If the phrase “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” sounds very familiar to you, it could be you are one of the many millions of fans and admirers of either the books by L. Frank Baum or the many products that continued the tales of Oz. For nearly 120 years, the world […]
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Author: Dr. A. Ebert
James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction by Nathan Ashman (2018)
In his masterpiece The Black Dahlia, in the first L.A. Quartet novel, James Ellroy presents a detective very much devoted to the murder of Elisabeth Short. Both Ellroy and Detective Bucky Bleichert become obsessed with the violent crime; Bleichert finally turns almost insane reconstructing both the case and the victim’s body. Ellroy in an interview […]
From Flappers to Rappers: The Origins, Evolution, and Demise of Youth Culture by Marcel Danesi (2018...
Even if there already are some titles informing about this “feature” of modernity (youth cultures), the title at hand by Marcel Danesi convinces with a solid introduction of what “the youth,” (“a youth,” “a teenager,” or a person in its “adolescence”) actually is and how the “species” was first, well, discovered by sociologists and how, […]
Cowboy Politics: Myths and Discourses in Popular Westerns … by John S. Nelson (2018)
The popularity of the American western is still unbroken. This has to do with the story lines, great landscapes, good soundtracks and mostly with the deeds of some heroic men (and sometimes women) who did “the right thing” in times of distress and usually in very rough and dangerous times. However, Cowboy Politics is not […]
Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture After Apollo by Alexander C. T. Geppert (ed.) (2018)
Introducing the second volume of the European view on space programs and the sociocultural effects of current and future space travel and planet colonization plans, Limiting Outer Space continues the Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology series. The title is strongly linked to Vol. 1 Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the […]
California Crazy. American Pop Architecture by Jim Heimann (2018)
Southern California has always had a special reputation when it comes to architecture and weird, very exceptional buildings or interior design. With the booming American automobile industry, the innovation of the highway system and long cruises by car instead of the endless train rides in the 1940s, came the thirst, hunger and need for supplies […]
Selling Folk Music: An Illustrated History by Ronald D. Cohen and David Bonner (2018)
This title was designed to portray the various setups, styles, collages, and the cover art of both scores, books, festival ads, piano rolls, and vinyl that was marketed and sold in packages that related to the musical content of “folk music” in the United States at a certain period. So there is not too much […]
Terrifying Texts. Essays on Books of Good and Evil in Horror … by C. J. Miller and A. B. Van Riper (
There is hardly a book more popular with occultists or the genre of horror movies than the Necronomicon. It is filled with spells, runes and various texts to summon demons, spirits and otherworldly creatures (what actually makes it a so-called “grimoire”). The tales surrounding this fabricated text – that only was published as a joke […]
Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and Other Media… by N. Bentley, B. Johnson and A. Zieleniec (eds.
With emphasis on “Teenage Dreams,” three loosely designed subdivisions – literary fictions, representations on screen, critical theory and representations in other media – approach the huge body of demonstrations of subcultures in popular culture in the title at hand. Already the very idea of subcultures is strongly connected to modes of narration: “One of the […]