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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Essays, journals, letters & other prose works > From 1900
With an Introduction by Rosemary O'Day. London Labour and the London Poor is a masterpiece of personal inquiry and social observation. It is the classic account of life below the margins in the greatest Metropolis in the world and a compelling portrait of the habits, tastes, amusements, appearance, speech, humour, earnings and opinions of the labouring poor at the time of the Great Exhibition. In scope, depth and detail it remains unrivalled. Mayhew takes us into the abyss, into a world without fixed employment where skills are declining and insecurity mounting, a world of criminality, pauperism and vice, of unorthodox personal relations and fluid families, a world from which regularity is absent and prosperity has departed. Making sense of this environment required curiosity, imagination and a novelist's eye for detail, and Henry Mayhew possessed all three. No previous writer had succeeded in presenting the poor through their own stories and in their own words, and in this undertaking Mayhew rivals his contemporary Dickens. 'To pass from one to the other', writes one authority,' is to cross sides of the same street'.
Investigative reporter Brian Deer exposes a conspiracy of fraud and betrayal behind attacks on a mainstay of medicine: vaccinations. 2021 IPPY Book Award Winner (Gold) in Health/Medicine/Nutrition, Recipient of the Eric Hoffer Award for Nonfiction in the Culture Category. From San Francisco to Shanghai, from Vancouver to Venice, controversy over vaccines is erupting around the globe. Fear is spreading. Banished diseases have returned. And a militant "anti-vax" movement has surfaced to campaign against children's shots. But why? In The Doctor Who Fooled the World, award-winning investigative reporter Brian Deer exposes the truth behind the crisis. Writing with the page-turning tension of a detective story, he unmasks the players and unearths the facts. Where it began. Who was responsible. How they pulled it off. Who paid. At the heart of this dark narrative is the rise of the so-called "father of the anti-vaccine movement": a British-born doctor, Andrew Wakefield. Banned from medicine, thanks to Deer's discoveries, he fled to the United States to pursue his ambitions, and now claims to be winning a "war." In an epic investigation spread across fifteen years, Deer battles medical secrecy and insider cover-ups, smear campaigns and gagging lawsuits, to uncover rigged research and moneymaking schemes, the heartbreaking plight of families struggling with disability, and the scientific scandal of our time.
The Man Who Crucified Himself is the history of a sensational nineteenth-century medical case. In 1805 a shoemaker called Mattio Lovat attempted to crucify himself in Venice. His act raised a furore, and the story spread across Europe. For the rest of the century Lovat's case fuelled scientific and popular debates on medicine, madness, suicide and religion. Drawing on Italian, German, English and French sources, Maria Boehmer traces the multiple readings of the case and identifies various 'interpretive communities'. Her meticulously researched study sheds new light on Lovat's case and offers fresh insights on the case narrative as a genre - both epistemic and literary.
'Revisiting this selection of diaries and essay-reviews from the London Review of Books is restorative, an extended spa treatment that stretches tired brains and unkinks the usual habitual responses where Hitchens is concerned.' James Wolcott in his introduction Christopher Hitchens was a star writer wherever he wrote, and the same was true of the London Review of Books, to which he contributed sixty pieces over two decades. Anthologised here for the first time, this selection of his finest LRB reviews, diaries and essays (along with a smattering of ferocious letters) finds Hitchens at his very best. Familiar betes noires - Kennedy, Nixon, Kissinger, Clinton - rub shoulders with lesser-known preoccupations: P.G. Wodehouse, Princess Margaret and, magisterially, Isaiah Berlin. Here is Hitchens on the (first) Gulf War and the 'Salman Rushdie Acid Test', on being spanked by Mrs Thatcher in the House of Lords and taking his son to the Oscars, on America's homegrown Nazis and 'Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square' in 1968. Edited by the London Review of Books, with an introduction by James Wolcott, this collection recaptures, ten years after his death, 'a Hitch in time': barnstorming, cauterising, and ultimately uncontainable.
`I must find my own complicated junkie to have violent sex with. In 1994, nothing seemed like a better idea, save being able to write about it later.' Michelle Tea is our exuberant, witty guide to the hard times and wild creativity of queer life in America. Along the way she reclaims SCUM Manifesto author Valerie Solanas as an absurdist, remembers the lives and deaths of the lesbian motorbike gang HAGS, and listens to activists at a trans protest camp. This kaleidoscope of love and adventure also makes room for a defence of pigeons and a tale of teenage goths hustling for tips at an ice creamery in a `grimy, busted city called Chelsea'. Unsparing but unwaveringly kind, Michelle Tea reveals herself and others in unexpected and heartbreaking ways. Against Memoir is the winner of the 2019 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Best known as writer of fiction and memoir, this is the first time Tea's journalism has been collected. Delivered with her signature candour and dark humour, Against Memoir solidifies her place as one of the leading queer writers of our time.
International specialists explore magazines and newspapers from a sociocultural perspective allowing us to understand the relation between its audience and these much beloved friends from the late seventeenth to the twenty first century. A must-read for academic and interested readers who wish to explore new and relevant ways to analyse periodicals.
The work deals with issues of performance, gender ambiguity, and marginality. It is concerned with the boundaries of language and the possibilities of cross-dressing poetry as commercials, diary, tabloids, gossip, confessions, videos, autobiography, musicals, and manifesto. Characters turn into other characters. Clowns, buffoons, shepherds, lead soldiers, magicians, madmen, witches, fortune-tellers, and artists perform their fantasies in the city streets. An antinovel within the book satirizes the writer's role in the modern age and calls for a revolution of poetry. New York City becomes the site of liberation for its marginal citizens, as the narrator is led through a seeming phantasmagoria of internal and external trials in order to experience the center - of political power, of meaning, of feeling, and of personal identity.
Fifty more essays from famous writers on their incurable love affair with the Big Apple What do Francine Prose, Suketu Mehta, and Edwidge Danticat have in common? Each suffers from an incurable love affair with the Big Apple, and each contributed to the canon of writing New York has inspired by way of the New York Times City Section, a part of the paper that once defined Sunday afternoon leisure for the denizens of the five boroughs. Former City Section editor Constance Rosenblum has again culled a diverse cast of voices that brought to vivid life our metropolis through those pages in this follow-up to the publication New York Stories (2005). The fifty essays in More New York Stories unite the city's best-known writers to provide a window to the bustle and richness of city life. As with the previous collection, many of the contributors need no introduction, among them Kevin Baker, Laura Shaine Cunningham, Dorothy Gallagher, Colin Harrison, Frances Kiernan, Nathaniel Rich, Jonathan Rosen, Christopher Sorrentino, and Robert Sullivan; they are among the most eloquent observers of our urban life. Others are relative newcomers. But all are voices worth listening to, and the result is a comprehensive and entertaining picture of New York in all its many guises. The section on "Characters'' offers a bouquet of indelible profiles. The section on "Places" takes us on journeys to some of the city's quintessential locales. "Rituals, Rhythms, and Ruminations" seeks to capture the city's peculiar texture, and the section called "Excavating the Past" offers slices of the city's endlessly fascinating history. Delightful for dipping into and a great companion for anyone planning a trip, this collection is both a heart-warming introduction to the human side of New York and a reminder to life-long New Yorkers of the reasons we call the city home.
Politics looked straightforward when Patrick Kidd took over the reins of the daily political sketch in The Times in 2015. David Cameron had just won a general election and would clearly be Prime Minister for as long as he wanted; George Osborne was his obvious successor (rather than the editor of a free London evening newspaper); Theresa May was a slightly underwhelming Home Secretary and Jeremy Corbyn an anonymous Labour backbencher best known as a serial rebel against his own party. Then suddenly everything went a bit strange. In this anthology of his best columns from the past four years, Kidd plays the role of parliamentary theatre critic, chronicling the collapse of Cameron, the nebulous clarity of May, the rise and refusal to fall of Corbyn and Boris Johnson's repeated failure to keep his foot out of his mouth. Featuring a menagerie of supporting oddballs, such as Jacob and the Mogglodytes, Failing Grayling, Gavin `Private Pike' Williamson and the simpering lobby fodder that are Toady, Lickspittle and Creep, this is a much-needed antidote to the gloom of the Brexit years.
There is a part of human nature compelled to test our own limits. But what happens when this part comes to define us? When journalist Jenny Valentish wrote Woman of Substances, a book about addiction, she noticed that people who treated drug-taking like an Olympic sport would often hurl themselves into a pursuit like marathon running upon giving up. What stayed constant was the need to push their boundaries. Everything Harder Than Everyone Else follows people doing the things that most couldn't, wouldn't or shouldn't. By delving into their extreme behaviour, there's a lot that us mere mortals can learn about the human condition. There's the neuroscientist violating his brain to override his disgust response. The athlete using childhood adversity as grist for the mill. The wrestler turning restlessness into curated ultraviolence. The architect hanging from hooks in her flesh, to better get out of her head. The performance artist seeking erasure by torturing his body. The BDSM dom helping people flirt with death to feel more alive. The bare-knuckle boxer whose gnarliest opponent is her ego. The dancer who could not separate her identity from her practice until at death's door. The bodybuilder exacting order on a life that was once chaotic. And the porn star-turned-fighter for whom sex and violence are two sides of the same coin. Their insights lead Jenny on a compulsive, sometimes reckless journey of immersion journalism. -- .
Smiling Slovenia's collection of articles and essays on Slovenia's current political scene boldly declares its dissenting view from the political mainstream beginning with a declaration of a dozen prominent intellectuals presenting their views of Slovenia's political situation. Topics range from recent Slovenian history, Slovenia's role in the breakup of Yugoslavia, foreign policies, including liaisons with the Islamic terrorists to modern-day Slovenian-American relations and Slovenia's admission into the European Union. This book shows that Slovenia, although outwardly westernized, is still deeply rooted in its communistic legacy. However, prominent intellectuals and democratic politicians strive to hold Slovenia to the highest European cultural, ethical, political, legal, and economical standards in public life - a goal that may take several generations to achieve. Some authors observe that transparency achieved by the present conservative coalition government has already established a state of affairs where return to the old ways of a crypto government would be impossible even if the leftist parties returned to power.
This book offers a revealing look at how newspapers covered the key events of the Plains Indian Wars between 1862-1891-reporting that offers some surprising viewpoints as well as biases and misrepresentations. The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars takes readers back to the late 19th century to show how newspaper reporting impacted attitudes toward the conflict between the United States and Native Americans. Emphasizing primary sources and eyewitness accounts, the book focuses on eight watershed events between 1862 and 1891-the Great Sioux Uprising in Minnesota, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Flight of the Nez Perce, the Cheyenne Outbreak, the Trial of Standing Bear, and the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and its aftermath. Each chapter examines an individual event, analyzing the balance and accuracy of the newspaper coverage and how the reporting of the time reinforced stereotypes about Native Americans. Includes historical photos of prominent Native Americans and a scene of the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre Presents an extensive bibliography of books, articles, and a list of frontier newspapers that served as primary source material
Drawing on the history of English feminism and the study of Victorian periodical and newspaper presses, this important and timely new book asks a key question that neither history nor literary studies has yet addressed: what did it mean to have a Victorian feminist write for an established newspaper or periodical? Using the example of Frances Power Cobbe (one of a handful of women to make a steady living for the mid-nineteenth century established press), Susan Hamilton opens up our understanding of Victorian feminism and its political workings, and urges us to reconsider what feminism looked like in the nineteenth-century.
Representing Wars from 1860 to the Present examines representations of war in literature, film, photography, memorials, and the popular press. The volume breaks new ground in cutting across disciplinary boundaries and offering case studies on a wide variety of fields of vision and action, and types of conflict: from civil wars in the USA, Spain, Russia and the Congo to recent western interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of World War Two, Representing Wars emphasises idiosyncratic and non-western perspectives - specifically those of Japanese writers Hayashi and Ooka. A central concern of the thirteen contributors has been to investigate the ethical and ideological implications of specific representational choices. Contributors are: Claire Bowen, Catherine Ann Collins, Marie-France Courriol, Eliane Elmaleh, Teresa Gibert, William Gleeson, Catherine Hoffmann, Sandrine Lascaux, Christopher Lloyd, Monica Michlin, Guillaume Muller, Misako Nemoto, Clement Sigalas.
Victorian culture was dominated by an ever expanding world of
print. A tremendous increase in the volume of books, newspapers,
and periodicals, was matched by the corresponding development of
the first mass reading public. It has long been acknowledged that
the growth of the popular publishing industry played an
instrumental role in the success of most major Victorian novelists.
Traditional critical positions have, nevertheless, recently
expanded into a much broader field concerned with media history,
book studies, modes of textual production and consumption, and
concepts of "popular literature." One of most notable current
critical trends is a renewed interest in the importance of all
aspects of nineteenth-century print culture.
NOW WITH A NEW AFTERWORD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND THE SOURCE OF THE VIRAL TED TALK 'Screamingly addictive' STEPHEN FRY 'Superb ... Thrilling story-telling' NAOMI KLEIN 'A powerful contribution to an urgent debate' GUARDIAN What if everything we've been told about addiction is wrong? One of Johann Hari's earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of his relatives and not being able to. As he grew older, he realised there was addiction in his family. Confused, he set out on a three-year, thirty-thousand mile journey to discover what really causes addiction - and how to solve it. Told through a series of gripping human stories, this book was the basis of a TED talk and animation that have been viewed more than twenty million times. It has transformed the global debate about addiction.
James Boswell (1740-1795), best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was also a lawyer, journalist, diarist, and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This fascinating collection, edited by Paul Tankard, presents a generous and varied selection of Boswell's journalistic writings, most of which have not been published since the eighteenth century. It offers a new angle on the history of journalism, an idiosyncratic view of literature, politics, and public life in late eighteenth-century Britain, and an original perspective on a complex and engaging literary personality.
Many of the photographs are as familiar as they are iconic: Nelson Mandela gazing through the bars of his prison cell on Robben Island; a young Miriam Makeba smiling and dancing; Hugh Masekela as a schoolboy receiving the gift of a trumpet from Louis Armstrong; Henry ‘Mr Drum’ Nxumalo; the Women’s March of 1955; the Sophiatown removals; the funeral of the Sharpeville massacre victims … Photographer Jürgen Schadeberg was the man behind the camera, recording history as it unfolded in apartheid South Africa, but his personal story is no less extraordinary. His affiliation for the displaced, the persecuted and the marginalised was already deeply rooted by the time he came to South Africa from Germany in 1950 and began taking pictures for the fledgling Drum magazine. In this powerfully evocative memoir of an international, award-winning career spanning over 50 years – in Europe, Africa and the US – this behind-the-scenes journey with a legendary photojournalist and visual storyteller is a rare and special privilege. Schadeberg’s first-hand experiences as a child in Berlin during the Second World War, where he witnessed the devastating effect of the repressive Nazi regime, and felt the full wrath of the Allied Forces’ relentless bombing of the city, are vividly told. The only child of an actress, who left her son largely to his own devices, Jürgen became skilled at living by his wits, and developed a resourcefulness that held him in good stead throughout his life. At the end of the war, his mother married a British officer and emigrated to South Africa, leaving Jürgen behind in a devastated Germany to fend for himself. With some luck and a great deal of perseverance, he was able to pursue his interest in photography in Hamburg, undergoing training as an unpaid ‘photographic volunteer’ at the German Press Agency, then graduating to taking photos at football matches. After two years there, Jürgen made the decision to travel to South Africa. He arrived at Johannesburg station on a cold winter’s morning. He had a piece of paper with his mother’s address on it, his worldly possessions in a small, cheap suitcase on the platform beside him, and his Leica camera, as always, around his neck. |
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