New Books in Popular Culture

Gretchen Dykstra‘s career to date has been both impressive and wide-ranging. She was the founding President of the Times Square Alliance, the former Commissioner of the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs, and the founding President of the 9/11 Memorial Foundation. She is also a writer, and in this New Books in Folklore episode, she is interviewed about her biography of her grandfather, Franz Ricka...

In Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (UNC Press, 2017), Andrew McKevitt explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese. Would Japan’s remarkable post World War II economic success enable the East Asian nation to overtake the United States? Or could Japan’s globe-trotting corporations serve as a model for batt...

We’ve featured a few books on fashion and the Muslim world recently, all part of an effort to re-orient the study of women in the Muslim and Arabic-speaking worlds. Elizabeth Bucar’s Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Harvard University Press, 2017) uses three different Muslim populations, Iran, Indonesia and Turkey, to look at what Muslim women wear and how it reflects individual agency. What...

Today we are joined by Paul Hensler, author of the book The New Boys of Summer: Baseball’s Radical Transformation in the Late Sixties (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). Paul is a baseball historian and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research. He has also written The American League in Transition, 1965-1975: How Competition Thrived When the Yankees Didn’t, and has written for NINE: A Jo...

How can Lacan help us to understand the subversive potential of video games? In The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), Alfie Bown, Assistant Professor of Literature at HSMC, Hong Kong, explores this and many other questions of the modern condition. The book offers an accessible overview of key psychoanalytic theories to understand the video game, in particular the video game experience and its...

What were the dreams of the Civil War? Find out by listening to my conversation with Jonathan White about his new book Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Jonathan W. White is associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. He is the author of several books and almost one hundred articles, essa...

Today we are joined by Brett L. Abrams, author of the book Terry Bradshaw: From Super Bowl Champion to Television Personality (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). It is part of a series called Sports Icons and Issues in Popular Culture. Abrams, an archivist of electronic records in Washington. D.C., does more than just document the football career of Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw, who won four...

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow‘s book, Personal Stereo (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) , which is part of the Object Lessons series, offers a compelling and expertly researched study of the Sony Walkman, taking into account the device’s controversial origin story, the seismic cultural impact on society in the 1980s, the worries of diminishing social interactions, and the philosophical implications of listening...

In his new book, Stan Lee: The Man Behind Marvel (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), cultural historian and biographer Bob Batchelor examines the life of Marvel’s Stan Lee one of the most iconic figures in comic book history. Batchelor has written the first biography of Stan Lee. Starting with his childhood as a Depression-era New Yorker born to immigrant parents, Batchelor follows Lee’s career as a t...

Studio 54 opened its doors 40 years ago and since that time it has held a place in American popular culture. Studio 54 was the place to go dancing to great music, mingle with celebrities and beautiful people, and do drugs night after night. In his historical and cultural memoir as the owner of Studio 54, Mark Fleischman takes readers behind the scenes and the into the basement rooms and dark corne...

Why are you still single? This question is often asked of single women, especially those who are deemed by loved ones or friends to be too old to be single. In her newest book, A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time (Manchester University Press, 2017), Kinneret Lahad analyzes this undertheorized aspect of the gendered experience. Singlehood is inextricably linked to a p...

I Was Britpopped: The A-Z of Britpop (Valley Press, 2017) is a comprehensive guide to the people, the bands, the places, and the events that shaped British music in the mid-to-late 1990s. Taking on the form of a A-Z guide, the book doesn’t gloss over even the most remote B-Side or bands who only fleetingly played a role in the genre. Every entry is carefully researched and expertly written to pain...

Though not a figure in the public imagination today, William Fox is a man whose legacy is visible in the numerous media enterprises that bear his name. Vanda Krefft‘s biography The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox (Harper, 2017) leads readers through the remarkable arc of Fox’s life, one that took him from the slums of New York City to the glittering lights...

Richard Power Sayeed’s book, 1997: The Future that Never Happened (Zed Books, 2017), is a brilliant and exhaustively researched account of the late 1990s. The subject matter covered is broad. From music to politics, from feminism to the media, it paints a picture of an era in which those living and invested in British society never had it so good. The outlook was sunny, yet this positive future ne...

In A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-Up Comedy (The University Press of Mississippi, 2014), Ian Brodie, an associate professor of folklore at Cape Breton University, brings a folkloristic approach to the study of stand-up comedy. By focusing on comedic performance, Brodie shows stand-up comedy to be a collaborative act between comedian and audience similar to folk performance around the world,...

Kathryn Lofton is a professor of religious studies and history at Yale University. Her book Consuming Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers a collection of eleven essays of cultural critique that reflect on the connections between religion, consumer culture, celebrity and the corporation. Her definition of religion is capacious and founded on Durkheim’s understanding of it as a form...

In her new book, Beyond the Silver Screen: A History of Women, Filmmaking and Film Culture in Australia, 1920-1990 (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), Mary Tomsic, an ARC Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Melbourne, explores the history of women’s engagement with filmmaking and film culture in Australia. From early women in film, like Lottie Lyell, to feminist filmmakers of...

Today we are joined by Adam J. Criblez, author of the book Tall Tales and Short Shorts: Dr. J, Pistol Pete, and The Birth of the Modern NBA (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). In his second book, Criblez tells the story of the most maligned decade of professional basketball the 1970s. Tall Tales and Short Shorts takes the reader from the retirement of Bill Russell in 1969, which ended the great dynasty...

In her book, Death Makes the News: How the Media Censor and Display the Dead (NYU Press, 2017), Jessica M. Fishman examines how death is presented in the media. Researching how media outlets present images of death over the past 30 years, Fishman explores the controversial practice of picturing the dead. Fishman presents the varying ways the press selects the images they choose to use, the way the...

Material success and prosperity are the aspirational goal for many Americans. The myth of meritocracy embedded in this national ethos has made this dream a civil religion. In Profane Parables: Film and the American Dream (Baylor University Press, 2016), Matthew S. Rindge, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Gonzaga University, explores critiques of this vision of contemporary America in po...

Often, poetry and punk rock are seen as distinct activities that occur in different locations with separate audiences. Many would also ascribe to them varying levels of cultural and political capital. Daniel Kane, the author of Do You Have a Band?: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City (Columbia University Press, 2017) challenges these notions and explores the interaction between the New York Scho...

In his new book, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Cultural Studies scholar Joel Dinerstein explores the cultural history of cool and the codes that defined the style and attitude of this relatively new concept. Using cultural icons such as Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Albert Camus, Billie Holiday, Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando, Miles Davis, and Lorraine H...

“How can the modern individual maintain control over his or her self-representation when the whole world seems to be watching?” This is the question that prompts Julia Fawcett‘s new book, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801 (University of Michigan Press, 2016). Drawing on a diverse range of material to analyze some of England’s earliest modern celebrities, Fawcett offers a...

Ever since Donald Trump was elected President, he’s created a non-stop torrent of news, so much so that members of the media regularly claim that he’s effectively trashed the traditional news cycle. Whether that’s true or not, it is hard to keep up with what’s going on in the White House, and each new uproar makes it difficult to remember what’s already happened. Take Trump’s first cabinet meeting...

What are your impressions when you think of the flapper? Who is she in your mind? When and where does she exist? In her new book Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper (Reaktion Books, 2017), Linda Simon tracks the historical narrative surrounding the flapper from the late-nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth century. Using sources from popular culture and from people of th...