by Melville and Twain, this book throws new light on the construction ot American identity in the 19th century.
Download or read book Egypt Land written by Scott Trafton and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-19 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Egypt Land is the first comprehensive analysis of the connections between constructions of race and representations of ancient Egypt in nineteenth-century America. Scott Trafton argues that the American mania for Egypt was directly related to anxieties over race and race-based slavery. He shows how the fascination with ancient Egypt among both black and white Americans was manifest in a range of often contradictory ways. Both groups likened the power of the United States to that of the ancient Egyptian empire, yet both also identified with ancient Egypt’s victims. As the land which represented the origins of races and nations, the power and folly of empires, despots holding people in bondage, and the exodus of the saved from the land of slavery, ancient Egypt was a uniquely useful trope for representing America’s own conflicts and anxious aspirations. Drawing on literary and cultural studies, art and architectural history, political history, religious history, and the histories of archaeology and ethnology, Trafton illuminates anxieties related to race in different manifestations of nineteenth-century American Egyptomania, including the development of American Egyptology, the rise of racialized science, the narrative and literary tradition of the imperialist adventure tale, the cultural politics of the architectural Egyptian Revival, and the dynamics of African American Ethiopianism. He demonstrates how debates over what the United States was and what it could become returned again and again to ancient Egypt. From visions of Cleopatra to the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, from the works of Pauline Hopkins to the construction of the Washington Monument, from the measuring of slaves’ skulls to the singing of slave spirituals—claims about and representations of ancient Egypt served as linchpins for discussions about nineteenth-century American racial and national identity.
Download or read book Fast Food Maniac written by Jon Hein and published by Crown. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beloved personality from The Howard Stern Show celebrates American fast food, exploring the history and secret menu items of both national and regional chains, ranking everything from burgers and fries to ice and mascots, and offering his own expert tips on where to go and what to order. Jon Hein is the ultimate fast food maniac, and in this book he draws on his extensive knowledge of, and love for, both nationwide chains and regional gems, from McDonald’s and KFC to In-N-Out Burger and Carvel. He digs into their origin stories; reveals secret menu items; includes best lists for everything from fried chicken and shakes to connoisseur concerns such as straws and biscuits; takes a nostalgic look back at the best giveaways, slogans, and uniforms; and even provides a battle-tested drive-thru strategy. With behind-the-counter looks at places like the Dunkin' Donuts headquarters and Nathan's original hot dog stand, Fast Food Maniac is the definitive, cross-country guide to some of America's best-loved guilty pleasures.
Download or read book American Madness written by Richard Noll and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-24 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1895 there was not a single case of dementia praecox reported in the United States. By 1912 there were tens of thousands of people with this diagnosis locked up in asylums, hospitals, and jails. By 1927 it was fading away . How could such a terrible disease be discovered, affect so many lives, and then turn out to be something else? In vivid detail, Richard Noll describes how the discovery of this mysterious disorder gave hope to the overworked asylum doctors that they could at last explain—though they could not cure—the miserable patients surrounding them. The story of dementia praecox, and its eventual replacement by the new concept of schizophrenia, also reveals how asylum physicians fought for their own respectability. If what they were observing was a disease, then this biological reality was amenable to scientific research. In the early twentieth century, dementia praecox was psychiatry’s key into an increasingly science-focused medical profession. But for the moment, nothing could be done to help the sufferers. When the concept of schizophrenia offered a fresh understanding of this disorder, and hope for a cure, psychiatry abandoned the old disease for the new. In this dramatic story of a vanished diagnosis, Noll shows the co-dependency between a disease and the scientific status of the profession that treats it. The ghost of dementia praecox haunts today’s debates about the latest generation of psychiatric disorders.
Download or read book Holland Mania written by Annette Stott and published by . This book was released on 1998-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating and idiosyncratic work of art history chronicles the years between 1880 and 1920, when Americans went absolutely wild for all things Dutch. 210 illustrations, 30 in color.
Download or read book Auto Mania written by Tom McCarthy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twentieth-century American experience with the automobile has much to tell us about the relationship between consumer capitalism and the environment, Tom McCarthy contends. In Auto Mania he presents the first environmental history of the automobile that shows how consumer desire (and manufacturer decisions) created impacts across the product lifecycle--from raw material extraction to manufacturing to consumer use to disposal. From the provocative public antics of young millionaires who owned the first cars early in the twentieth century to the SUV craze of the 1990s, Auto Mania explores developments that touched the environment. Along the way McCarthy examines how Henry Ford’s fetish for waste reduction tempered the environmental impacts of Model T mass production; how Elvis Presley’s widely shared postwar desire for Cadillacs made matters worse; how the 1970s energy crisis hurt small cars; and why baby boomers ignored worries about global warming. McCarthy shows that problems were recognized early. The difficulty was addressing them, a matter less of doing scientific research and educating the public than implementing solutions through America’s market economy and democratic government. Consumer and producer interests have rarely aligned in helpful ways, and automakers and consumers have made powerful opponents of regulation. The result has been a mixed record of environmental reform with troubling prospects for the future.
Download or read book Electroboy written by Andy Behrman and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2003 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author describes his longtime battle with ills of manic depression, his desperate search for the ultimate high, the art-forgery scandal that confined him to jail and to house arrest, and his decision to opt for the controversial treatment of electroconvulsive therapy to preserve his sanity. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.
Download or read book Mania written by David Healy and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2008-06-23 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative history of bipolar disorder illuminates how perceptions of illness, if not the illnesses themselves, are mutable over time. Beginning with the origins of the concept of mania—and the term maniac—in ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, renowned psychiatrist David Healy examines how concepts of mental afflictions evolved as scientific breakthroughs established connections between brain function and mental illness. Healy recounts the changing definitions of mania through the centuries, explores the effects of new terminology and growing public awareness of the disease on culture and society, and examines the rise of psychotropic treatments and pharmacological marketing over the past four decades. Along the way, Healy clears much of the confusion surrounding bipolar disorder even as he raises crucial questions about how, why, and by whom the disease is diagnosed. Drawing heavily on primary sources and supplemented with interviews and insight gained over Healy's long career, this lucid and engaging overview of mania sheds new light on one of humankind's most vexing ailments.
Download or read book American Niceness written by Carrie Tirado Bramen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-14 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Epigraphs -- Contents -- Introduction: American Niceness and the Democratic Personality -- 1. Indian Giving and the Dangers of Hospitality -- 2. Southern Niceness and the Slave's Smile -- 3. The Christology of Niceness -- 4. Feminine Niceness -- 5. The Likable Empire from Plymouth Rock to the Philippines -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index
