|
|
A brutally honest look at the systemic exclusion of women in film--an industry with massive cultural influence--and how, in response, women are making space in cinema for their voices to be heard. Generation after generation, women have faced the devastating reality that Hollywoo...d is a system built to keep them out. The films created by that system influence everything from our worldviews to our brain chemistry. When women's voices are excluded from the medium, the impact on society is immense. Actor, screenwriter, and award-winning independent filmmaker Naomi McDougall Jones takes us inside the cutthroat, scandal-laden film industry, where only 5% of top studio films are directed by women and less than 20% of leading characters in mainstream films are female. Jones calls on all of us to act radically to build a different kind of future for cinema--not only for the women being actively hurt inside the industry but for those outside it, whose lives, purchasing decisions, and sense of selves are shaped by the stories told. Informed by the journey of her own career; by interviews with others throughout the film industry; and by cold, hard data, Jones deconstructs the casual, commonplace sexism rampant in Hollywood that has kept women out of key roles for decades. Next, she shows us the growing women-driven revolution in filmmaking--sparked by streaming services, crumbling distribution models, direct-to-audience access via innovative online platforms, and outside advocacy groups--which has enabled women to build careers outside the traditional studio system. Finally, she makes a business case for financing and producing films by female filmmakers.
Read more
|
|
|
First published in Germany in 1946 as Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager ( Saying yes to life in spite of everything: a psychologist experiences the Concentration Camp ). First English-language edition published as From Death-Camp to Existe...ntialism: A Psychiatrist's Path to a New Therapy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959).
Read more
|
|
|
Exposes the new generation of whiteness thriving at the expense and borrowed ingenuity of black people--and explores how this intensifies racial inequality. American culture loves blackness. From music and fashion to activism and language, black culture constantly achieves worldw...ide influence. Yet, when it comes to who is allowed to thrive from black hipness, the pioneers are usually left behind as black aesthetics are converted into mainstream success--and white profit. Weaving together narrative, scholarship, and critique, Lauren Michele Jackson reveals why cultural appropriation--something that's become embedded in our daily lives--deserves serious attention. It is a blueprint for taking wealth and power, and ultimately exacerbates the economic, political, and social inequity that persists in America. She unravels the racial contradictions lurking behind American culture as we know it--from shapeshifting celebrities and memes gone viral to brazen poets, loveable potheads, and faulty political leaders. An audacious debut, White Negroes brilliantly summons a re-interrogation of Norman Mailer's infamous 1957 essay of a similar name. It also introduces a bold new voice in Jackson. Piercing, curious, and bursting with pop cultural touchstones, White Negroes is a dispatch in awe of black creativity everywhere and an urgent call for our thoughtful consumption.
Read more
|
|
|
Award-winning author Aladdin Elaasar's latest; BARRACUDA: The Unauthorized Biography of Sarah Palin is a timely book that reveals how McCain's choice of 'the Barracuda', a.k.a. Sarah Palin, as his running mate, opened the flood gates of the media to controversy and speculations. ...Will Palin play a role in the 2012 presidential elections? Will she be the next and the first female American president, or at least vice-president?
Read more
|
|
|
A confrontation of the hypocrisy of the evangelical right with a passionate defense, grounded in the Gospel, of inclusive Christian love. Throughout his distinguished career, Obery M. Hendricks, Jr. has been a pillar of moral clarity for many overlapping communities: African Amer...icans, religious scholars, Christians of all backgrounds, political leaders, journalists, and his many readers. Now, in these pages, he rejects the anti-Christ views of the American religious right that are corroding the faith from within. Devoting each chapter to a specific contemporary issue--from abortion rights to homophobia, from gun control to nativism--Hendricks invokes Biblical and theological texts to show how evangelicals are misreading the teachings of Christ. He denounces the moneyed, power-hungry interests who have led evangelicals astray with hollow promises of a Christian-centric government. And he calls for a return to the Christlike love and generosity that he grew up with in his family's Baptist community. Timely, inspiring, galvanizing, at once intellectually rigorous and broadly accessible, this is essential reading for anyone concerned about the moral direction of church and country.
Read more
|
|
|
In 1935, at the height of his powers, Howard Thurman, one of the most influential African American religious thinkers of the twentieth century, took a pivotal trip to India that would forever change him--and that would ultimately shape the course of the civil rights movement in t...he United States. When Thurman (1899-1981) became the first African American to meet with Mahatma Gandhi, he found himself called upon to create a new version of American Christianity, one that eschewed self-imposed racial and religious boundaries, and equipped itself to confront the enormous social injustices that plagued the United States during this period. Gandhi's philosophy and practice of satyagraha, or soul force, would have a momentous impact on Thurman, showing him the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance. After the journey to India, Thurman's distinctly American translation of satyagraha into a Black Christian context became one of the key inspirations for the civil rights movement, fulfilling Gandhi's prescient words that it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world. Thurman went on to found one of the first explicitly interracial congregations in the United States and to deeply influence an entire generation of black ministers--among them Martin Luther King Jr. Visions of a Better World depicts a visionary leader at a transformative moment in his life. Drawing from previously untapped archival material and obscurely published works, Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt explore, for the first time, Thurman's development into a towering theologian who would profoundly affect American Christianity--and American history.
Read more
|
|
|
The smartphone is the defining commodity of the twenty-first century, pitting ordinary peoples' desire for entertainment, connection, and justice against government and corporate drives for control and profit --
|
|
|
Elaine Scarry's consistently radical way of posing essential questions redirects inquiry in the most valuable ways, a tribute to a disciplined and erudite imagination put almost exclusively at the service of democratic citizenship in American society. --Richard Falk Through a min...ute-by-minute analysis of the phone calls, official reports, responses, and reported actions of passengers on two hijacked flights, United Airlines 93 (which crashed in Pennsylvania) and American Airlines 77 (which crashed into the Pentagon), Elaine Scarry offers a dramatic retelling of their fate and some startling conclusions. Leading off a provocative debate, she asks if the difficulty we had as a country in defending ourselves on September 11 suggests serious flaws in our national security. The need to act in a matter of minutes has been invoked to justify military arrangements increasingly outside the citizenry's control, yet the only successful defense on September 11 was carried out, after a vote, by the passengers themselves on hijacked Flight 93. Arguments made at the time of the writing of the Constitution judged that the only plausible way to defend the home ground was to have actions measured against the norms of civilian life: the military had to be held within a civil frame. Scarry asks, have we strayed too far from this model? Does our authoritarian conception of national defense diminish our capacity to protect ourselves? Is it legal? Is it moral? Responding to her argument are nine prominent thinkers and writers from across the political spectrum, including Richard Falk, Ellen Willis, Admiral Eugene Carroll, and Antonia Chayes. Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, is the author of The Body in Pain, On Beauty and Being Just, Dreaming by the Book, and Resisting Representation.
Read more
|
|
|
Chronicles the last 31 hours of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life as he seeks to revive the non-violent civil rights movement and push to end poverty in America.
|
|
|
|
