Download or read book Beyond the Neon Lights written by Hanchao Lu and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-07-28 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did ordinary people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? How did the citizens of Shanghai cope with the epic upheavals—revolution, war, and again revolution—that shook their lives? Even after decades of scholarship devoted to modern Chinese history, our understanding of the daily lives of the common people of China remains sketchy and incomplete. In this carefully researched study, Hanchao Lu weaves rich documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in China's largest and most complex city in the first half of this century.
Download or read book Beyond the Neon Lights written by Hanchao Lu and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Today, in the post-Mao, post-Deng era, China faces a vigorous resurgence of paradoxes similar to those that surfaced at the end of the imperial era. At the same time, the pragmatism of the Chinese people endures, suggesting that the lessons of the past have broad implications for urban China and urban-rural relations in China at the beginning of the third millennium."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Beneath the Neon written by Matthew O'Brien and published by Huntington Press Inc. This book was released on 2010-12-20 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas chronicles O'Brien's adventures in subterranean Las Vegas. He follows the footsteps of a psycho killer. He braces against a raging flood. He parties with naked crackheads. He learns how to make meth, that art is most beautiful where it's least expected, that in many ways, he prefers underground Las Vegas to aboveground Las Vegas, and that there are no pots of gold under the neon rainbow
Download or read book My Week at the Blue Angel written by Matthew O'Brien and published by Huntington Press Inc. This book was released on 2011-03 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A savage journey into the heart of Hunter S. Thompson's Las Vegas with the Good Doctor as tour guide. A Lord-of-the-Rings-like adventure in the city's underground flood channels. A seven-day stay at a seedy motel on East Fremont Street. The stories in My Week at the Blue Angel aren't about Steve Wynn, Cirque du Soleil, or how to play poker, and they aren't set in Caesars Palace, XS Nightclub, or a 2,000-seat showroom. They're about prostitutes, ex-cons, and the homeless, and they're set under Caesars Palace and in trailer parks and weekly motels. In this creative nonfiction collection, Matthew O'Brien--author of Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas--and veteran photographer Bill Hughes show a side of the city rarely seen. A side beyond the neon lights, themed facades, and motel-room doors. A side beyond the barbwire fences, No Trespassing signs, and midnight shadows.
Download or read book Shanghai Grand written by Taras Grescoe and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the eve of WWII, the foreign-controlled port of Shanghai was the rendezvous for the twentieth century's most outlandish adventurers, all under the watchful eye of the fabulously wealthy Sir Victor Sassoon. ?? Emily Hahn was a legendary New Yorker writer who would cover China for nearly fifty years, and play an integral part in opening Asia up to the West. But at the height of the Depression, "Mickey" Hahn, had just arrived in Shanghai nursing a broken heart after a disappointing affair with an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter, convinced she would never love again. After entering Sassoon's glamorous Cathay Hotel, Hahn is absorbed into the social swirl of the expats drawn to pre-war China, among them Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Harold Acton, and the colourful gangster named Morris "Two-Gun" Cohen. But when she meets Zau Sinmay, a Chinese poet from an illustrious family, she discovers the real Shanghai through his eyes: the city of rich colonials, triple agents, opium-smokers, displaced Chinese peasants, and increasingly desperate White Russian and Jewish refugees—a place her innate curiosity will lead her to discover first hand. But danger lurks on the horizon and Mickey barely makes it out alive as the brutal Japanese occupation destroys the seductive world of pre-war Shanghai and Mao Tse-tung's Communists come to power in China.
Download or read book Agatha of Little Neon written by Claire Luchette and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree “An enchanting, sparkling book about the many meanings of sisterhood.” —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29 Claire Luchette's debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don’t), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life. But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. They take over the care of a halfway house, where they live alongside their charges, such as the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill. Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she has to reckon all on her own with what she sees and feels. Who will she be if she isn’t with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home. Or has she just been hiding? Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette’s Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make.
Download or read book City of Shattered Light written by Claire Winn and published by North Star Editions, Inc.. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this YA sci-fi, an heiress flees her controlling father to prevent her test-subject sister’s mind from being reprogrammed—but must ally with a smuggler to outwit a monstrous AI, gravity-shifting gladiatorial pits, and bloodthirsty criminal matriarchs to save her sister and their city.
Download or read book Color and Light written by James Gurney and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike many other art books only give recipes for mixing colors or describe step-by-step painting techniques, *Color and Light* answers the questions that realist painters continually ask, such as: "What happens with sky colors at sunset?", "How do colors change with distance?", and "What makes a form look three-dimensional?" Author James Gurney draws on his experience as a plain-air painter and science illustrator to share a wealth of information about the realist painter's most fundamental tools: color and light. He bridges the gap between abstract theory and practical knowledge for traditional and digital artists of all levels of experience.
Download or read book Surrealism Beyond Borders written by Stephanie D'Alessandro and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2021-10-04 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surrealism Beyond Borders challenges conventional narratives of a revolutionary artistic, literary, and philosophical movement. Tracing Surrealism's influence and legacy from the 1920s to the late 1970s in places as geographically diverse as Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Romania, Syria, Thailand, and Turkey, this publication includes more than 300 works of art in a variety of media by well-known figures—including Dalí, Ernst, Kahlo, Magritte, and Miró—as well as numerous artists who are less widely known. Contributions from more than forty distinguished international scholars explore the network of Surrealist exchange and collaboration, artists' responses to the challenges of social and political unrest, and the experience of displacement and exile in the twentieth century. The multiple narratives addressed in this expansive book move beyond the borders of history, geography, and nationality to provocatively redraw the map of Surrealism.
Download or read book Dangerous Pleasures written by Gail Hershatter and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 631 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering work examines prostitution in Shanghai from the late nineteenth century to the present. Drawn mostly from the daughters and wives of the working poor and declassé elites, prostitutes in Shanghai were near the bottom of class and gender hierarchies. Yet they were central figures in Shanghai urban life, entering the historical record whenever others wanted to appreciate, castigate, count, regulate, cure, pathologize, warn about, rescue, eliminate, or deploy them as a symbol in a larger social panorama. Over the past century, prostitution has been understood in many ways: as a source of urbanized pleasures, a profession full of unscrupulous and greedy schemers, a changing site of work for women, a source of moral danger and physical disease, a marker of national decay, and a sign of modernity. For the Communist leadership of the 1950s, the elimination of prostitution symbolized China's emergence as a strong, healthy, and modern nation. In the past decade, as prostitution once again has become a recognized feature of Chinese society, it has been incorporated into a larger public discussion about what kind of modernity China should seek and what kind of sex and gender arrangements should characterize that modernity. Prostitutes, like every other non-elite group, did not record their own lives. How can sources generated by intense public argument about the "larger" meanings of prostitution be read for clues to those lives? Hershatter makes use of a broad range of materials: guidebooks to the pleasure quarters, collections of anecdotes about high-class courtesans, tabloid gossip columns, municipal regulations prohibiting street soliciting, police interrogations of streetwalkers and those accused of trafficking in women, newspaper reports on court cases involving both courtesans and streetwalkers, polemics by Chinese and foreign reformers, learned articles by Chinese scholars commenting on the world history of prostitution and analyzing its local causes, surveys by doctors and social workers on sexually transmitted disease in various Shanghai populations, relief agency records, fictionalized accounts of the scams and sufferings of prostitutes, memoirs by former courtesan house patrons, and interviews with former officials and reformers. Although a courtesan may never set pen to paper, we can infer a great deal about her strategizing and working of the system through the vast cautionary literature that tells her customers how not to be defrauded by her. Newspaper accounts of the arrests and brief court testimonies of Shanghai streetwalkers let us glimpse the way that prostitutes positioned themselves to get the most they could from the legal system. Without recourse to direct speech, Hershatter argues, these women have nevertheless left an audible trace. Central to this study is the investigation of how things are known and later remembered, and how, later still, they are simultaneously apprehended and reinvented by the historian.
Download or read book Globalizing Automobilism written by Gijs Mom and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-08-07 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has “car society” proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In this follow-up to his magisterial Atlantic Automobilism, Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so difficult. Drawing on archival research as well as wide-ranging forays into popular culture, Mom reveals here the roots of the exuberance, excess, and danger that define modern automotive culture.
Download or read book Silencing Shanghai written by Fang Xu and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silencing Shanghai investigates the paradoxical and counterintuitive contrast between Shanghai’s emergence as a global city and the marginalization of its native population, captured through the rapid decline of the distinctive Shanghai dialect. From this unique vantage point, Fang Xu tells a story of power relations in a cosmopolitan metropolis closely monitored and shaped by an authoritarian state through policies affecting urban redevelopment, internal migration, and language. These state policies favor the rich, the resourceful, and the highly educated, while alienate the poorer and less educated Shanghainese geographically and linguistically. When the state vigorously promotes Mandarin Chinese through legal and administrative means, Shanghainese made the conscious yet reluctant choice of shifting from the dialect to the national language. At the same time, millions of migrants have little incentive to adopt the vernacular given that their relation to the state has already firmly established their legal, financial, and social standing in the city. The recent shift in the urban linguistic scene that silences the Shanghai dialect is ultimately part of the state-led global city-building process. Through the association of the use of national language with realizing the "China Dream," the state further eliminates the unique vernacular characters of Shanghai.
Download or read book Education in the Neon Shadow written by Kay Carl and published by Stephens PressLlc. This book was released on 2009 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one could have predicted that a tiny outpost in the middle of the desert between Salt Lake City and southern California would become a world-renowned tourist destination. Nor could anyone have envisioned that only fifty years later over 300,000 children would be attending school beneath the bright lights of the Las Vegas skyline. Filled with photos dating back to the earliest days in southern Nevada, [i]Education in the Neon Shadow[/i] chronicles the birth and growth of a school district in one of the most unique settings imaginable.
Download or read book Beyond World S End written by Mercedes Lackey and published by Baen Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Eric Banyon fantasy.
Download or read book The Neon Jungle written by John D. MacDonald and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No writer captured the urban blight that befell postwar America in all its grime and commotion as well as noir legend John D. MacDonald. The Neon Jungle depicts a world in which the bright lights belie the turbulent lives of a lost generation. Introduction by Dean Koontz The smell of warm gin hovers over a whole section of town. The threat of violence hangs in the air. And the neighborhood kids know all about drugs, knives, and back-alley beatings long before they’re pushed into high school by weary truant officers. This is simply reality for the family that runs Varaki Quality Market. Its patriarch, Gus Varaki, is doing all he can to keep his business afloat after his beloved middle child, Henry, is killed in action. But his oldest son is at a crossroads, his teenage daughter has been seduced by a rough crowd, and one of his employees is running a racket of his own. Only Henry’s despondent widow, Bonny, sees the awful truth—and the deadly plot hanging over all of their heads. Praise for John D. MacDonald “John D. MacDonald was the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.”—Stephen King “My favorite novelist of all time . . . No price could be placed on the enormous pleasure that his books have given me.”—Dean Koontz “John D. MacDonald is a shining example for all of us in the field. Talk about the best.”—Mary Higgins Clark
Download or read book A Protestant Church in Communist China written by John Craig William Keating and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-02-16 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom of religious belief is guaranteed under the constitution of the People’s Republic of China, but the degree to which this freedom is able to be exercised remains a highly controversial issue. Much scholarly attention has been given to persecuted underground groups such as Falungong, but one area that remains largely unexplored is the relationship between officially registered churches and the communist government. This study investigates the history of one such official church, Moore Memorial Church in Shanghai. This church was founded by American Methodist missionaries. By the time of the 1949 revolution, it was the largest Protestant church in East Asia, running seven day a week programs. As a case study of one individual church, operating from an historical (rather than theological) perspective, this study examines the experience of people at this church against the backdrop of the turbulent politics of the Mao and Deng eras. It asks and seeks to answer questions such as: were the people at the church pleased to see the foreign missionaries leave? Were people forced to sign the so-called “Christian manifesto”"? Once the church doors were closed in 1966, did worshippers go underground? Why was this particular church especially chosen to be the first re-opened in Shanghai in 1979? What explanations are there for its phenomenal growth since then? A considerable proportion of the data for this study is drawn from Chinese language sources, including interviews, personal correspondence, statistics, internal church documents and archives, many of which have never previously been published or accessed by foreign researchers. The main focus of this study is on the period from 1949 to 1989, a period in which the church experienced many ups and downs, restrictions and limitations. The Mao era, in particular, remains one of the least understood and seldom written about periods in the history of Christianity in China. This study therefore makes a significant contribution to our evolving understanding of the delicate balancing act between compromise, co-operation and compliance that categorises church-state relations in modern China.
Download or read book Champions Day The End of Old Shanghai written by James Carter and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How a single day revealed the history and foreshadowed the future of Shanghai. It is November 12, 1941, and the world is at war. In Shanghai, just weeks before Pearl Harbor, thousands celebrate the birthday of China’s founding father, Sun Yat-sen, in a new city center built to challenge European imperialism. Across town, crowds of Shanghai residents from all walks of life attend the funeral of China’s wealthiest woman, the Chinese-French widow of a Baghdadi Jewish businessman whose death was symbolic of the passing of a generation that had seen Shanghai’s rise to global prominence. But it is the racetrack that attracts the largest crowd of all. At the center of the International Settlement, the heart of Western colonization—but also of Chinese progressivism, art, commerce, cosmopolitanism, and celebrity—Champions Day unfolds, drawing tens of thousands of Chinese spectators and Europeans alike to bet on the horses. In a sharp and lively snapshot of the day’s events, James Carter recaptures the complex history of Old Shanghai. Champions Day is a kaleidoscopic portrait of city poised for revolution.
