Cultural Memoir

In the tradition of Neil Postman's masterpiece Amusing Ourselves to Death, Audience of One shows how American media have shaped American society and politics, by interweaving two crucial stories. The first story follows the evolution of television from the three-network era of the 20th century, which joined millions of Americans in a shared monoculture, into today's zillion-channel, internet-atomized universe, which sliced and diced them into fractious, alienated subcultures. The second story is a cultural critique of Donald Trump.

Few politicians have risen to national prominence as quickly as Marco Rubio. Here is the full story of his unlikely journey. Florida Senator Marco Rubio electrified the 2012 Republican National Con­vention by telling the story of his parents, who were struggling immigrants from Cuba. They embraced their new country and taught their children to appreciate its unique opportunities. Every sacrifice they made over the years, as they worked hard at blue-collar jobs in Miami and Las Vegas, was for their children. Young Marco grew up dreaming about football, not politics.

Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow throughout her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. For Nora, the simple fact of her German citizenship bound her to the Holocaust and its unspeakable atrocities and left her without a sense of cultural belonging. Yet Nora knew little about her own family’s involvement in the war: Though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it.

For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: His mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the patrol for civilian life.

More than a biography, Serena Williams: Tennis Champion, Sports Legend, and Cultural Heroine not only tells the story of her upbringing and remarkable career but also looks at Williams as a sports pioneer. Merlisa Lawrence Corbett explores Williams’ influence on cultural and political issues such as body shaming, gender equality, and racism in sports and society. Corbett also analyzes Williams’ impact on discussions of feminism, the sports celebrity, and the marketing of female athletes.

No other narrative from within the corridors of power has offered as frank and intimate an account of the making of the modern Chinese nation as Ji Chaozhu's The Man on Mao's Right. Having served Chairman Mao Zedong and the Communist leadership for two decades, and having become a key figure in China's foreign policy, Ji now provides an honest, detailed account of the personalities and events that shaped today's People's Republic.

This is the life story of a naughty and rebellious boy who grew up in extreme poverty in the dusty alleys of the Jewish ghetto in Tehran, made his way to a kibbutz in Israel, went through hair-raising adventures in the underworld of Berlin, smuggled people from East Berlin and was expelled from the city as well as from West Germany, and after many hardships achieved impressive success in the United States.

Years after his tragic death, Trayvon Martin’s name is still evoked every day. He has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a child still in the process of becoming a young man, wearing a hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became, in death, an icon? And how did one Black child’s death on a dark, rainy street in a small Florida town become the match that lit a civil rights crusade?

Caught between family demands, social groups, and ostracized as a member of the religious “Holy Rollers,” the author of American Robot: A Cultural Chameleon Rising Above Race & Religious Traumas balances on precarious razor edges of sacred edicts, genetic mental illnesses, and toxic social stress. Parental physical abuse and rigid mental programming add to repeated cult behavior–modification strategies.

Shoshana Johnson, the first black female soldier in America's history to be taken as a prisoner of war, presents the much-anticipated story of her capture and imprisonment in Iraq and what happened after her rescue.

George Manuel (1920-1989) was the strategist and visionary behind the modern Indigenous movement in Canada. A three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, he laid the groundwork for what would become the Assembly of First Nations and was the founding president of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. Authors Peter McFarlane and Doreen Manuel follow him on a riveting journey from his childhood on a Shuswap reserve through three decades of fierce and dedicated activism.

تناول الكاتب في كتابه هروبي إلى الحرية ماحل به في الفترة التي كان يقبع فيها في سجن فوتشا في الفترة ما بين (1983 - 1988)، وما تعرض له في عهد جوزيف بروز تيتو، حيث مكث في سجنه أعوام طويلة، وكان فيها يخلد إلى أفكاره ويناجي خواطره ويسجلها في ظروف صعبة، ثم جمعها في كتابه هروبي إلى الحرية، الذي يعبر فيه عن طموحاته وآماله بطريقة لا تدخل في عمق الأحداث الجارية، ويفصح فيها عن تطلعات شعب البوشناق المسلم وشعوب البوسنة الأخرى، جمع علي عزت في كتابه خلاصة الخلاصات لكل ما يجب التفكير فيه أو يستحيل أن يفكر فيه، يتضمن الكتاب حشد كبير من الأفكار والتأملات والاعتقادات في موضوعات منفصلة، تحدث عن أن

It’s 1996, and Jeremy Atherton Lin has met the boy of his dreams — a mumbling, starry-eyed Brit — just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples federal rights including immigration. The pair steals away to remote forests and vast deserts, London fashion shows and Berlin sex clubs, dinner parties, back alleys, East Village hotel rooms, and San Francisco dives. Finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in a “city of refuge.”

In 1971, Robin Green had an interview with Jann Wenner at the offices Rolling Stone magazine. Green thought she was interviewing for a clerical job like the other girls in the office, a "real job". Instead, she was hired as a journalist. Brutally honest and bold, Robin Green reveals what it was like to be the first woman granted entry into an iconic boys' club. Pulling back the curtain on Rolling Stone magazine in its prime, The Only Girl is a stunning tribute to a bygone era and a publication that defined a generation.

Lass dich inspirieren – von kraftvollen Geschichten aus dem wahren Leben! Die Angst einer Mutter um ihre Kinder, als die Ahrtal-Flut ihr Leben bedroht, Bettina, die nach einem schweren Arbeitsunfall monatelang im Krankenhaus liegt und um ihr Leben kämpft, Astrid, die alkoholabhängig und obdachlos wird, Cora, die häusliche Gewalt erlebt, oder Eltern, die sich um ihre schwer erkrankten Kinder sorgen – Katharina Afflerbach erzählt in ihrem neuen Buch die bewegenden wahren Geschichten von Menschen, die durch schwere Zeiten gehen und ihren eigenen Weg zur Zuversicht hin finden.

Modern Shanghai: a global city in the midst of a renaissance, where dreamers arrive each day to partake in a mad torrent of capital, ideas, and opportunity. Marketplace's Rob Schmitz is one of them. He immerses himself in his neighborhood, forging deep relationships with ordinary people who see in the city's sleek skyline a brighter future, and a chance to rewrite their destinies.

"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" is the 1845 autobiography of freed slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. It recounts his life as a slave in Maryland and his flight for freedom. The account is accompanied by texts written by well-known fellow abolitionists of the time: William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Philipps, acting as proof of the legitimacy of the author’s claims.

"...אבא ואני בדרך לבית החולים הפסיכיאטרי פרדסיה, אני מסתכלת על אבא ורוצה לבכות, המחלה של נעמי היא הסוד הכי גדול במשפחה... שששששש! אסור לדבר, השכנים ישמעו, אבל ... השכנים רחוקים ולא יכולים לשמוע. אני מבולבלת ופוחדת, לא יודעת מה לעשות עם כל הסודות שאסור לדבר עליהם..."

This singular memoir from one of Ukraine’s new literary lights tracks her journey from a little girl toiling in the potato fields of the Soviet Union to the shiny but sometimes foreign new world of America. Ruslana’s From Borsch to Burgers elegantly and humorously captures her gleeful yet puzzling journey through new foods, customs, language, and love. Her message of cross-cultural discovery presents enlightening insights into understanding the nuances found in spanning two worlds.

Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House is the life story of Elizabeth Keckley, a shrewd entrepreneur who, while enslaved, raised enough money to purchase freedom for herself and her son. Working as a seamstress and dressmaker for the wives of influential politicians, Keckley helped organize an auction of dresses that belonged to Mary Todd Lincoln, the former first lady. The auction elicited strong criticism from the Washington elite.