Download or read book The Humorless Ladies of Border Control written by Franz Nicolay and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2009, musician Franz Nicolay left his job in the Hold Steady, aka “the world’s greatest bar band.” Over the next five years, he crossed the world with a guitar in one hand, a banjo in the other, and an accordion on his back, playing the anarcho-leftist squats and DIY spaces of the punk rock diaspora. He meets Polish artists nostalgic for their revolutionary days, Mongolian neo-Nazis in full SS regalia, and a gay expat in Ulaanbaatar who needs an armed escort between his home and his job. The Russian punk scene is thrust onto the international stage with the furor surrounding the arrest of the group Pussy Riot, and Ukrainians find themselves in the midst of a revolution and then a full-blown war.> While engaging with the works of literary predecessors from Rebecca West to Chekhov and the nineteenth-century French aristocrat the Marquis de Custine, Nicolay explores the past and future of punk rock culture in the postcommunist world in the kind of book a punk rock Paul Theroux might have written, with a humor reminiscent of Gary Shteyngart. An audacious debut from a vivid new voice, The Humorless Ladies of Border Control is an unforgettable, funny, and sharply drawn depiction of surprisingly robust hidden spaces tucked within faraway lands.
Download or read book Someone Should Pay for Your Pain written by Franz Nicolay and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Someone Should Pay for Your Pain by Franz Nicolay is about a singer-songwriter named Rudy Pauver, his conflicted relationship with a successful former protege, and a young niece who wants to travel with him and whose surprise appearance forces a reckoning with himself and his past. This illuminating anti-hero story propels the characters through time, story, and philosophical discourse with sharp asides, short stories, dialogues, and monologues. A musician's book for the punk scene insider, with so many truths that "punks" (whatever) have had to reconcile or deny, that it's like holding up a mirror and seeing something beautiful and ugly. Engrossing and compelling, the novel wrestles with the "punk ethos" and features a punk/rock-inflected inside look at life on the road: magical, honest, and pure, but also destructive, dangerous, and out of control. The author, a writer and musician best known for playing the accordion and piano in The World/Inferno Friendship Society and keyboards in The Hold Steady, was once named #1 of the top ten accordionists in punk rock. He is also the author of the travel book The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar (a New York Times "Season's Best Travel Books" pick) and is a lecturer in writing about music at UC Berkeley.
Download or read book Weird Al written by Lily E. Hirsch and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Expanded Edition features even more insights on “Weird Al” Yankovic, including his activities during a tumultuous 2020 and 2021, diving deeper into the world of the iconic man who has made a career out of making us laugh. Funny music is often dismissed as light and irrelevant, but Yankovic’s fourteen successful studio albums prove there is more going on than comedic music's reputation suggests. Lily Hirsch weaves together original interviews with the prince of parody himself, creating a fresh take on comedy and music’s complicated romance. She reveals that Yankovic’s jests have always had a deeper meaning, addressing such topics as bullying, celebrity, and racial and gender stereotypes. The Expanded Edition celebrates Yankovic’s vast influence on musicians, comedians, and performing artists as well as what the man has meant to fans—in a time of uncertainty, Yankovic has served as a much-needed bright spot for many. From his love of accordions and Hawaiian print shirts to his popular puns and trademark dance moves, Weird Al is undeterred by those who say funny music is nothing but a low-brow pastime. And thank goodness. With his good-guy grace still intact, Yankovic remains unapologetically and unmistakably himself. Reveling in the mischief and wisdom of Yankovic’s over forty-year career, this book is an Al-expense-paid tour of a true comedic and musical genius.
Download or read book Hitchhiking written by Patrick Laviolette and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-02 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language social science book to comprehensively explore hitchhiking in the contemporary era in the West, this volume covers a lot of ground—it goes to and fro, in an echo of the modus operandi of most hitchhiking journeys. As scarification, piercings, and tattoos move from the counter-culture to popular culture, hitchhiking has remained an activity apart. Yet, with the assistance of virtual platforms and through its ever-growing memorialisation in literature and the arts, hitchhiking persists into the 21st century, despite the many social anxieties surrounding it. The themes addressed here thus include: adventure; gender; fear and trust; freedom and existential travel; road and transport infrastructures; communities of protest and resistance; civic surveillance and risk ecologies.
Download or read book The Savage Frontier written by Matthew Carr and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-12-18 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping historical travelogue of the contentious border of France and Spain, in the great tradition of Bruce Chatwin and Jan Morris With the Catalonia crisis making international headlines, the unique cultural and geographic region bordering Spain and France has once again moved to the center of the world's attention. In The Savage Frontier, acclaimed author and journalist Matthew Carr uncovers the fascinating, multilayered story of the Pyrenees region—at once a forbidding, mountainous frontier zone of stunning beauty, home to a unique culture, and a site of sharp conflict between nations and empires. Carr follows the routes taken by monks, soldiers, poets, pilgrims, and refugees. He examines the people and events that have shaped the Pyrenees across the centuries, with a cast of characters including Napoleon, Hannibal, and Charlemagne; the eccentric British climber Henry Russell; Francisco Sabaté Llopart, the Catalan anarchist who waged a lone war against the Franco regime across the Pyrenees for years after the civil war; Camino de Santiago pilgrims; and the cellist Pablo Casals, who spent twenty-three years in exile only a few miles from the Spanish border to show his disgust and disapproval of the Spanish regime. The Savage Frontier is a book that will spark a new awareness and appreciation of one of the most haunting, magical, and dramatic landscapes on earth.
Download or read book Sensation Machines written by Adam Wilson and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in a near-future New York City, where the ubiquity of automation has caused mass unemployment and a major market crash, Sensation Machines is by turns a portrait of a marriage in decline, a murder mystery, and a panoramic vision of a post-Trump economic dystopia. Michael and Wendy Mixner are a Jewish Brooklyn-based couple whose marriage is failing in the wake of their daughter's stillbirth. Michael, a Wall Street trader, has secretly lost the couple's life savings. Wendy, a digital marketing strategist, has been hired onto a Cambridge Analytica--style data mining project, whose mysterious owner has ambitions to reshape America's social and political landscapes. When Michael's best friend is murdered, the evidence leads back to Wendy's client, setting off a dangerous chain of events that will profoundly change the couple--and the country. Sensation Machines inhabits the perspectives of the Wall Street bros, the marketing mad men, the Silicon Valley sociopaths--and uncomfortably humanizes them, while considering the ways everyone is complicit in the consequences of late capitalism. Sensation Machines is a novel of big ideas, intricate plotting, and keenly observed human drama.
Download or read book Hegemony How To written by Jonathan Smucker and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to political struggle for a generation that is deeply ambivalent about power. While many activists gravitate toward mere self-expression and identity-affirming rituals at the expense of serious political intervention, Smucker provides an apologia for leadership, organization, and collective power, a moral argument for its cultivation, and a discussion of dilemmas that movements must navigate in order to succeed.
Download or read book Wild Music written by Maria Sonevytsky and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-02 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recipient of the 2020 Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society What are the uses of musical exoticism? In Wild Music, Maria Sonevytsky tracks vernacular Ukrainian discourses of "wildness" as they manifested in popular music during a volatile decade of Ukrainian political history bracketed by two revolutions. From the Eurovision Song Contest to reality TV, from Indigenous radio to the revolution stage, Sonevytsky assesses how these practices exhibit and re-imagine Ukrainian tradition and culture. As the rise of global populism forces us to confront the category of state sovereignty anew, Sonevytsky proposes innovative paradigms for thinking through the creative practices that constitute sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism.
Download or read book Good Booty written by Ann Powers and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NPR Best Books of 2017 In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR’s acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American ideas and beliefs, allowing us to communicate difficult emotions and truths about our most fraught social issues, most notably sex and race. In Good Booty, Ann Powers explores how popular music became America’s primary erotic art form. Powers takes us from nineteenth-century New Orleans through dance-crazed Jazz Age New York to the teen scream years of mid-twentieth century rock-and-roll to the cutting-edge adventures of today’s web-based pop stars. Drawing on her deep knowledge and insights on gender and sexuality, Powers recounts stories of forbidden lovers, wild shimmy-shakers, orgasmic gospel singers, countercultural perverts, soft-rock sensitivos, punk Puritans, and the cyborg known as Britney Spears to illuminate how eroticism—not merely sex, but love, bodily freedom, and liberating joy—became entwined within the rhythms and melodies of American song. This cohesion, she reveals, touches the heart of America's anxieties and hopes about race, feminism, marriage, youth, and freedom. In a survey that spans more than a century of music, Powers both heralds little known artists such as Florence Mills, a contemporary of Josephine Baker, and gospel queen Dorothy Love Coates, and sheds new light on artists we think we know well, from the Beatles and Jim Morrison to Madonna and Beyoncé. In telling the history of how American popular music and sexuality intersect—a magnum opus over two decades in the making—Powers offers new insights into our nation psyche and our soul.
Download or read book Arrowsmith written by Sinclair Lewis and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings written by Maya Angelou and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-07-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.”—James Baldwin From the Paperback edition.
Download or read book Sex Matters written by Mona Charen and published by Forum Books. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author of the New York Times bestseller Useful Idiots and popular columnist Mona Charen takes a close, reasoned look at the aggressive feminist agenda undermining the success and happiness of men and women across the country In this smart, deeply necessary critique, Mona Charen unpacks the ways feminism fails us at home, in the workplace, and in our personal relationships--by promising that we can have it all, do it all, and be it all. Here, she upends the feminist agenda and the liberal conversation surrounding women's issues by asking tough and crucial questions, such as: Did women's full equality require the total destruction of the nuclear family? Did it require a sexual revolution that would dismantle traditions of modesty, courtship, and fidelity that had characterized relations between the sexes for centuries? Did it cause the broken dating culture and the rape crisis on our college campuses? Did it require war between the sexes that would deem men the "enemy" of women? Have the strides of feminism made women happier in their home and work life. (The answer is No.) Sex Matters tracks the price we have paid for denying sex differences and stoking the war of the sexes--family breakdown, declining female happiness, aimlessness among men, and increasing inequality. Marshaling copious social science research as well as her own experience as a professional as well as a wife and mother, Mona Charen calls for a sexual ceasefire for the sake of women, men, and children.
Download or read book Sexing the Body written by Anne Fausto-Sterling and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now updated with groundbreaking research, this award-winning classic examines the construction of sexual identity in biology, society, and history. Why do some people prefer heterosexual love while others fancy the same sex? Is sexual identity biologically determined or a product of convention? In this brilliant and provocative book, the acclaimed author of Myths of Gender argues that even the most fundamental knowledge about sex is shaped by the culture in which scientific knowledge is produced. Drawing on astonishing real-life cases and a probing analysis of centuries of scientific research, Fausto-Sterling demonstrates how scientists have historically politicized the body. In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms -- sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed -- and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.
Download or read book A Game of Thrones written by George R. R. Martin and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 835 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW THE ACCLAIMED HBO SERIES GAME OF THRONES—THE MASTERPIECE THAT BECAME A CULTURAL PHENOMENON Winter is coming. Such is the stern motto of House Stark, the northernmost of the fiefdoms that owe allegiance to King Robert Baratheon in far-off King’s Landing. There Eddard Stark of Winterfell rules in Robert’s name. There his family dwells in peace and comfort: his proud wife, Catelyn; his sons Robb, Brandon, and Rickon; his daughters Sansa and Arya; and his bastard son, Jon Snow. Far to the north, behind the towering Wall, lie savage Wildings and worse—unnatural things relegated to myth during the centuries-long summer, but proving all too real and all too deadly in the turning of the season. Yet a more immediate threat lurks to the south, where Jon Arryn, the Hand of the King, has died under mysterious circumstances. Now Robert is riding north to Winterfell, bringing his queen, the lovely but cold Cersei, his son, the cruel, vainglorious Prince Joffrey, and the queen’s brothers Jaime and Tyrion of the powerful and wealthy House Lannister—the first a swordsman without equal, the second a dwarf whose stunted stature belies a brilliant mind. All are heading for Winterfell and a fateful encounter that will change the course of kingdoms. Meanwhile, across the Narrow Sea, Prince Viserys, heir of the fallen House Targaryen, which once ruled all of Westeros, schemes to reclaim the throne with an army of barbarian Dothraki—whose loyalty he will purchase in the only coin left to him: his beautiful yet innocent sister, Daenerys.
Download or read book A Thousand Splendid Suns written by Khaled Hosseini and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2008-09-18 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting and powerful story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship and an indestructible love
Download or read book American Airpower Comes Of Age General Henry H Hap Arnold s World War II Diaries Vol II Illustrated Edition written by Gen. Henry H. “Hap.” Arnold and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes the Aerial Warfare In Europe During World War II illustrations pack with over 180 maps, plans, and photos. Gen Henry H. “Hap.” Arnold, US Army Air Forces (AAF) Chief of Staff during World War II, maintained diaries for his several journeys to various meetings and conferences throughout the conflict. Volume 1 introduces Hap Arnold, the setting for five of his journeys, the diaries he kept, and evaluations of those journeys and their consequences. General Arnold’s travels brought him into strategy meetings and personal conversations with virtually all leaders of Allied forces as well as many AAF troops around the world. He recorded his impressions, feelings, and expectations in his diaries. Maj Gen John W. Huston, USAF, retired, has captured the essence of Henry H. Hap Arnold—the man, the officer, the AAF chief, and his mission. Volume 2 encompasses General Arnold’s final seven journeys and the diaries he kept therein.
Download or read book Something Borrowed written by Emily Giffin and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giffin's smash-hit debut novel--basis for the 2011 film--is for every woman who has ever had a complicated love-hate friendship.
