Download or read book Steel Chair to the Head written by Nicholas Sammond and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-13 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The antagonists—oiled, shaved, pierced, and tattooed; the glaring lights; the pounding music; the shouting crowd: professional wrestling is at once spectacle, sport, and business. Steel Chair to the Head provides a multifaceted look at the popular phenomenon of pro wrestling. The contributors combine critical rigor with a deep appreciation of wrestling as a unique cultural form, the latest in a long line of popular performance genres. They examine wrestling as it happens in the ring, is experienced in the stands, is portrayed on television, and is discussed in online chat rooms. In the process, they reveal wrestling as an expression of the contradictions and struggles that shape American culture. The essayists include scholars in anthropology, psychology, film studies, communication studies, and sociology, one of whom used to wrestle professionally. Classic studies of wrestling by Roland Barthes, Carlos Monsiváis, Sharon Mazer, and Henry Jenkins appear alongside original essays. Whether exploring how pro wrestling inflects race, masculinity, and ideas of reality and authenticity; how female fans express their enthusiasm for male wrestlers; or how lucha libre provides insights into Mexican social and political life, Steel Chair to the Head gives due respect to pro wrestling by treating it with the same thorough attention usually reserved for more conventional forms of cultural expression. Contributors. Roland Barthes, Douglas L. Battema, Susan Clerc, Laurence de Garis, Henry Jenkins III, Henry Jenkins IV, Heather Levi, Sharon Mazer, Carlos Monsiváis, Lucia Rahilly, Catherine Salmon, Nicholas Sammond, Phillip Serrat, Philip Sewell

Download or read book Steel Chair to the Head written by Nicholas Sammond and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-13 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The People's collection of cultural studies essays on wrestling.

Download or read book Steel Chair to the Head written by Nicholas Sammond and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-13 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The antagonists—oiled, shaved, pierced, and tattooed; the glaring lights; the pounding music; the shouting crowd: professional wrestling is at once spectacle, sport, and business. Steel Chair to the Head provides a multifaceted look at the popular phenomenon of pro wrestling. The contributors combine critical rigor with a deep appreciation of wrestling as a unique cultural form, the latest in a long line of popular performance genres. They examine wrestling as it happens in the ring, is experienced in the stands, is portrayed on television, and is discussed in online chat rooms. In the process, they reveal wrestling as an expression of the contradictions and struggles that shape American culture. The essayists include scholars in anthropology, psychology, film studies, communication studies, and sociology, one of whom used to wrestle professionally. Classic studies of wrestling by Roland Barthes, Carlos Monsiváis, Sharon Mazer, and Henry Jenkins appear alongside original essays. Whether exploring how pro wrestling inflects race, masculinity, and ideas of reality and authenticity; how female fans express their enthusiasm for male wrestlers; or how lucha libre provides insights into Mexican social and political life, Steel Chair to the Head gives due respect to pro wrestling by treating it with the same thorough attention usually reserved for more conventional forms of cultural expression. Contributors. Roland Barthes, Douglas L. Battema, Susan Clerc, Laurence de Garis, Henry Jenkins III, Henry Jenkins IV, Heather Levi, Sharon Mazer, Carlos Monsiváis, Lucia Rahilly, Catherine Salmon, Nicholas Sammond, Phillip Serrat, Philip Sewell

Download or read book Professional Wrestling written by Sharon Mazer and published by Enactments. This book was released on 2020-11-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wildly popular form of mass media and live entertainment, professional wrestling makes a spectacle of violent acts. With its long history of working contemporary events into storylines and commenting upon cultural and military conflicts, professional wrestling is also intrinsically political. Its performance--theatricalities, machinations and conditions of production, figurations, and audiences--arises from and engages with the world around. Whether flowing with the mainstream of popular culture or fighting at the fringes, professional wrestling shows us how we are fighting, what we are fighting about, and what we are fighting for. This edited volume asks how professional wrestling is implicated in the current resurgence of populist politics, whether right-wing and Trump-inflected, or leftist and socialist. How might it do more than reflect and, in so doing, reaffirm the status quo? While provoked by the disruptive performances of Trump as candidate and president, and mindful of his longstanding ties to the WWE, this timely volume looks more broadly and internationally at the infusion of professional wrestling's worldview into the twinned discourses of politics and populism. The contributors are scholars from a wide range of disciplines: theater and performance studies; cultural, media, and communication studies; anthropology and sociology; and gender and sexuality studies. Together they argue that the game's popularity and its populist tendencies open it to the left as well as to the right, to contestation as well as to conformity, making it an ideal site for working on feminist and activist projects and ideas.

Download or read book The Empty Chair written by Jeffery Deaver and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-01-09 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reowned criminalist Lincoln Rhyme is pitted against Amelia Sachs, his own brilliant protegee, as they disagree on the analysis of a crime they began working together.

Download or read book Southern Lights written by Danielle Steel and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2009-10-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Danielle Steel sweeps us from a Manhattan courtroom to the Deep South in her powerful new novel—at once a behind-closed-doors look into the heart of a family and a tale of crime and punishment. Eleven years have passed since Alexa Hamilton left the South behind, fleeing the pain of her ex-husband’s betrayal and the cruelty of his prominent Charleston family. Now an assistant D.A. in Manhattan, Alexa has finally put her demons to rest, making a name for herself as a top prosecutor, handling the city’s toughest cases while juggling her role as devoted single mom to a teenage daughter. But everything changes when Alexa is handed her latest case: the trial of accused serial killer Luke Quentin. Sifting through mountains of forensic evidence, Alexa prepares for a high-stakes trial…until threatening letters throw her private life into turmoil. The letters are addressed to her beautiful seventeen-year-old daughter, Savannah, whom Alexa has been raising alone since her divorce. Alexa is certain that Quentin is behind the letters—and that they are too dangerous to ignore. Suddenly she must make the toughest choice of all—and send her daughter back to the very place she swore she would never return to: the place where her marriage ended in heartbreak…her ex-husband’s world of southern tradition, memories of betrayal, and the antebellum charm of Charleston. Now, while Alexa’s trial builds to a climax in New York, her daughter is settling into southern life, discovering a part of her family history and a father she barely knows--from the ice-cold stepmother who stole him away to a fascinating ancestry and a half-sister and half-brothers she comes to love. As secrets are exposed and old wounds are healed, Alexa and Savannah, after a season in different worlds, will come together again—strengthened by the challenges they have faced, changed by the mysteries they have unraveled, and with Savannah now at home in the southern world her mother fled. In this masterfully told tale, Danielle Steel creates a stunning array of contrasts: from the gritty chaos of Manhattan’ s criminal court system to the seductive gentility of the South, from the rage of a hardened criminal to the tender bond between a mother and daughter—and a loving father who has welcomed Savannah home at last. A novel that will catch you off guard at every turn, Southern Lights is Danielle Steel at her electrifying best.

Download or read book Hot Lights Cold Steel written by Michael J. Collins and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Michael Collins decides to become a surgeon, he is totally unprepared for the chaotic life of a resident at a major hospital. A natural overachiever, Collins' success, in college and medical school led to a surgical residency at one of the most respected medical centers in the world, the famed Mayo Clinic. But compared to his fellow residents Collins feels inadequate and unprepared. All too soon, the euphoria of beginning his career as an orthopedic resident gives way to the feeling he is a counterfeit, an imposter who has infiltrated a society of brilliant surgeons. This story of Collins' four-year surgical residency traces his rise from an eager but clueless first-year resident to accomplished Chief Resident in his final year. With unparalleled humor, he recounts the disparity between people's perceptions of a doctor's glamorous life and the real thing: a succession of run down cars that are towed to the junk yard, long weekends moonlighting at rural hospitals, a family that grows larger every year, and a laughable income. Collins' good nature helps him over some of the rough spots but cannot spare him the harsh reality of a doctor's life. Every day he is confronted with decisions that will change people's lives-or end them-forever. A young boy's leg is mangled by a tractor: risk the boy's life to save his leg, or amputate immediately? A woman diagnosed with bone cancer injures her hip: go through a painful hip operation even though she has only months to live? Like a jolt to the system, he is faced with the reality of suffering and death as he struggles to reconcile his idealism and aspiration to heal with the recognition of his own limitations and imperfections. Unflinching and deeply engaging, Hot Lights, Cold Steel is a humane and passionate reminder that doctors are people too. This is a gripping memoir, at times devastating, others triumphant, but always compulsively readable.

Download or read book Controversy Creates Cash written by Eric Bischoff and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under Eric Bishoff's watch as president of WCW, the company went head to head with Vince McMahon's WWE and beat them at their own game before WCW itself spectacularly imploded. But by then, Bishoff had made an indelible mark on televised wrestling, producing shows that had appeared more dangerous, more sexy, and more edgy than anything that had come before. He did this to such an extent that in 2002, McMahon seized the chance to bring in his former nemesis as General Manager of RAW; since then, true to form, Bishoff regularly surprises fans with matches that would once have been unthinkable for television. In this revelatory look at his life and career, Bishoff frankly discusses the things he did, both right and wrong, as he helped shape the sports entertainment industry into today's billion dollar business.

Download or read book Rhetorical Crossover written by Cedric Burrows and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In music, crossover means that a song has moved beyond its original genre and audience into the general social consciousness. Rhetorical Crossover uses the same concept to theorize how the black rhetorical presence has moved in mainstream spaces in an era where African Americans were becoming more visible in white culture. Cedric Burrows argues that when black rhetoric moves into the dominant culture, white audiences appear welcoming to African Americans as long as they present an acceptable form of blackness for white tastes. The predominant culture has always constructed coded narratives on how the black rhetorical presence should appear and behave when in majority spaces. In response, African Americans developed their own narratives that revise and reinvent mainstream narratives while also reaffirming their humanity. Using an interdisciplinary model built from music, education, film, and social movement studies, Rhetorical Crossover details the dueling narratives about African Americans that percolate throughout the United States.

Download or read book Birth of an Industry written by Nicholas Sammond and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond describes how popular early American cartoon characters were derived from blackface minstrelsy. He charts the industrialization of animation in the early twentieth century, its representation in the cartoons themselves, and how important blackface minstrels were to that performance, standing in for the frustrations of animation workers. Cherished cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, were conceived and developed using blackface minstrelsy's visual and performative conventions: these characters are not like minstrels; they are minstrels. They play out the social, cultural, political, and racial anxieties and desires that link race to the laboring body, just as live minstrel show performers did. Carefully examining how early animation helped to naturalize virulent racial formations, Sammond explores how cartoons used laughter and sentimentality to make those stereotypes seem not only less cruel, but actually pleasurable. Although the visible links between cartoon characters and the minstrel stage faded long ago, Sammond shows how important those links are to thinking about animation then and now, and about how cartoons continue to help to illuminate the central place of race in American cultural and social life.

Download or read book Human Dimension and Interior Space written by Julius Panero and published by Watson-Guptill. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of human body measurements on a comparative basis is known as anthropometrics. Its applicability to the design process is seen in the physical fit, or interface, between the human body and the various components of interior space. Human Dimension and Interior Space is the first major anthropometrically based reference book of design standards for use by all those involved with the physical planning and detailing of interiors, including interior designers, architects, furniture designers, builders, industrial designers, and students of design. The use of anthropometric data, although no substitute for good design or sound professional judgment should be viewed as one of the many tools required in the design process. This comprehensive overview of anthropometrics consists of three parts. The first part deals with the theory and application of anthropometrics and includes a special section dealing with physically disabled and elderly people. It provides the designer with the fundamentals of anthropometrics and a basic understanding of how interior design standards are established. The second part contains easy-to-read, illustrated anthropometric tables, which provide the most current data available on human body size, organized by age and percentile groupings. Also included is data relative to the range of joint motion and body sizes of children. The third part contains hundreds of dimensioned drawings, illustrating in plan and section the proper anthropometrically based relationship between user and space. The types of spaces range from residential and commercial to recreational and institutional, and all dimensions include metric conversions. In the Epilogue, the authors challenge the interior design profession, the building industry, and the furniture manufacturer to seriously explore the problem of adjustability in design. They expose the fallacy of designing to accommodate the so-called average man, who, in fact, does not exist. Using government data, including studies prepared by Dr. Howard Stoudt, Dr. Albert Damon, and Dr. Ross McFarland, formerly of the Harvard School of Public Health, and Jean Roberts of the U.S. Public Health Service, Panero and Zelnik have devised a system of interior design reference standards, easily understood through a series of charts and situation drawings. With Human Dimension and Interior Space, these standards are now accessible to all designers of interior environments.

Download or read book Craving written by Helen Hardt and published by Waterhouse Press. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Your Escape Into A World of Dark Mysteries & Spicy Romance. A jilted bride. A broken man. A craving that can’t be denied. After being left at the altar, Jade Roberts seeks solace at her best friend's ranch on the Colorado western slope. Her humiliation still ripe, she doesn't expect to be attracted to her friend's reticent brother, but when the gorgeous cowboy kisses her, all bets are off. Talon Steel is broken. Having never fully healed from a horrific childhood trauma, he simply exists, taking from women what is offered and giving nothing in return...until Jade Roberts catapults into his life. She is beautiful, sweet, and giving, and his desire for her becomes a craving he fears he'll never be able to satisfy. Passion sizzles between the two lovers...but long-buried secrets haunt them both and may eventually tear them apart.

Download or read book Inside Out Back Again written by Thanhha Lai and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving to America turns H&à's life inside out. For all the 10 years of her life, H&à has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by, and the beauty of her very own papaya tree. But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. H&à and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, H&à discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape, and the strength of her very own family. This is the moving story of one girl's year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.

Download or read book Babes in Tomorrowland written by Nicholas Sammond and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-20 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linking Margaret Mead to the Mickey Mouse Club and behaviorism to Bambi, Nicholas Sammond traces a path back to the early-twentieth-century sources of “the normal American child.” He locates the origins of this hypothetical child in the interplay between developmental science and popular media. In the process, he shows that the relationship between the media and the child has long been much more symbiotic than arguments that the child is irrevocably shaped by the media it consumes would lead one to believe. Focusing on the products of the Walt Disney company, Sammond demonstrates that without a vision of a normal American child and the belief that movies and television either helped or hindered its development, Disney might never have found its market niche as the paragon of family entertainment. At the same time, without media producers such as Disney, representations of the ideal child would not have circulated as freely in American popular culture. In vivid detail, Sammond describes how the latest thinking about human development was translated into the practice of child-rearing and how magazines and parenting manuals characterized the child as the crucible of an ideal American culture. He chronicles how Walt Disney Productions’ greatest creation—the image of Walt Disney himself—was made to embody evolving ideas of what was best for the child and for society. Bringing popular child-rearing manuals, periodicals, advertisements, and mainstream sociological texts together with the films, tv programs, ancillary products, and public relations materials of Walt Disney Productions, Babes in Tomorrowland reveals a child that was as much the necessary precursor of popular media as the victim of its excesses.

Download or read book A History of Stone and Steel written by Assistant Professor Co-Chair Keyboard Division G Christopher Fisher and published by . This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Paul Keppel learns that his fanatical, fire-and-brimstone-preaching grandfather is dying from brain cancer, he sees his own chronic headaches as a sign from above that he too has a very short time to live. Driven by pain, a nightmare about work boots, and a sense of impending doom, Paul soon finds himself losing control over his words and actions, to disastrous and comical effect. In order to save his marriage, avenge his sister, and preserve his sanity, he must face the memory of the summer when he was twenty-one, when a tragic steel plant accident sent his life spinning off course. But in the process, Paul begins to suspect that the history he has written in his head may not be as accurate as he once believed.

Download or read book Daughter of War written by Brad Taylor and published by Dutton Books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **A New York Times Bestseller** Former Special Forces Officer and New York Times bestselling author Brad Taylor delivers a heart-pounding thriller featuring Taskforce operators Pike Logan and Jennifer Cahill as they come face to face with a conspiracy where nothing is as it seems. Hot on the trail of a North Korean looking to sell sensitive US intelligence to the Syrian regime, Pike Logan and the Taskforce stumble upon something much graver: the sale of a lethal substance called Red Mercury. Unbeknownst to the Taskforce, the Syrians plan to use the weapon of mass destruction against American and Kurdish forces, and blame the attack on terrorists, causing western nations to reassess their participation in the murky cauldron of the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, North Korea has its own devastating agenda: a double-cross that will dwarf the attack in Syria even as it lays the blame on the Syrian government. Leveraging Switzerland's fame for secrecy and its vast network of military bunkers, now repurposed by private investors for the clandestine storage of wealth, North Korea will use Red Mercury to devastate the West's ability to deliver further sanctions against the rogue regime. As the Taskforce begins to unravel the plot, a young refugee unwittingly holds the key to the conspiracy. Hunted across Europe for reasons she cannot fathom, she is the one person who can stop the attack--if she can live long enough for Pike and Jennifer to find her.

Download or read book Undisputed written by Chris Jericho and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2011-02-16 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Entertaining . . .an insightful and funny observer of pro wrestling's universe." -- Publishers Weekly In this insightful, riveting book, Jericho takes us into WWE wrestling arenas around the world as he details his classic rivalries with The Rock, Steve Austin, HHH, Shawn Michaels, and John Cena, along with all the politics and backstage machinations he faced outside the ring. Chris recounts his hilarious escapades of breaking in with the Hollywood elite via doomed auditions, short-lived reality shows, made-for-television movies, and red-carpet interviewing fiascos. Jam packed with CJ's trademark self-effacing humor, one-of-a-kind writing style, and ridiculous random encounters with everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Axl Rose, and Wayne Gretzky to Paul McCartney, and Howard Stern, Undisputed is one of a rare breed-a sequel that might be better than the original.