By examining interviews, trade magazines and even testimonies, letters, memoirs and other personal data author Regalado seeks direct impact of the superheroes on the real lives of actual people. Or rather, he aims to find out just how “the big forces of American modernity shaped the lives of Americans on an individual level and how […]
Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology by Brian Hochman (2014)
When technology and ethnographic curiosity meet, the result often is a huge body of data – mostly consisting of recordings and data stored in all varieties of the current technical standards. In five chapters, each one quite enthralling, Brian Hochman elaborates on various researchers, field studies and vanishing cultures, with subjects as Plains Indian sign […]
Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairy Tales of Victorian Britain by Melanie Keene (2015)
Mythical characters from folklore and fairy tales saw a revival unprecedented in 19th-century England. Fairies, and their realms, for many authors served as prominent means to comment on contemporary society and fairy tales were used as parables. Taking into consideration the many modern inventions such as steam engines, machines and electricity that transformed everyday life, […]
Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of ‘Consensus’ by The Subcultures Network (2015)
The seven concise chapters of the book at hand actually represent a special issue of Contemporary British History (26.3) from 2012. They were conceived as the results of a symposium devoted to examining youth-associated cultural responses to the political, economic and socio-cultural changes that transformed Britain in the aftermath of WWII. The post-war consensus (1945-1979), […]
Lee, Myself & I: Inside The Very Special World Of Lee Hazlewood by Wyndham Wallace (2015)
In case you are looking for a straightforward biography of a pop music giant, you may not immediately like Lee, Myself and I. One reason may be the large room the „Myself“ and the „I“ take up on those pages; and they refer to biographer Wallace, not to Lee Hazlewood. However, if one considers the […]
The Noir Western: Darkness on the Range 1943-1962 by David Meuel (2015)
By now, there are many excellent books on film noir, even on specific themes, locations, eras and countries. However, at least one major theme (or sub genre) has escaped the authors so far. The noir experience in America’s probably oldest and unique (usually most optimistic in outlook) movie tradition, the western, has not yet been […]
Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution by Michael Denning (2015)
The history of modern music was forever altered when in a few years after 1925 talent scouts and engineers were busy recording regional musicians and their styles, like hula, fado, beguine, calypso, marabi and many other musics. What decades later was repacked, remastered and resold as “folk,” and “roots” music, actually was local popular music; […]
Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology by Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka (eds.) (2012)
There are probably many millions of people worldwide awaiting the new Star Wars episode to be presented in December 2015, including your reviewer here. So even if the book at hand came out some months ago, now is the time to devote some lines to it. The topics of this volume are subsumed under the […]
American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz (2014)
What actually was the idea of Englishman Allen Lane during WWII found its way to the United States: the invention of a small, affordable book format, available almost anywhere where you could buy chewing gum and cigarettes. Lane, after unsuccessfully searching for small-sized books to read on his daily train rides, in 1935 founded Penguin […]