The Thematic Evolution of Sports Journalism's Narrative of Mental Illness: A Little Less Conversation contends that the conversation developed and sustained by sports journalists about professional athletes' experience with mental illness has evolved through three slightly overlapping stages, each marked by a primary theme. During the first stage, from the end of the 19th Century to the middle of the 20th century, sports journalists sensationalized the experience and portrayed the athletes - breathlessly labeled insane - as tragic figures. During the roughly two-decade second stage, an athlete's experience with mental illness was portrayed as an inconvenience that flummoxed and infuriated team officials who had neither the ability nor the inclination to address the issue. The final stage, leading up to present day and beyond, is most notable for the development and widespread adoption of a coverage template that centers around an athlete's brave decision to reveal and discuss their experiences. Combining historical research and narrative analysis, Ronald Bishop interrogates whether sports journalists have finally begun to cover the experience of mental illness with sufficient depth. Scholars of media studies, journalism, celebrity studies, and sports psychology would find this book of particular interest.

Gone are the days of enjoying life's simple pleasures for pleasure's sake. Twenty-first-century Americans are on a mission to cram every second of their earthly existence with significant accomplishments and momentous events. Even the most mundane undertaking must be approached with zeal, gusto, and expertise, or so the media persuade us to believe. Are we capable of doing anything casually anymore? In this first book-length treatment of media's obsession with triviality, cultural critic Ronald Bishop calls into focus the role of media in the demise of scale - the amount of effort, intensity, and significance with which we live - in contemporary culture. Bishop argues that American audiences are assaulted with messages that the ordinary, and often private, aspects of our lives - family, childhood, parenting, education, food, sports, home improvement - must be showcased publicly and with extreme passion. Playfully mixing personal narratives with an abundance of examples from television shows, news stories, editorials, advertisements, books, and movies, Bishop demonstrates how media promote the idea that the notion of scale must be abandoned to achieve success and happiness in modern society. Written with originality, intellectual acumen, and wit, More is a must-read for anyone obsessed with being obsessed and for others interested in media's contribution to society's out-of-scale behavior.

Even as kindness toward individuals with intellectual disabilities has increased, encountering an individual and his or her family whose lives revolve around the daily challenges that come with them is atypical, or is experienced and narrated as such, particularly by the media. Even when there is progress, making such a leap provides rhetorical cover, or at least a distraction, while intolerance regroups. And for some, it becomes less about showing love and compassion than about being able to pat oneself on the back when an interaction with a person like our son Neil is over. But it's why they don't know, or are curious but reluctant to engage, or just flat out lack empathy, that compelled us to write this book. Contributing to their misimpressions and misanthropy are portrayals of individuals with intellectual disabilities in the mass media, scant though they are. We should always be skeptical of those in my line of work who argue that the onslaught of information we take in from a widened array of sources can magically change our behavior - the so-called "hypodermic needle" theory of media effects. But these messages do help us craft our realities and develop and share our own narratives about folks with intellectual disabilities. Holding Up the Sky Together is admittedly a hybrid: part memoir, part academic analysis-a professor with more than 30 published articles and four books, all of which revolve around media analysis, looks inward. But our fervent hope is to inject a bit more realism into the national dialogue about intellectual disabilities. We are grateful for increased awareness and tolerance, for Special Olympics, and for shows like Born This Way. But there is so much more to be done.

Though much has been said about Japanese-American incarceration camps, little attention is paid to the community newspapers closest to the camps and how they constructed the identities and lives of the occupants inside. Dependent on government and military officials for information, these journalists rarely wrote about the violation of the evacuees' civil rights. Instead, they concentrated on the economic impact the camps-and the evacuees, who would replace workers off to enlist in the military and work for defense contractors-would have on the areas they covered. Newspapers like the Cody Enterprise and Powell Tribune in Wyoming, the Lamar Daily News, and the Casa Grande Dispatch regularly published overly optimistic updates on the progress of construction, the size of the contractor payrolls, and the amount of materials used to build the camps. Ronald Bishop and his coauthors reveal how journalists positioned the incarceration camps as a potential economic boon and how evacuees were framed as another community group, there to contribute to the region's economic well-being. Community Newspapers and the Japanese-American Incarceration Camps examines the rhetoric and journalistic approach of the local papers and how they informed the communities just outside their walls. This book will appeal to scholars of history and journalism.