Download or read book Political Fictions written by Joan Didion and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2002-08-27 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In these coolly observant essays, the iconic bestselling writer looks at the American political process and at "that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life." Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.
Download or read book The American Dream written by Cal Jillson and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: these words have long represented the promise of America, a “shimmering vision of a fruitful country open to all who come, learn, work, save, invest, and play by the rules.” In 2004, Cal Jillson took stock of this vision and showed how the nation’s politicians deployed the American Dream, both in campaigns and governance, to hold the American people to their program. “Full of startling ideas that make sense,” NPR's senior correspondent Juan Williams remarked, Jillson's book offered the fullest exploration yet of the origins and evolution of the ideal that serves as the foundation of our national ethos and collective self-image. Nonetheless, in the dozen years since Pursuing the American Dream was published, the American Dream has fared poorly. The decline of social mobility and the rise of income inequality—to say nothing of the extraordinary social, political, and economic developments of the Bush and Obama presidencies—have convinced many that the American Dream is no more. This is the concern that Jillson addresses in his new book, The American Dream: In History, Politics, and Fiction, which juxtaposes the claims of political, social, and economic elite against the view of American life consistently offered in our national literature. Our great novelists, from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to John Updike, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and beyond highlight the limits and challenges of life—the difficulty if not impossibility of the dream—especially for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as well as women. His book takes us through the changing meaning and reality of the American Dream, from the seventeenth century to the present day, revealing a distinct, sustained separation between literary and political elite. The American Dream, Jillson suggests, took shape early in our national experience and defined the nation throughout its growth and development, yet it has always been challenged, even rejected, in our most celebrated literature. This is no different in our day, when what we believe about the American Dream reveals as much about its limits as its possibilities.
Download or read book Imperium written by Robert Harris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006-09-19 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Fatherland and Pompeii, comes the first novel of a trilogy about the struggle for power in ancient Rome. In his “most accomplished work to date” (Los Angeles Times), master of historical fiction Robert Harris lures readers back in time to the compelling life of Roman Senator Marcus Cicero. The re-creation of a vanished biography written by his household slave and righthand man, Tiro, Imperium follows Cicero’s extraordinary struggle to attain supreme power in Rome. On a cold November morning, Tiro opens the door to find a terrified, bedraggled stranger begging for help. Once a Sicilian aristocrat, the man was robbed by the corrupt Roman governor, Verres, who is now trying to convict him under false pretenses and sentence him to a violent death. The man claims that only the great senator Marcus Cicero, one of Rome’s most ambitious lawyers and spellbinding orators, can bring him justice in a crooked society manipulated by the villainous governor. But for Cicero, it is a chance to prove himself worthy of absolute power. What follows is one of the most gripping courtroom dramas in history, and the beginning of a quest for political glory by a man who fought his way to the top using only his voice—defeating the most daunting figures in Roman history.
Download or read book Arab American Literary Fictions Cultures and Politics written by S. Salaita and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-12-25 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: N.B. this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title. Stock of this book requires shipment from overseas. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. Using literary and social analysis, this book examines a range of modern Arab American literary fiction and illustrates how socio-political phenomena have affected the development of the Arab American novel.
Download or read book American Political Fictions written by Peter Swirski and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-03 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a discussion of diverse art and media such as apocalyptic thrillers, rap, and television, Swirski debunks the American political system, sieving out fact from a sea of bipartisan untruths. Engaging with close analysis and multiple case studies, this book forges a more accurate picture of contemporary American culture and of America itself.
Download or read book Insider Baseball written by Joan Didion and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Vintage Shorts Selection • Almost three decades ago, iconic and incomparable American essayist Joan Didion’s now-classic report from the Dukakis campaign trail exposed, in no uncertain terms, the complete sham that is the modern American presidential run. Writing with bite and some humor too, Didion betrays “the process”—the way in which power is exchanged and the status quo is maintained. All insiders—politicians, journalists, spin doctors—participate in a political narrative that is “designed as it is to maintain the illusion of consensus by obscuring rather than addressing actual issues.” The optics of presidential campaigns have grown ever more farcical and remote from the needs and issues most relevant to Americans’ lives, and Didion’s elegant, shrewd, and prescient commentary has never been more urgent than it is right now. An ebook short.
Download or read book American Fiction in the Cold War written by Thomas H. Schaub and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schaub presents American fiction in the political climate of its time. Through the 1930s, he portrays authors as typically left of center and becoming disillusioned with communism as a result of Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler. Subsequent authors embraced a His general discussion comes to focus on the works of Barth, O'Connor, Ellison, and Mailer. Paper edition (unseen), $12.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Founding Fictions written by Jennifer R. Mercieca and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extended analysis of how Americans imagined themselves as citizens between 1764 and 1845 Founding Fictions develops the concept of a “political fiction,” or a narrative that people tell about their own political theories, and analyzes how republican and democratic fictions positioned American citizens as either romantic heroes, tragic victims, or ironic partisans. By re-telling the stories that Americans have told themselves about citizenship, Mercieca highlights an important contradiction in American political theory and practice: that national stability and active citizen participation are perceived as fundamentally at odds.
Download or read book All the King s Men written by Robert Penn Warren and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Willie Stark's obsession with political power leads to the ultimate corruption of his gubernatorial administration.
Download or read book The Presidents We Imagine written by Jeff Smith and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2009-03-19 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In such popular television series as The West Wing and 24, in thrillers like Tom Clancy’s novels, and in recent films, plays, graphic novels, and internet cartoons, America has been led by an amazing variety of chief executives. Some of these are real presidents who have been fictionally reimagined. Others are “might-have-beens” like Philip Roth’s President Charles Lindbergh. Many more have never existed except in some storyteller’s mind. In The Presidents We Imagine, Jeff Smith examines the presidency’s ever-changing place in the American imagination. Ranging across different media and analyzing works of many kinds, some familiar and some never before studied, he explores the evolution of presidential fictions, their central themes, the impact on them of new and emerging media, and their largely unexamined role in the nation’s real politics. Smith traces fictions of the presidency from the plays and polemics of the eighteenth century—when the new office was born in what Alexander Hamilton called “the regions of fiction”—to the digital products of the twenty-first century, with their seemingly limitless user-defined ways of imagining the world’s most important political figure. Students of American culture and politics, as well as readers interested in political fiction and film, will find here a colorful, indispensable guide to the many surprising ways Americans have been “representing” presidents even as those presidents have represented them. “Especially timely in an era when media image-mongering increasingly shapes presidential politics.”—Paul S. Boyer, series editor “Smith's understanding of the sociopolitical realities of US history is impressive; likewise his interpretations of works of literature and popular culture. . . .In addition to presenting thoughtful analysis, the book is also fun. Readers will enjoy encounters with, for example, The Beggar's Opera, Duck Soup, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Philip Roth's Plot against America, the comedic campaigns of W. C. Fields for President and Pogo for President, and presidential fictions that continue up to the last President Bush. . . . His writing is fluid and conversational, but every page reveals deep understanding and focus. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.”—CHOICE
Download or read book Fixed Ideas written by Joan Didion and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novelist and essayist Joan Didion writes about the refusal of Americans to openly discuss and debate the Bush administration's new unilateralism toward both domestic and international policies since 9/11. This provocative and persuasive essay was originally published in The New York Review of Books, and garnered a tremendous response from the magazine's readers. In a preface commissioned for this book edition, Frank Rich, the popular op-ed columnist for The New York Times, echoes her argument with his own passionate analysis. Fixed Ideas is an incisive, timely political commentary from an American virtuoso.
Download or read book Political Science Fiction written by Donald M. Hassler and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the science fiction writer Frederik Pohl observes in the lead essay, the contributors collectively find science fiction to be either implicitly or explicitly political by its very nature.
Download or read book Science Fiction and Political Philosophy written by Timothy McCranor and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometimes called the “literature of ideas,” science fiction is a natural medium for normative political philosophy. Science fiction’s focus on technology, space and time travel, non-human lifeforms, and parallel universes cannot help but invoke the perennial questions of political life, including the nature of a just social order and who should rule; freedom, free will, and autonomy; and the advantages and disadvantages of progress. Rather than offering a reading of a work inspired by a particular thinker or tradition, each chapter presents a careful reading of a classic or contemporary work in the genre (a novel, short story, film, or television series) to illustrate and explore the themes and concepts of political philosophy.
Download or read book Advise and Consent written by Allen Drury and published by WordFire Press. This book was released on 2017-07-04 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner. A seminal work of political fiction-as relevant today as when it was first published. A sweeping tale of corruption and ambition cuts across the landscape of Washington, DC, with the breadth and realism that only an astute observer and insider can convey.
Download or read book New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction written by Donald M. Hassler and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying the vast expanse of politically-charged science fiction, this book posits that the defining dilemma for these tales rests in whether identity and meaning germinate from progressive linear changes or progress, or from a continuous return to primitive realities of war, death and the competition for survival.
Download or read book Ars Americana Ars Politica written by Peter Swirski and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2010 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A penetrating look at modern American politics and the partisan culture that feeds off its turmoil.
Download or read book Reproductive Acts written by Heather Latimer and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forty years after Roe v. Wade, it is evident that the ideologies of "choices" and "rights," which have publicly framed reproductive politics in North America since the landmark legal decision, have been inadequate in making sense of the topic's complexities. In Reproductive Acts, Heather Latimer investigates what contemporary fiction and film can tell us about the divisive nature of these politics, and demonstrates how fictional representations of reproduction allow for readings of reproductive politics that are critical of the terms of the debate itself. In an innovative argument about the power of fiction to engage and shape politics, Latimer analyzes works by authors such as Margaret Atwood, Kathy Acker, Toni Morrison, Larissa Lai, and director Alfonso Cuarón, among others, to claim that the unease surrounding reproduction, particularly the abortion debate, has increased both inside and outside the US over the last forty years. Fictional representation, Latimer argues, reveals reproductive politics to be deeply connected to cultural anxieties about gender, race, citizenship, and sexuality - anxieties that cannot be contained under the rules of individual rights or choices. Striking a balance between fictional, historical, and political analysis, Reproductive Acts makes a compelling argument for the vital role narrative plays in how we make sense of North American reproductive politics.
