Nonfiction Descriptions: (Reviews from Amazon.Com)
Outside Reading:
Pop Culture
Nonfiction / FictionTitle / Author / Title / Author
1 / Isn't It Romantic / Ascher / Barbara / 1 / The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy / Adams / Douglas
2 / The Unsettling of America / Barry / Wendell / 2 / The Handmaid's Tale / Atwood / Margaret
3 / History of the Millennium / Barry / Dave / 3 / Fahrenheit 451 / Bradbury / Ray
4 / The Dumbest Generation / Bauerlein / Mark / 4 / Digital Fortress / Brown / Dan
5 / How to Read and Why / Bloom / Harold / 5 / Brave New World / Huxley / Aldous
6 / On Paradise Drive / Brooks / David / 6 / Getting Home Alive / Morales / Aurora
7 / Snark / Denby / David / 7 / One True Thing / Quindlen / Anna
8 / The New Golden Rule / Etziani / Amitai / 8 / Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim / Sedaris / David
9 / The Sixties / Gitlin / Todd / 9 / Slaughterhouse Five / Vonnegut / Kurt
10 / Ever Since Darwin / Gould / Stephen Jay / 10 / The Optimist's Daughter / Welty / Eudora
11 / Living Within Limits / Hardin / Garrett / 11 / The Shadow of the Wind / Zafon / Carlos Ruiz
12 / End of Illusion / Hedges / Chris
13 / Everything Bad is Good For You / Johnson / Steven
14 / Amusing Ourselves to Death / Postman / Neil
15 / Fast Food Nation / Schlosser / Eric
16 / Confessions of a Knife / Selzer / Richard
17 / Against Interpretation / Sontag / Susan
18 / The Plug-in Drug / Winn / Marie
NonFiction Descriptions: (Reviews from Amazon.com)
1. Isn’t It Romantic "An eloquent collection of essays...it means to be an outsider, forever trying to apprehend the mysterious order of things." -- Boston Globe
"This is one of those books that wakes you up to the life you have failed to live. It declares war on the part of you that settles for too little and dares or ask for enough. Barbara Ascher's book is part philosophy, part glove flung to the ground, and part cry of the heart. You read it and wonder aloud why you have not asked more for yourself. You want to tear If a from your own sleeping life and shout, 'Now!' What a wonderful book! This is one of the books I love." -- Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides and Beach Music
2. The Unsettling of America The mid-20th-century environmental crisis that led to important protective legislation in the 1970s, is, to poet/farmer Wendell Berry's mind, also a crisis of character, agriculture, and culture. Because Americans are divorced from the land, they mistreat it; because they are divorced from each other, they mistreat those around them. Berry, writing in a prophetic mode, argues that if Americans are to heal the environmental wounds their land has suffered, they will also need to create more meaningful work, sustain happier and healthier lives, and return to what conservatives call "family values."
3. History of the Millennium Humorist Barry offers a look at the new millennium thus far in this collection of the annual reviews that Barry offers through his newspaper columns. It consists of month-to-month commentary on the most outrageous events of the year—Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, the "heck of a job" done by Michael Brown during Hurricane Katrina, the failure to find WMDs in Iraq—all delivered with Barry's hilarious look at the absurdities of American life. The book includes 32 line drawings that add to the fun, as well as a bonus look at history during the first millennium, from 1000 through 1999. Barry fans and readers looking for a lighter perspective on the history of world events will enjoy this book. Bush, Vanessa
4. The Dumbest Generation It’s an irony so commonplace it’s become almost trite: despite the information superhighway, despite a world of knowledge at their fingertips, the younger generation today is less informed, less literate, and more self-absorbed than any that has preceded it. But why? According to the author, an English professor at Emory University, there are plenty of reasons. The immediacy and intimacy of social-networking sites have focused young people’s Internet use on themselves and their friends. The material they’re studying in school (such as the Civil War or The Great Gatsby) seems boring because it isn’t happening right this second and isn’t about them. They’re using the Internet not as a learning tool but as a communications tool: instant messaging, e-mail, chat, blogs. And the language of Internet communication, with its peculiar spelling, grammar, and punctuation, actually encourages illiteracy by making it socially acceptable. It wouldn’t be going too far to call this book the Why Johnny Can’t Read for the digital age. Some will disagree vehemently; others will nod sagely, muttering that they knew it all along.
5. How to Read and Why Bloom is never heavy, since his vision quest contains a healthy love of irony--Jedediah Purdy, take note: "Strip irony away from reading, and it loses at once all discipline and all surprise." And this supreme critic makes us want to equal his reading prowess because he writes as well as he reads; his epigrams are equal to his opinions. He is also a master allusionist and quoter. His section on Hedda Gabler is preceded by three extraordinary statements, two from Ibsen, who insists, "There must be a troll in what I write." Who would not want to proceed? Of course, Bloom can also accomplish his goal by sheer obstinacy. As far as he is concerned, Don Quixote may have been the first novel but it remains to this day the best one. Is he perhaps tweaking us into reading this gigantic masterwork by such bald overstatement? Bloom knows full well that a prophet should stop at nothing to get his belief and love across, and throughout How to Read and Why he is as unstinting as the visionary company he adores.
6. On Paradise Drive For readers who are feeling glum about America and its place in the world, or those who despairingly look at our culture's cookie cutter, strip mall consumerism and flash-bang glitter, Brooks (Bobos in Paradise) offers a balm with his latest pseudo-sociological treatise. More a way to look at what he sees as America's problems (e.g., our thirst for enormous gas guzzlers and super-sized soft drinks) with optimism than a series of suggestions of how to fix them, this book by the New York Times op-ed columnist tells readers it's okay to consume, consume, consume-so long as they look toward the future while doing so. At times playful and sarcastic (though less funny than intended), the book jumps from statistical analysis to cultural observation to defense of Bush's foreign policy, all without much of a mooring in essential context or factual citation. This is deceptive optimism; one long essay insisting our society's problems are not so big, provided we talk about them in the right way.
7. Snark In this highly entertaining essay, Denby traces the history of snark through the ages, starting with its invention as personal insult in the drinking clubs of ancient Athens, tracking its development all the way to the age of the Internet, where it has become the sole purpose and style of many media, political, and celebrity Web sites. Snark releases the anguish of the dispossessed, envious, and frightened; it flows when a dying class of the powerful struggles to keep the barbarians outside the gates, or, alternately, when those outsiders want to take over the halls of the powerful and expel the office-holders. Snark was behind the London-based magazine Private Eye, launched amid the dying embers of the British empire in 1961; it was also central to the career-hungry, New York-based magazine Spy. It has flourished over the years in the works of everyone from the startling Roman poet Juvenal to Alexander Pope to Tom Wolfe to a million commenters snarling at other people behind handles. Thanks to the grand dame of snark, it has a prominent place twice a week on the opinion page of the New York Times.
8. The New Golden Rule A leading communitarian thinker, sociologist Etzioni contends Americans have overemphasized individual rights in recent years. In his searching treatise, he seeks to restore an equilibrium between personal liberty and the common good, urging the diverse strands of America's social fabric to come together, to commit to a core of shared values that will help renew the family, schools and public institutions. Arguing that rights and responsibilities go hand in hand, he champions the two-parent family, national service involving voluntary participation in agencies such as the Peace Corps and Vista, a nationally standardized public school curriculum, community courts as alternatives to the official judicial system, schools as character-building agents and devolving federal functions to voluntary associations and other community bodies. Challenging liberals and conservatives alike, Etzioni, a professor at George Washington University, cuts through a welter of issues, from bicultural education to curbing alcohol abuse, in this timely contribution to the debate over what constitutes a good society.
9. The Sixties The author was elected president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963, and he brings an insider's perspective to bear on the turbulent whirl of political, social, and sexual rebellion we now call "the sixties." Gitlin does a nice job of integrating his first-person recollections with a broader history that ranges from the roots of 1960s revolt in 1950s affluence and complacency to the movement's apocalyptic collapse in the early 1970s--a victim of its own excesses as well as governmental persecution. His lucid summary of the complex strands that intertwined to form the counterculture is essential basic reading for those who don't know the difference between the Diggers and the Yippies.
10. Ever Since Darwin This popular anthology offers an introduction to the wonders and depths of evolutionary biology. "A remarkable achievement by any measure . . . One is hard pressed to single out past writers who could wear the sobriquet of natural history essayist with such distinction."--Chicago Tribune.
11. Living Within Limits "We fail to mandate economic sanity," writes Garrett Hardin, "because our brains are addled by...compassion." With such startling assertions, Hardin has cut a swathe through the field of ecology for decades, winning a reputation as a fearless and original thinker. A prominent biologist, ecological philosopher, and keen student of human population control, Hardin now offers the finest summation of his work to date, with an eloquent argument for accepting the limits of the earth's resources--and the hard choices we must make to live within them.
12. Empire of Illusion Pulitzer prize–winner Chris Hedges charts the dramatic and disturbing rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion.
Chris Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: One, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world, that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. In this “other society,” serious film and theatre, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins.
13. Everything Bad is Good For You Worried about how much time your children spend playing video games? Don't be, advises Johnson—not only are they learning valuable problem-solving skills, they'd probably do better on an IQ test than you or your parents could at their age. Go ahead and let them watch more television, too, since even reality shows can function as "elaborately staged group psychology experiments" to stimulate rather than pacify the brain. With the same winning combination of personal revelation and friendly scientific explanation he displayed in last year's Mind Wide Open, Johnson shatters the conventional wisdom about pop culture as pabulum, showing how video games, television shows and movies have become increasingly complex. Furthermore, he says, consumers are drawn specifically to those products that require the most mental engagement, from small children who can't get enough of their favorite Disney DVDs to adults who find new layers of meaning with each repeated viewing of Seinfeld. Johnson lays out a strong case that what we do for fun is just as educational in its way as what we study in the classroom (although it's still worthwhile to encourage good reading habits, too).
14. Amusing Ourselves to Death From the author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity comes a sustained, withering and thought-provoking attack on television and what it is doing to us. Postman's theme is the decline of the printed word and the ascendancy of the "tube" with its tendency to present everything, murder, mayhem, politics, weather as entertainment. The ultimate effect, as Postman sees it, is the shriveling of public discourse as TV degrades our conception of what constitutes news, political debate, art, even religious thought. Early chapters trace America's one-time love affair with the printed word, from colonial pamphlets to the publication of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. There's a biting analysis of TV commercials as a form of "instant therapy" based on the assumption that human problems are easily solvable. Postman goes further than other critics in demonstrating that television represents a hostile attack on literate culture.
15. Fast Food Nation On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating exposé with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant meatpacking corporations. Schlosser wants you to know why those French fries taste so good (with a visit to the world's largest flavor company) and "what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns."