Download or read book Fear Itself written by Christopher D. Bader and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An antidote to the culture of fear that dominates modern life From moral panics about immigration and gun control to anxiety about terrorism and natural disasters, Americans live in a culture of fear. While fear is typically discussed in emotional or poetic terms—as the opposite of courage, or as an obstacle to be overcome—it nevertheless has very real consequences in everyday life. Persistent fear negatively effects individuals’ decision-making abilities and causes anxiety, depression, and poor physical health. Further, fear harms communities and society by corroding social trust and civic engagement. Yet politicians often effectively leverage fears to garner votes and companies routinely market unnecessary products that promise protection from imagined or exaggerated harms. Drawing on five years of data from the Chapman Survey of American Fears—which canvasses a random, national sample of adults about a broad range of fears—Fear Itself offers new insights into what people are afraid of and how fear affects their lives. The authors also draw on participant observation with Doomsday preppers and conspiracy theorists to provide fascinating narratives about subcultures of fear. Fear Itself is a novel, wide-ranging study of the social consequences of fear, ultimately suggesting that there is good reason to be afraid of fear itself.

Download or read book Afraid written by Robert H. Bennett and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating and unnerving book, Afraid is a must-read that equips all Christians to recognize the devil's influence in our society and to act on it. Robert Bennett describes real events and actual confessions people have shared with him of demonic encounters-in America, in our modern age. Summoning demons, interacting with "ghosts" and holding séances led to what many may call horrifying hallucinations and even schizophrenia. But for many Americans, these things are their spirituality. How can we break free from the despair and crushing fear that such encounters can bring? How do we come to the aid of our neighbors who are lost in Satan's deceptions? Bennett points us to the only way out: God's grace and the medicines He gives to His people. Book jacket.

Download or read book Be Not Afraid for You Have Sons in America written by Stacy Sullivan and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2004-05-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Florin Krasniqi immigrated to the United States from Kosovo in 1988 by sneaking across the Mexican border in the trunk of a white Cadillac. Once in America, he started his own business, fell in love, married, and bought a house. But he did not forget the country he left behind. In 1996, when one of his cousins helped start the Kosovo Liberation Army in the hope of securing Kosovo's independence, Florin chipped in to help. Over the next two years, Florin helped direct a network of Albanian émigrés across the U.S., raising millions of dollars for the rebel force. Soon he began visiting gun shows across America and running weapons and other supplies to the rebels. All the while he was also lobbying some of Washington's most powerful politicians. Eventually he helped recruit American volunteers, some of whom left schools and colleges in the New York area to fight for a homeland they hardly knew. Be Not Afraid, For You Have Sons in America tells the remarkable story of how a small group of young men in Kosovo backed by a network of émigrés in the United States started a guerrilla army that lured the world's most powerful military alliance into fighting their war and changed the course of history in the Balkans forever.

Download or read book Fortress America written by Elaine Tyler May and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning historian argues that America's obsession with security imperils our democracy in this "compelling" portrait of cultural anxiety (Mary L. Dudziak, author of War Time). For the last sixty years, fear has seeped into every area of American life: Americans own more guns than citizens of any other country, sequester themselves in gated communities, and retreat from public spaces. And yet, crime rates have plummeted, making life in America safer than ever. Why, then, are Americans so afraid-and where does this fear lead to? In this remarkable work of social history, Elaine Tyler May demonstrates how our obsession with security has made citizens fear each other and distrust the government, making America less safe and less democratic. Fortress America charts the rise of a muscular national culture, undercutting the common good. Instead of a thriving democracy of engaged citizens, we have become a paranoid, bunkered, militarized, and divided vigilante nation.

Download or read book Who s Afraid of Post Blackness written by Touré and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we make sense of what it means to be Black in a world with room for both Michelle Obama and Precious? Tour , an iconic commentator and journalist, defines and demystifies modern Blackness with wit, authority, and irreverent humor. In the age of Obama, racial attitudes have become more complicated and nuanced than ever before. Americans are searching for new ways of understanding Blackness, partly inspired by a President who is unlike any Black man ever seen on our national stage. This book aims to destroy the notion that there is a correct or even definable way of being Black. It’s a discussion mixing the personal and the intellectual. It gives us intimate and painful stories of how race and racial expectations have shaped Tour ’s life as well as a look at how the concept of Post-Blackness functions in politics, psychology, the Black visual arts world, Chappelle’s Show, and more. For research Tour has turned to some of the most important luminaries of our time for frank and thought-provoking opinions, including Rev. Jesse Jackson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Malcolm Gladwell, Harold Ford, Jr., Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Chuck D, and many others. Their comments and disagreements with one another may come as a surprise to many readers. Of special interest is a personal racial memoir by the author in which he depicts defining moments in his life when he confronts the question of race head-on. In another chapter—sure to be controversial—he explains why he no longer uses the word “nigga.” Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? is a complex conversation on modern America that aims to change how we perceive race in ways that are as nuanced and spirited as the nation itself.

Download or read book Fear and Loathing in America written by Hunter S. Thompson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 1116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the king of “Gonzo” journalism and bestselling author who brought you Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas comes another astonishing volume of letters by Hunter S. Thompson. Brazen, incisive, and outrageous as ever, this second volume of Thompson’s private correspondence is the highly anticipated follow-up to The Proud Highway. When that first book of letters appeared in 1997, Time pronounced it "deliriously entertaining"; Rolling Stone called it "brilliant beyond description"; and The New York Times celebrated its "wicked humor and bracing political conviction." Spanning the years between 1968 and 1976, these never-before-published letters show Thompson building his legend: running for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado; creating the seminal road book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; twisting political reporting to new heights for Rolling Stone; and making sense of it all in the landmark Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. To read Thompson's dispatches from these years—addressed to the author's friends, enemies, editors, and creditors, and such notables as Jimmy Carter, Tom Wolfe, and Kurt Vonnegut—is to read a raw, revolutionary eyewitness account of one of the most exciting and pivotal eras in American history.

Download or read book Fears of a Setting Sun written by Dennis C. Rasmussen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surprising story of how George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson came to despair for the future of the nation they had created Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them—including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—came to deem America’s constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation. Fears of a Setting Sun is the first book to tell the fascinating and too-little-known story of the founders’ disillusionment. As Dennis Rasmussen shows, the founders’ pessimism had a variety of sources: Washington lost his faith in America’s political system above all because of the rise of partisanship, Hamilton because he felt that the federal government was too weak, Adams because he believed that the people lacked civic virtue, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions laid bare by the spread of slavery. The one major founder who retained his faith in America’s constitutional order to the end was James Madison, and the book also explores why he remained relatively optimistic when so many of his compatriots did not. As much as Americans today may worry about their country’s future, Rasmussen reveals, the founders faced even graver problems and harbored even deeper misgivings. A vividly written account of a chapter of American history that has received too little attention, Fears of a Setting Sun will change the way that you look at the American founding, the Constitution, and indeed the United States itself.

Download or read book We Must Not Be Afraid to Be Free written by Ronald K.L. Collins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-25 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a stinging dissent to a 1961 Supreme Court decision that allowed the Illinois state bar to deny admission to prospective lawyers if they refused to answer political questions, Justice Hugo Black closed with the memorable line, "We must not be afraid to be free." Black saw the First Amendment as the foundation of American freedom - the guarantor of all other Constitutional rights. Yet since free speech is by nature unruly, people fear it. Consequently, the impulse to curb or limit it has been a constant danger throughout American history. In We Must Not Be Afraid to Be Free, two of America's leading free speech scholar-activists, Ron Collins and Sam Chaltain, provide an authoritative history of free speech in modern America. Each chapter is an engaging narrative account of a landmark First Amendment case that foregrounds the colorful people involved-judges, plaintiffs, attorneys, defendants-and the issue at stake. Cumulatively, the chapters provide a definitive account of how the First Amendment evolved over the course of a century. Tracing the development of free speech rights from a more restrictive era-the early twentieth century-through the Warren Court revolution of the 1960s and up to the current post 9/11 era of heightened security concerns, Collins and Chaltain not only cover the history of an ideal, but explain in accessible language how the law surrounding the ideal transformed. Essential for anyone interested in this most essential of rights, We Must Not Be Afraid to Be Free will be a standard work on free speech for years to come.

Download or read book The Nature of Fear written by Daniel T. Blumstein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading expert in animal behavior takes us into the wild to better understand and manage our fears. Fear, honed by millions of years of natural selection, kept our ancestors alive. Whether by slithering away, curling up in a ball, or standing still in the presence of a predator, humans and other animals have evolved complex behaviors in order to survive the hazards the world presents. But, despite our evolutionary endurance, we still have much to learn about how to manage our response to danger. For more than thirty years, Daniel Blumstein has been studying animals’ fear responses. His observations lead to a firm conclusion: fear preserves security, but at great cost. A foraging flock of birds expends valuable energy by quickly taking flight when a raptor appears. And though the birds might successfully escape, they leave their food source behind. Giant clams protect their valuable tissue by retracting their mantles and closing their shells when a shadow passes overhead, but then they are unable to photosynthesize, losing the capacity to grow. Among humans, fear is often an understandable and justifiable response to sources of threat, but it can exact a high toll on health and productivity. Delving into the evolutionary origins and ecological contexts of fear across species, The Nature of Fear considers what we can learn from our fellow animals—from successes and failures. By observing how animals leverage alarm to their advantage, we can develop new strategies for facing risks without panic.

Download or read book The Monarchy of Fear written by Martha C. Nussbaum and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world’s most celebrated moral philosophers comes a thorough examination of the current political crisis and recommendations for how to mend our divided country. For decades Martha C. Nussbaum has been an acclaimed scholar and humanist, earning dozens of honors for her books and essays. In The Monarchy of Fear she turns her attention to the current political crisis that has polarized American since the 2016 election. Although today’s atmosphere is marked by partisanship, divisive rhetoric, and the inability of two halves of the country to communicate with one another, Nussbaum focuses on what so many pollsters and pundits have overlooked. She sees a simple truth at the heart of the problem: the political is always emotional. Globalization has produced feelings of powerlessness in millions of people in the West. That sense of powerlessness bubbles into resentment and blame. Blame of immigrants. Blame of Muslims. Blame of other races. Blame of cultural elites. While this politics of blame is exemplified by the election of Donald Trump and the vote for Brexit, Nussbaum argues it can be found on all sides of the political spectrum, left or right. Drawing on a mix of historical and contemporary examples, from classical Athens to the musical Hamilton, The Monarchy of Fear untangles this web of feelings and provides a roadmap of where to go next.

Download or read book Fear of Food written by Harvey Levenstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-03-08 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These include Nobel Prize-winner Eli Metchnikoff, who advised that yogurt would enable people to live to be 140, and Elmer McCollum, the "discoverer" of vitamins, who tailored his warnings about vitamin deficiencies to suit the food producers who funded him. Levenstein also highlights how large food companies have taken advantage of these concerns by marketing their products to combat the fear of the moment. Such examples include the co-opting of the "natural foods" movement, which grew out of the belief that inhabitants of a remote Himalayan Shangri-la enjoyed remarkable health by avoiding the very kinds of processed food these corporations produced, and the physiologist Ancel Keys, originator of the Mediterranean Diet, who provided the basis for a powerful coalition of scientists, doctors, food producers, and others to convince Americans that high-fat foods were deadly.

Download or read book The Paranoid Style in American Politics written by Richard Hofstadter and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-06-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.

Download or read book The Age of Eisenhower written by William I Hitchcock and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller, this is the “outstanding” (The Atlantic), insightful, and authoritative account of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. Drawing on newly declassified documents and thousands of pages of unpublished material, The Age of Eisenhower tells the story of a masterful president guiding the nation through the great crises of the 1950s, from McCarthyism and the Korean War through civil rights turmoil and Cold War conflicts. This is a portrait of a skilled leader who, despite his conservative inclinations, found a middle path through the bitter partisanship of his era. At home, Eisenhower affirmed the central elements of the New Deal, such as Social Security; fought the demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy; and advanced the agenda of civil rights for African-Americans. Abroad, he ended the Korean War and avoided a new quagmire in Vietnam. Yet he also charted a significant expansion of America’s missile technology and deployed a vast array of covert operations around the world to confront the challenge of communism. As he left office, he cautioned Americans to remain alert to the dangers of a powerful military-industrial complex that could threaten their liberties. Today, presidential historians rank Eisenhower fifth on the list of great presidents, and William Hitchcock’s “rich narrative” (The Wall Street Journal) shows us why Ike’s stock has risen so high. He was a gifted leader, a decent man of humble origins who used his powers to advance the welfare of all Americans. Now more than ever, with this “complete and persuasive assessment” (Booklist, starred review), Americans have much to learn from Dwight Eisenhower.

Download or read book The Coddling of the American Mind written by Greg Lukianoff and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something is going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and afraid to speak honestly. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths are incompatible with basic psychological principles, as well as ancient wisdom from many cultures. They interfere with healthy development. Anyone who embraces these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—is less likely to become an autonomous adult able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to produce these untruths. They situate the conflicts on campus in the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization, including a rise in hate crimes and off-campus provocation. They explore changes in childhood including the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.

Download or read book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas written by Hunter S. Thompson and published by . This book was released on 2003-04-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a reissue of the novel inspired by Hunter S. Thompson's ether-fuelled, savage journey to the heart of the American Dream: We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold... And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.

Download or read book How to Not Be Afraid of Everything written by Jane Wong and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores the vulnerable ways we articulate and reckon with fear: fear of intergenerational trauma and the silent, hidden histories of families. What does it mean to grow up in a take-out restaurant, surrounded by food, just a generation after the Great Leap Forward famine in 1958-62. Full of elegy and resilient joy, these poems speak across generations of survival. How much of the world do we fear? How can we find comfort and ancestral power in this fear?"--

Download or read book Be Afraid Be Very Afraid written by Harold Jan Brunvand and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-10-05 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of over ninety frightening urban legends, arranged by theme.