New Books in Popular Culture

In Millennials and the Moments that Made Us: A Cultural History of the U.S. from 1982-Present (Zero Books, 2018), Shaun Scott critiques the America millennials inherited and using a pop culture lens to explore how they navigate it. Starting in 1982 as the birth of millennials, Scott examines how millennials have been impacted by the economic and social changes of the 1980s and neoliberalism. Scott takes readers through defining moments and experiences such as latchkey parents, changing representations of masculinity, pop culture feminism, September 11th, and Hurricane Katrina. He uses popular culture examples to define these moments comparing September 11th to Jay-Z’s The Blueprint and using the career of LeBron James to critique corporate relocation and its effects on economic livelihoods. Scott’s well-research book presents readers with a challenge to rethink how millennials are defined and critiqued as he challenges millennials to learn from the mistakes of the past and work for lasting change. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Noel Brown is a film and television scholar at Liverpool Hope University. His research has focused on Hollywood and British cinema (classical and contemporary), family entertainment, children’s culture and animation. His first three books were published by I.B. Tauris and include, The Hollywood Family Film: from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter, Family Films in Global Cinema: The World Beyond Disney, and British Children’s Cinema: from The Thief of Bagdad to Wallace and Gromit. Now his newest, The Children’s Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative (Wallflower Press, 2017) looks at children’s film to explore its cultural and social impact, and it shows the evolution of a beloved genre that has resonated across ages and generations. The Children’s Film is part of the Short Cuts Series published by Wallflower Press, an imprint of Columbia University Press. Information on Noel Brown’s work is available at http://lhu.academia.edu/NoelBrown. Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have includedNational Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’sBook Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’salso a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Two professors from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada have published a book about how American popular culture reinforces militarism in the United States. In Pop Culture Goes to War: Enlisting and Resisting Militarism in the War on Terror (Lexington Books, 2010) Geoff Martin and Erin Steuter argue that popular songs, Hollywood movies, professional sports, TV news and even children’s toys help generate public support for the use of military force to solve political problems such as international terrorism. At the same time, they also argue that other elements of popular culture such as The Daily Show, the Colbert Report and The Simpsons, for example, actively resist militarism with pointed political comedy and satire. In this New Books Network interview, Steuter and Martin say their book was inspired in part by the ideas of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. who preached against the War in Vietnam. “We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation,” King declared in a speech delivered a year before he was assassinated in 1968. Professors Steuter and Martin argue that King’s opposition to militarism is as relevant today during the seemingly endless post 9/11 War on Terror, as it was then. Erin Steuter teaches sociology at Mount Allison, in Sackville, New Brunswick while her partner, Geoff Martin is a professor of political science there. Bruce Wark is a freelance journalist and retired journalism professor based in the Sackville, New Brunswick. Laura Landon is a librarian at Mount Allison University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

While many authors write about famous films, actors, or directors, Patty Farmer‘s book–Starring the Plaza: Hollywood, Broadway, and High Society Visit the World’s Favorite Hotel (Beaufort Books, 2017)–is about a famous hotel. Built in the early twentieth century, Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel has been visited by many celebrities and used as a backdrop in books, movies, and television. Patty illustrates the hotel with great stories and photographs.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Fiona Helmsley‘s Girls Gone Old (We Heard You Like Books, 2017) is wildly honest, intense in its personal and cultural inquiry, and often brilliantly hilarious. Helmsley uses her keen eye, rich life experience, and incredible humor to get readers to consider and swallow hard truths, while also considering the wider cultural implications. A friend’s questions regarding the subject matter of her work (often continued reflection upon the complexity of her youth), posed on the night before her 40th birthday, acted as a springboard for this collection, and the 2016 presidential election results of cemented the deal. Helmsley has crafted sophisticated essays about the confluence of the late 20th-century television, art, and sexual fantasy; addiction and illness; school shootings and serial killers; family; Andy Warhol; ‘Mork and Mindy’; and the sleazy (yet sexy) misogyny of Axl Rose…” She stares down what many would avert our eyes from, and probes, with curiosity and openness the many contours of shame, until it becomes a terrain of connection for her readers. Fiona Helmsley’s writing can be found online at websites like The Rumpus, Jezebel, The Weeklings, The Hairpin, PANK and in various anthologies like Ladyland and The Best Sex Writing of the Year. A multiple Pushcart nominee, her book of essays and stories, My Body Would be the Kindest of Strangers was released in 2015. Barbara Lawhorn is an Assistant Professor at Western Illinois University. She’s into literacy activism, walking Banjo (the best dog in the history of the universe), running, baking and eating bread, and finding the wild places, within and in the world. Her most recent work can be found at The Longleaf Pine, BLYNKT, Nebo: A Literary Magazine, and Naugatuck River Review. Her favorite creative endeavors are her kids, Annaleigh and Jack.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Tanya Ann Kennedy‘s book, Historicizing Post-Discourses: Postfeminism and Postracialism in United States Culture (SUNY Press, 2017), is a complex and important exploration of our collective understanding of questions of racial and gender equality, or lack thereof. The text specifically interrogates the theoretical concepts of postracialism and postfeminism and the discourse surrounding these terms and their meaning. Kennedy examines these ideas, where they were initially linked together, and how they have been pursued separately, often without attention paid to the intersectional nature of how race and gender actually interact within American culture and society. Historicizing Post-Discourses examines these concepts within a variety of cultural venues, including television series like Mad Men, The Wire, and Gray’s Anatomy; within films like The Help, Perfect Stranger, The Blind Side, and Monsters Ball; within popular non-fiction like Lean-In and The End of Men; and in political speeches and rhetoric that have been integrated into our culture, often without historically clear contexts. Postracialism and postfeminism have become frameworks that often reify cultural and political tropes within American society, and Kennedy’s book explores how these frameworks and narratives reaffirm heroic notions of individualism and triumphalism, especially in our popular culture consumption. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Steven McQueen was known as a great action star, but he also sometimes had a reputation for being troublesome on the set. Don Nunley worked with him as a prop man on Le Mans, a pet project of McQueen’s set around the 24-hour endurance auto race in France. This book is an homage to the film, which despite being a box-office disappointment, is widely regarded as one of the most beloved auto racing films of all time. Steve McQueen: Le Mans in the Rearview Mirror (Dalton Watson Fine Books, 2017) also contains many details and photographs from Nunley’s long career in Hollywood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In Devoured: How What We Eat Defines Who We Are (William Morrow Books, 2017), food writer and Culinary Institute of America program director Sophie Egan takes readers on an eye-opening journey through the American food psyche, examining the connections between the values that define our national character—work, freedom, and progress—and our eating habits, the good and the bad. Egan explores why these values make for such an unstable, and often unhealthy, food culture and, paradoxically, why they also make Americas cuisine so great. Egan raises a host of intriguing questions: Why does McDonalds have 107 items on its menu? Why are breakfast sandwiches, protein bars, and gluten-free anything so popular? Will bland, soulless meal replacements like Soylent revolutionize our definition of a meal? The search for answers takes her across the culinary landscape, from the prioritization of convenience over health to the unintended consequences of perks like free meals for employees; from the American obsession with having it our way to the surge of Starbucks, Chipotle, and other chains individualizing the eating experience; from high culture—artisan and organic and what exactly “natural” means—to low culture—the sale of 100 million Taco Bell Doritos Locos Tacos in ten weeks. She also looks at how America’s cuisine—like the nation itself—has been shaped by diverse influences from across the globe. Devoured weaves together insights from the fields of psychology, anthropology, food science, and behavioral economics as well as myriad examples from daily life to create a powerful and unique look at food in America. Sophie Egan is the director of programs and culinary nutrition for the Strategic Initiatives Group at The Culinary Institute of America. Holding degrees from Stanford and UC Berkeley, she has written for Sunset magazine and was named one of the UC Global Food Initiative’s 30 Under 30. Her writing has been published in WIRED, Bon Appetit, Time, The Wall Street Journal, KQED, and The New York Times Well blog. She is based in San Francisco. Lori A. Flores is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale, 2016). She is based in Brooklyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In his 1903 hit “Congo Love Song,” James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may appear consistent with that narrative, it also invokes the site of King Leopold II of Belgium’s brutal colonial regime at a time when African Americans were playing a central role in a growing Congo reform movement. In an era when popular vaudeville music frequently trafficked in racist language and imagery, “Congo Love Song” emerges as one example of the many ways that African American activists, intellectuals, and artists called attention to colonialism in Africa. Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) examines black Americans’ long cultural and political engagement with the Congo and its people. Through studies of George Washington Williams, Booker T. Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, and other figures, the author brings to light a long-standing relationship that challenges familiar presumptions about African American commitments to Africa. Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State offers compelling new ways to understand how African American involvement in the Congo has helped shape anticolonialism, black aesthetics, and modern black nationalism. Author Ira Dworkin is an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University who specializes in African American and African Diaspora literature, American literature and culture, race and ethnicity studies, and transnational literatures. After Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State, Dworkin’s current book project is focused on two autobiographies published by African Muslim and American Civil War soldier Nicholas Said in 1867 and 1873, tentatively titled Imperfectly Known: Nicholas Said and the Routes of African American Narrative. The work will consider the place of Africa, including Islamic religious traditions, in early African American narrative by examining oral accounts within African American communities, northern literary venues like the Atlantic Monthly, and publishing in the Reconstruction-era South. James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In her new book, Playboy Laughs: The Comedy, Comedians, and Cartoons of Playboy (Beaufort Books, 2017), Patty Farmer examines the relationship between Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire and some of the most influential comedians and cartoonists of the past 50 years. Farmer explores the ways in which the Playboy Clubs and Resorts of the 1960s and 1970s established spaces for comedians to hone their acts, get paid, and started the careers for many comedians and musicians. She looks at the savvy business decisions of Hefner that led to clubs which have influenced popular culture and society in a variety of ways. Farmer describes how establishing these clubs challenged racial barriers as desegregated comedy clubs in the 1960s as well as gender barriers, giving a performance space to many rising female comedians such as Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers. Farmer also looks at the role Playboy magazine played in launching the careers of many cartoonists such as Shel Silverstein and Al Jaffe and the meticulous attention to detail that Hefner paid to all cartoons and artists used throughout the magazine. Using interviews and oral histories, Farmer presents inside experiences from comedians and cartoonists who owe much of their career to Playboy magazine and Playboy Clubs. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchananor email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture