New Books in Popular Culture

“You’re in our world now.” This bold tagline led Sony’s 1999 ad blitz for EverQuest (Boss Fight Books, 2024), the year’s most anticipated massively multiplayer game. Though just five words long, it challenged players to live in a virtual world beyond anything they’d experienced before—and delivered. The game that proved the MMORPG’s potential, EverQuest outsold all prior entries in the genre and w...

The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and countless others who invented the gaming industry. Astrosmash, Snafu, Star Strike, Utopia—do these names sound familiar to you? No? Maybe? They were all videogames created for the Intellivision videogame system, sold by Mattel Electronics between 1979...

A. L. McClanan's Griffinology: The Griffin's Place in Myth, History and Art (Reaktion, 2024) is a fascinating exploration of the mythical creature's many depictions in human culture. Drawing on a wealth of historical and literary sources, this book shows how the griffin has captured the imagination of people for over 5,000 years, representing power, transcendence and even divinity. It explores the...

By the 1970s, World War II had all but disappeared from US popular culture. But beginning in the mid-eighties it reemerged with a vengeance, and for nearly fifteen years World War II was ubiquitous across US popular and political culture. In Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Barbara A. Biesecker explores the...

Hounds Of Love invites you to not only listen, but to cross the boundaries of sensory experience into realms of imagination and possibility. Side A spawned four Top 40 hit singles in the UK, 'Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)', 'Cloudbusting', 'Hounds of Love' and 'The Big Sky', some of the best-loved and most enduring compositions in Bush's catalogue. On side B, a hallucinatory seven-part so...

Victoria Sturtevant's It’s All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy (University of Texas Press, 2024) is about how changing depictions of pregnancy in comedy from the start of the twentieth century to the present show an evolution in attitudes toward women’s reproductive roles and rights. Some of the most groundbreaking moments in American film and TV comedy have cente...

How does the music industry actually work? In Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry: Remaking the Major Record Label from the Inside Out Toby Bennett, a Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture & Organisation in the School of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster offers a deep ethnography of everyday life in a contemporary record company. The book examines the challenges facing...

What happened to culture in 2020? In Like Lockdown Never Happened: Music and Culture During Covid (Repeater, 2024), Joy White, a Lecturer in Applied Social Studies at the University of Bedfordshire, explores the impact of Covid, along with social, community and artistic responses. The book ranges widely, including comparative analysis of the UK and Jamaica, deep dives into contemporary Black music...

It’s no secret that superhero comics and their related media perpetuate a model of a straight, white, male hero at the expense of representing women and other minorities, but other narratives exist. Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sam Langsdale recognizes that female-led superhero comics, with diverse casts o...

Seth Rogovoy's latest book for Oxford University Press is called Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison (Oxford University Press, 2024). Often, biographies of musicians put the story of the subject’s life front and center, letting the music recede into the background. For a musician like George Harrison, this would be a mistake. George, the lead guitarist of the Beatles, sometimes re...

In this podcast, Nick Butler explores humour's complex and often controversial role in shaping modern political discourse, examining how jokes can challenge and reinforce power structures. Whether you're interested in the intersection of humour and politics or curious about the cultural implications of what’s considered "offensive," this conversation promises to be both insightful and engaging. Tu...

In his new book, Instrument of War: Music and the Making of the America's Soldiers (University of Chicago Press, 2024), David Suisman shows that the US military has deep and multilayered investment in music. It employs thousands of musicians, whose music creates communal norms and identities. Music also helps soldiers to grapple with the realities of combat, while serving as a weapon in its own ri...

From Broadway to the Bronx: New York City’s History through Song (Intellect, 2024) tells the history of New York City in song across a variety of different genres that the city has been home to and instrumental in developing, covering everything from early twentieth-century sheet music to Broadway’s musical theater, hip-hop, disco, punk, dancehall, but also contemporary metal, rock, and pop. It fe...

In Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) Dr. Travis A. Weisse tells a new history of modern diets in America that goes beyond the familiar narrative of the nation's collective failure to lose weight. By exploring how the popularity of diets grew alongside patients' frustrations with the limitations and failures of the...

Little is known about the boy detective in Japanese detective fiction despite his popularity. Who is he, and what mysteries does he unveil about cultural understandings of youth in Japanese society? Manga, Murder and Mystery: The Boy Detectives of Japan’s Lost Generation (Bloomsbury, 2023) answers these questions by exploring the figure of the shonen (boy) detective in commercially successful mang...

A turkey is the centerpiece of countless Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Yet most of us know almost nothing about today’s specially bred, commercially produced birds. In this brief book, bestselling author Peter Singer tells their story—and, unfortunately, it’s not a happy one. Along the way, he also offers a brief history of the turkey and its consumption, ridicules the annual U.S. presidenti...

Devotional Fanscapes: Bollywood Star Deities, Devotee-Fans, and Cultural Politics in India and Beyond (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) examines how fans worship film stars as deities. Focusing on temples dedicated to Bollywood (Hindi cinema) stars and the artifacts produced by Hindi and Tamil cinema fans, Shalini Kakar illustrates how the fan constructs their identity as a devotee and that of the st...

Cosplay, born from the fusion of ‘costume’ and ‘play’, transcends mere dress-up by transforming enthusiasts of TV shows, movies, books or video games into living embodiments of their cherished characters. Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Vivian Asimos is a close exploration of the vibrant world of cosplay, showing what makes it so captivating for so many. The book frame...

Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Wesleyan UP, 2024) recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from below," following the musicians as they built commu...

In The Image Maker: Shattering Rock and Roll's Glass Ceiling (2023), Connie DeNave shares her experiences in the public relations world during the British Invasion and the beginning of rock-n-roll marketing. Born in Brooklyn, New York, DeNave graduated from Hunter College and found herself with no job skills. Throughout the mid-1950s to the 1980s, DeNave was rock and roll's first female press agen...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Kwame Harrison, Alumni Distinguished Professor and Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech. Harrison records and performs under the moniker “Mad Squirrel” and has co-founded two groups—the San-Francisco-based Forest Fires Collective and Washington DC’s The Acorns—as well as releasing various solo projects. Harrison is the author of Hip Hop Underground:...

When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis became First Lady of the United States over sixty years ago, she stepped into the public spotlight. Although Jackie is perhaps best known for her two highly-publicized marriages, her legacy has endured beyond twentieth-century pop culture and she remains an object of public fascination today. Drawing on a range of sources– from articles penned for the women’s pages...

Millions of GIs returned from overseas in 1945. A generation of men who had left their families and had learned to kill and to quickly dispatch sexual urges were rapidly reintegrated into civilian life, told to put the war behind them with cheer and confidence. Many veterans struggled, openly or privately, with this transition. Others in society wondered what the war had wrought in them. As Erin L...

Life 24x a Second: Cinema, Selfhood, and Society (Oxford UP, 2023) highlights the life-sustaining and life-affirming power of cinema. Author Elsie Walker pays particular attention to pedagogical practice and students' reflections on what the study of cinema has given to their lives. This book provides multiple perspectives on cinema that matters for the deepest personal and social reasons-from fil...

What good is a good sense of humour especially when the humour may be ethically questionable? Although humour seems a valuable part of a good conversation and indeed a good life, jokes have never seemed more morally problematic than they do now. How can we then evaluate quips, gibes, pranks, teasing, light mockery, sarcasm when they can all too often be mean, deceitful, disrespectful, humiliating,...