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Book Notes
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Turning South Again:
Re-thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.
By Houston A. Baker Jr.
Duke University Press, 2001. 136 pages. $15.95.
Baker, the Susan Fox and George
D. Beischer Arts and Sciences Professor of English and professor
of African and African American Studies, has written what Booklist
calls a "scathing and insightful essay on race issues"
that "lyrically and evocatively explores the painful truths
of American racism." Turning South Again argues incarceration
has largely defined black life in the United States, whether
in slavery or today's prisons, and that the work of Booker T.
Washington led to "mulatto modernism," a compromised
attempt at full citizenship. Combining autobiography, literary
criticism, psychoanalysis, blues lyrics, and poetry, he meditates
on the consequences of mulatto modernism for "black modernism,"
which he defines as the achievement of mobile, life-enhancing
participation in the public sphere and economic solvency for
African Americans.
Links:
Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker
T.
Houston
A. Baker Jr.
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The Cold War and the Color
Line:
American Race Relations in the Global Arena
By Thomas Borstelmann A.M. '86, Ph.D. '90.
Harvard University Press, 2001. 369 pages. $35.
After World War II, the United
States faced two challenges: the administration of global responsibilities
as the world's strongest power and the management of a growing
domestic struggle for racial justice and civil rights. The Cold
War emphasized the American commitment to freedom, even as the
absence of that freedom for nonwhite Americans created an embarrassing
contradiction. The Cold War and the Color Line examines the
intersection of the Cold War with the final destruction of global
white supremacy, paying close attention to southern Africa and
the American South as the primary sites of white authority's
last stand. In doing so, it places the history of American race
relations into an international context.
Links:
The
Cold War and the Color Line
Thomas
Borstelmann
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Do Bald Men
Get Half-Price Haircuts?
In Search of America's Great Barber Shops
By Vince Staten '69.
Simon and Schuster, 2001. 175 pages. $19.
Why are the stripes on a barber pole red and white?
How did The Beatles almost kill the barbershop? What was Plutarch's
favorite barber joke? Staten has provided the answers to these
and other quirky questions about the American barbershop in
his carefully researched, humorous look at a small-town institution,
which dares to take the surprising position that the mullet
isn't the worst haircut in history.
Links:
Do
Bald Men Get Half-Price Haircuts?
"Hair Today,
Gone Tomorrow,"on Wisconsin Public Radio
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The Lure of
the Edge:
Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs
By Brenda Denzler Ph.D. '98.
University of California, 2001. 313 pages. $35.
UFO phenomena entered American consciousness at
the beginning of the Cold War and eventually entered the public
imagination as a cultural myth of the twentieth century. Denzler
examines the scientific and religious perspectives of the UFO/alien
abduction movement, surveying its sociological contours as a
community and its attempts to achieve scientific legitimacy,
concluding with a look at the movement's spiritual component.
The Lure of the Edge repositions what may be considered a marginal
segment of society into a central debate about the nature of
science and technology and the production of modern myth.
Links:
The
Lure of the Edge
The X-Files
Brenda
Denzler
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The Fiscal
Challenge of an Aging Industrial World
By Robert Stowe England '67.
Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2002.
155 pages. $21.95.
In the coming half-century, the proportion of elderly
in developed nations will nearly double, challenging the sustainability
of old-age pensions and health care. England's study, produced
for the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Global
Aging Initiative, examines that challenge, and offers alternative
forecasts for the leading industrialized nations.
Links:
The Fiscal
Challenge of an Aging Industrial World
Center for Strategic and International
Studies
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Enfants Terribles:
Youth and Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945-1968
By Susan Weiner Ph.D. '93.
Johns Hopkins Press, 2001. 251 pages. $38.
As imagined by the postwar media in France, the
teenage girl was no longer a demure and daughterly jeune fille.
Instead, she had become an enfant terrible. Weiner focuses on
the role of gender in representations of youth in post-war France,
showing how young men and women became symbols of different
aspects of social order and disorder in a troubled nation. The
anxieties of a country traumatized by Nazi occupation and the
Cold War, becoming increasingly consumer-minded, and caught
in an undeclared war in Algeria, all found expression in the
portrayal of these enfants terribles.
Links:
Enfants
Terribles
Susan
Weiner
Zazie
dans le Metro
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