They are a mass migration of thousands, yet each one travels alone. Solito, Solita (Alone, Alone), shortlisted for the 2019 Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, is an urgent collection of oral histories that tells-in their own words-the story of young refugees fleeing countries in Central America and traveling for hundreds of miles to seek safety and protection in the United States. Fifteen narrators describe why they fled their homes, what happened on their dangerous journeys through Mexico, how they crossed the borders, and for some, their ongoing struggles to survive in the United States. In an era of fear, xenophobia, and outright lies, these stories amplify the compelling voices of migrant youth. What can they teach us about abuse and abandonment, bravery and resilience, hypocrisy and hope? They bring us into their hearts and onto streets filled with the lure of freedom and fraught with violence. From fending off kidnappers with knives and being locked in freezing holding cells to tearful reunions with parents, Solito, Solita's narrators bring to light the experiences of young people struggling for a better life across the border. This collection includes the story of Adrian, from Guatemala City, whose mother was shot to death before his eyes. He refused to join a gang, rode across Mexico atop cargo trains, crossed the US border as a minor, and was handcuffed and thrown into ICE detention on his eighteenth birthday. We hear the story of Rosa, a Salvadoran mother fighting to save her life as well as her daughter's after death squads threatened her family. Together they trekked through the jungles on the border between Guatemala and Mexico, where masked men assaulted them. We also meet Gabriel, who after surviving sexual abuse starting at the age of eight fled to the United States, and through study, legal support and work, is now attending UC Berkeley.

Alfred Hitchcock was, despite his English origins and early career, an American master. Arriving on US shores in 1939, for the next three decades he created a series of masterpieces that redefined the nature and possibilities of cinema itself: Rebecca, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho, to name just a few. In this Companion, leading film scholars and critics of American culture and imagination trace Hitchcock's interplay with the Hollywood studio system, the Cold War, and new forms of sexuality, gender and desire over his American career. This Companion explores the way in which Hitchcock was transformed by the country where he made his home and did much of his greatest work. This book will be invaluable as a guide for both fans and students of Hitchcock and twentieth-century American culture, providing a set of new perspectives on a much-loved and hugely influential director.

Alfred Hitchcock was, despite his English origins and early career, an American master. Arriving on US shores in 1939, for the next three decades he created a series of masterpieces that redefined the nature and possibilities of cinema itself: Rebecca, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho, to name just a few. In this Companion, leading film scholars and critics of American culture and imagination trace Hitchcock's interplay with the Hollywood studio system, the Cold War, and new forms of sexuality, gender and desire over his American career. This Companion explores the way in which Hitchcock was transformed by the country where he made his home and did much of his greatest work. This book will be invaluable as a guide for both fans and students of Hitchcock and twentieth-century American culture, providing a set of new perspectives on a much-loved and hugely influential director.

The author traces Henry James's career-long encounter with the tradition of British aestheticism and places both in the context of the late nineteenth century's professionalization and commodification of literary life.

As Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals made their way into Western European and Anglo-American cultural centers, they encountered a society obsessed with decadence. An avant-garde movement characterized by self-consciously artificial art and literature, philosophic pessimism, and an interest in nonnormative sexualities, decadence was also a smear, whereby Jews were viewed as the source of social and cultural decline. In The Jewish Decadence, Jonathan Freedman argues that Jewish engagement with decadence played a major role in the emergence of modernism and the making of Jewish culture from the 1870s to the present. The first to tell this sweeping story, Freedman demonstrates the centrality of decadence to the aesthetics of modernity and its inextricability from Jewishness. Freedman recounts a series of diverse and surprising episodes that he insists do not belong solely to the past, but instead reveal that the identification of Jewishness with decadence persists today.

From the beginning of modern intellectual history to the culture wars of the present day, the experience of assimilating Jews and the idiom of "culture" have been fundamentally intertwined with each other. Freedman's book begins by looking at images of the stereotypical Jew in the literary culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and America, and then considers the efforts on the part of Jewish critics and intellectuals to counter this image in the public sphere. It explores the unexpected parallels and ironic reversals between a cultural dispensation that had ambivalent responses to Jews and Jews who became exponents of that very tradition.

As Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals made their way into Western European and Anglo-American cultural centers, they encountered a society obsessed with decadence. An avant-garde movement characterized by self-consciously artificial art and literature, philosophic pessimism, and an interest in nonnormative sexualities, decadence was also a smear, whereby Jews were viewed as the source of social and cultural decline. In The Jewish Decadence, Jonathan Freedman argues that Jewish engagement with decadence played a major role in the emergence of modernism and the making of Jewish culture from the 1870s to the present. The first to tell this sweeping story, Freedman demonstrates the centrality of decadence to the aesthetics of modernity and its inextricability from Jewishness. Freedman recounts a series of diverse and surprising episodes that he insists do not belong solely to the past, but instead reveal that the identification of Jewishness with decadence persists today.

They are a mass migration of thousands, yet each one travels alone. Solito, Solita, ("Alone, Alone"), is a Voice of Witness collection of oral histories that tell the stories of youth refugees fleeing their home countries and traveling for hundreds of miles seeking safety and protection in the United States. These powerful narrators describe why they fled their homes, what happened on their dangerous journeys through Mexico, how they crossed the border, and their ongoing struggles to survive in the United States. In an era of fear, xenophobia, and outright lies, these stories amplify the compelling voices of immigrant youth. What can they teach us about abuse and abandonment, bravery and resilience, hypocrisy and hope? They bring us into their hearts and onto streets filled with the lure of freedom and fraught with violence. From fending off kidnappers with knives and being locked in freezing holding cells to tearful reunions with parents, Solito, Solita's evocative stories bring to light the experiences of young people struggling for a better life across the border. Steven Mayers is a writer, oral historian, and professor of English at the City College of San Francisco. Jonathan Freedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and writing mentor at the City College of San Francisco. Voice of Witness, founded by Dave Eggers, Mimi Lok, and Lola Vollen, is a nonprofit organization that advances human rights by amplifying unheard voices.

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James is intended to provide a critical introduction to James' work. Throughout the major critical shifts of the past fifty years, and despite suspicions of the traditional high literary culture that was James' milieu, as a writer he has retained a powerful hold on readers and critics alike. All essays are written at a level free from technical jargon, designed to promote accessibility to the study of James and his work.

Alfred Hitchcock has long been understood as an inspired technician and master of abnormal psychology. The authors of this volume sugges, through new readings of his American films, that he is also a cultural critic of remarkable insight and undeniable presence. With new intensity and specificity, Hitchcock's America looks at Hitchcock's analysis of and engagement with American culture. His films emerge as our richest history of American middle-class culture at mid-century.

From the beginning of modern intellectual history to the culture wars of the present day, the experience of assimilating Jews and the idiom of "culture" have been fundamentally intertwined with each other. Freedman's book begins by looking at images of the stereotypical Jew in the literary culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and America, and then considers the efforts on the part of Jewish critics and intellectuals to counter this image in the public sphere. It explores the unexpected parallels and ironic reversals between a cultural dispensation that had ambivalent responses to Jews and Jews who became exponents of that very tradition.

Klezmer is a continually evolving musical tradition that grows out of Eastern European Jewish culture, and its changes reflect Jews' interaction with other groups as well as their shifting relations to their own history. But what happens when, in the klezmer spirit, the performances that go into the making of Jewishness come into contact with those that build different forms of cultural identity? Jonathan Freedman argues that key terms central to the Jewish experience in America, notions like "the immigrant," the "ethnic," and even the "model minority," have worked and continue to intertwine the Jewish-American with the experiences, histories, and imaginative productions of other groups: Latinos, Asians, African Americans, and gays and lesbians, among others.

Freedman traces the twists and turns taken by these various relationships in a number of imaginative arenas: the white-black crossover between jazz and klezmer and its unexpected consequences in Philip Roth's "The Human Stain"; the relationship between Jewishness and queer identity in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America"; contemporary fictions about crypto-Jews in Cuba and the Mexican-American borderland; the connection between Jews and Christian apocalyptic narratives, especially the best-selling "Left Behind" series; the centuries-old cross-referencing of Jewish and Asian American identities; the stories of "new immigrants" spun by contemporary writers like Bharathi Mukherjee, Gish Jen, Lan Samantha Chang, and Gary Shteyngart; and the revisionary relation of these authors to classic Jewish American immigrant narratives by the likes of Henry Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow. By interrogating the fraught andmultidimensional uses to which Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness have been put in shaping the nature and properties of other categories of identity and experience, Freedman offers a richer understanding of racial, ethnic, and sexual categories in America and of the ethnoracial complexities facing the United States in the twenty-first century.

The scientific evidence does not support the notion that TV and film violence cause aggression in children or in anyone else. So argues Jonathan Freedman, based on his findings that far fewer than half of the scientific studies have found a causal connection between exposure to media violence and aggression or crime. In fact, Freedman believes that, taken to a more controversial extreme, the research could be interpreted as showing that there is no causal effect of media violence at all.

"Media Violence and its Effect on Aggression" offers a provocative challenge to the accepted norms in media studies and psychology. Freedman begins with a comprehensive review of all the research on the effect of violent movies and television on aggression and crime. Having shown the lack of scientific support for the prevailing belief that media violence is connected to violent behaviour, he then explains why something that seems so intuitive and even obvious might be incorrect and goes on to provide plausible reasons why media violence might not have bad effects on children. He contrasts the supposed effects of TV violence on crime with the known effects of poverty and other social factors, and discusses the difference between television advertising, which, he argues, does have an effect, and violent programs, which do not.

Freedman concludes by noting that in recent years television and films have been as violent as ever and violent video games have become more and more popular, yet during this period there has been a dramatic "decrease" in violent crime. He argues that this makes it highly implausible that media violence causes aggression or crime.