New Books In Popular Culture

Do you have a cookbook in you? Thinking about a memoir with recipes? How about a food blog? Have you ever yearned to be an Instagram Influencer or dreamt of joining the waning ranks of restaurant reviewers? If that’s the case, stop whatever you are doing and get ahold of Will Write for Food: Pursue Your Passion and Bring Home the Dough Writing Recipes, Cookbooks, Blogs and More by Dianne Jacob, out this month in its fourth edition by Hachette Books. It’s no exaggeration to say that Dianne Jacob is America’s foremost food writing guru, and Will Write For Food, first published in 2005, offers the most comprehensive, unvarnished look at the always developing and perennially competitive world of food writing on the market today. Will Write for Food has been translated into Korean, Chinese, and Spanish, and is used as a textbook in universities and culinary schools. Will Write for Food has received three international awards for excellence, including the Cordon D’Or International award for Best Literary Food Refer

In The Cards: The History and Power of Tarot (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Patrick Maille examines the history of Tarot cards and their place in popular culture. The Cards starts with an extensive review of the history of Tarot from its roots as a game to its supposed connection to ancient Egyptian magic, through its place in secret societies, and to its current use in meditation and psychology. Part Two delves into specific areas of popular culture—art, television, movies, and comics—and how Tarot is used in works such as The Andy Griffith Show, Dark Shadows, Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic, and Live and Let Die. While Tarot means many different things to many different people, the cards somehow strike universal chords that can resonate through popular culture. The symbolism within the cards, and the cards as symbols themselves, make Tarot an excellent device for the media of popular culture in numerous ways. The cards are evocative images in their own right, but the mystical fascination they inspire

Julie Golia's new book Newspaper Confessions: A History of Advice Columns in a Pre-Internet Age (Oxford UP, 2021) chronicles the history of the newspaper advice column, a genre that has shaped Americans’ relationships with media, their experiences with popular therapy, and their virtual interactions across generations. Emerging in the 1890s, advice columns became unprecedented virtual forums where readers could debate the most resonant cultural crises of the day with strangers in an anonymous yet public forum. The columns are important—and overlooked—precursors to today’s digital culture: forums, social media groups, chat rooms, and other online communities that define how present-day American communicate with each other. This book charts the rise of the advice column and its impact on the newspaper industry. It analyzes the advice given in a diverse sample of columns across several decades, emphasizing the ways that advice columnists framed their counsel as modern, yet upheld the racial and gendered status q

What does it mean to “upend a norm,” which is the translation of the title of Sergio Rigoletto’s recent study “Upended norms: essays on gender and sexuality in Italian cinema and television.” Rigoletto focuses on Italian audiovisual texts from the mid-20th century until today, asking questions about how these media helped mark the boundaries of social norms in Italy as well as chart the threats to those boundaries made by sexually active women, foreigners, drag queens, homosexuals and other queer subjects. How these threats move from the background (Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, 1960) to centerstage, in films like Ferzan Ozpetek’s The Ignorant Fairies (2001) and Luca Guadagnino’s Call me by Your Name (2017). What do these movements tell us about gendered subjects in Italian mainstream and popular media? What do they reveal about norms? These are some of the themes that Rigoletto’s (University of Oregon) Le norme traviate studies. Ellen Nerenberg is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy. Recent scholarl

Benjamin Piekut's Henry Cow: The World is a Problem (Duke UP, 2019) provides a compelling case study of the problems and possibilities of collective improvisation through the story of Henry Cow, the cult favorite British rock band active from 1968-1978. Engaging with free jazz, Maoism, and live electronics, Henry Cow pushed the boundaries of what a rock band could be. They set a standard for artistic independence that would be an inspiration to the punks that followed them, even if Henry Cow's epic freak-outs were sonic worlds away from the punks' three chord assaults. Drawing on a trove of first-hand documents (Henry Cow was the rare rock band to record minutes at their weekly meetings), Piekut's book is a tribute to a band that never stopped challenging themselves and their audience. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.

Despite—or because of—its huge popular culture status, Peanuts enabled cartoonist Charles Schulz to offer political commentary on the most controversial topics of postwar American culture through the voices of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Peanuts gang. In postwar America, there was no newspaper comic strip more recognizable than Charles Schulz's Peanuts. It was everywhere, not just in thousands of daily newspapers. For nearly fifty years, Peanuts was a mainstay of American popular culture in television, movies, and merchandising, from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to the White House to the breakfast table. Most people have come to associate Peanuts with the innocence of childhood, not the social and political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. Some have even argued that Peanuts was so beloved because it was apolitical. The truth, as Blake Scott Ball shows, is that Peanuts was very political. Whether it was the battles over the Vietnam War, racial integration, feminism, or the future of a nuclear world, Pe

In From Music to Sound: The Emergence of Sound in 20th and 21st-century Music (Routledge, 2019), Makis Solomos (Professor of Musicology, University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis “Paris 8”) argues that the 20th century bears witness to a kind of paradigm shift relating to the subject matter of music, a shift “from a musical culture centered on the note to a culture of sound” (5). Crucially, Solomos sets out to track this transformation as a change that is music-internal: that is, one that may be understood with reference to the new aesthetic and cultural forms of particular compositions that put sound at stake. Solomos draws on analysis, listening, and the aesthetic writings of composers themselves to argue for the “emergence” of sound-as-such as a topic of 20th- and 21st-century music, one consequence of the increasing complexity of music since 1900.  His first sole-author monograph in English, From Music to Sound is an accessible and engaging entry point into Solomos’s work for an Anglophone audience that draw

Breaking box office records, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has achieved an unparalleled level of success with fans across the world, raising the films to a higher level of narrative: myth. Michael D. Nichols's Religion and Myth in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (McFarland, 2021) is first book to analyze the Marvel output as modern myth, comparing it to epics, symbols, rituals, and stories from world religious traditions. Nichols places the exploits of Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther, and the other stars of the Marvel films alongside the legends of Achilles, Gilgamesh, Arjuna, the Buddha, and many others. It examines their origin stories and rites of passage, the monsters, shadow-selves, and familial conflicts they contend with, and the symbols of death and the battle against it that stalk them at every turn. The films deal with timeless human dilemmas and questions, evoking an enduring sense of adventure and wonder common across world mythic traditions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant,

As tourists increasingly moved across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a surprising number of communities looked to capitalize on the histories of Native American people to create tourist attractions. Locals staged performances that claimed to honor an Indigenous past while depicting that past on white settlers' terms. Linking the origins of these performances to their present-day incarnations, Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) reveals how they constituted what Dr. Katrina Phillips calls "salvage tourism.” Across time, Phillips argues, tourism, nostalgia, and authenticity converge in the creation of salvage tourism, which blends tourism and history, contestations over citizenship, identity, belonging, and the continued use of Indians and Indianness as a means of escape, entertainment, and economic development. Dr. Katrina Phillips is assistant professor of American Indian history

Today I talked to Nicole Tersigni about her book Men to Avoid in Art and Life" (Chronicle Books, 2020). Nicole Tersigni is a comedic writer experienced in improve comedy and women’s advocacy. She lives in metro Detroit with her husband, daughter, and two dogs. This episode takes a romp through five types of men to avoid like the plague: the mansplainer, the concern troll, the comedian, the sexpert, and the patronize. Tersigni talks through what each type means and an example from her book pairing an older painting (often from either the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Rijksmuseum) with her own contemporary caption. In turn, host Dan Hill adds in what type of emotional response stood out among the women depicted per type of men, e.g. anger in response to mansplainers, contempt for concern trolls, fear in response to sexperts, and the slightest of smiles in dealing with a patronizer. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his rela

Today I talked to Amanda Ciafone's (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) about her book Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation (University of California Press, 2019). Counter-Cola charts the history of one of the world’s most influential and widely known corporations, The Coca-Cola Company. Over the past 130 years, the corporation has sought to make its products, brands, and business central to daily life in over 200 countries. Amanda Ciafone uses this example of global capitalism to reveal the pursuit of corporate power within the key economic transformations—liberal, developmentalist, neoliberal—of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Coca-Cola's success has not gone uncontested. People throughout the world have redeployed the corporation, its commodities, and brand images to challenge the injustices of daily life under capitalism. As Ciafone shows, assertions of national economic interests, critiques of cultural homogenization, fights for workers’ rights, movements for en

Vaudeville is one of the most famous styles of theater in American history, a font of showbiz legend and the training ground for a generation of stars. It’s also one of the least studied. In his new book, Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1925 (UNC Press, 2020), Professor David Monod examines Vaudeville as both a cultural form and a for-profit industry, connecting the two to produce a remarkably cohesive portrait of a vast phenomenon. The genre, he argues, was related to a distinctly American form of modernity, offering its vast audiences an enjoyable respite from the pace of modern life—and a way to express and understand the world-shaking experiences of their era. Sam Backer is a PhD candidate in History at Johns Hopkins, where his work focuses on the intersection of art, culture, and capitalism. He is also a freelance journalist and a podcaster. He is currently a host on “Money 4 Nothing,” a podcast about music and capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adcho

The inside story of the world's most famous board game-a buried piece of American history with an epic scandal that continues today. The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game (Bloomsbury, 2015) reveals the unknown story of how Monopoly came into existence, the reinvention of its history by Parker Brothers and multiple media outlets, the lost female originator of the game, and one man's lifelong obsession to tell the true story about the game's questionable origins. Most think it was invented by an unemployed Pennsylvanian who sold his game to Parker Brothers during the Great Depression in 1935 and lived happily--and richly--ever after. That story, however, is not exactly true. Ralph Anspach, a professor fighting to sell his Anti-Monopoly board game decades later, unearthed the real story, which traces back to Abraham Lincoln, the Quakers, and a forgotten feminist named Lizzie Magie who invented her nearly identical Landlord's Game more than thirty years before Pa

Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus (Princeton UP, 2020), esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt’s attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today’s poetry readers. Skillfully combining intricate patterns of sound and classical precedent with the very modern concerns of sex, gender, love, death, and technology, these poems speak with a twenty-first century voice, while also opening multiple gateways to ancient worlds. This Callimachus travels the Mediterranean, pays homage to Athena and Zeus, develops erotic fixations, practices funerary commemoration, and brings fresh gifts for the cult of Artemis. This reimagined poet also visits airports, uses

In her new book From Rabbit Ears to the Rabbit Hole: A Life with Television (University of Mississippi Press, 2021) TV scholar and fan Kathleen Collins reflects on how her life as a consumer of television has intersected with the cultural and technological evolution of the medium itself. In a narrative bridging television studies, memoir, and comic, literary nonfiction, Collins takes readers alongside her from the 1960s through to the present, reminiscing and commiserating about some of what has transpired over the last five decades in the US, in media culture, and in what constitutes a shared cultural history. In a personal, critical, and entertaining meditation on her relationship with TV—as avid consumer and critic—she considers the concept and institution of TV as well as reminiscing about beloved, derided, or completely forgotten content. She describes the shifting role of TV in her life, in a progression that is far from unique, but rather representative of a largely collective experience. It affords a

Swashbuckling tales of valiant gauchos roaming Argentina and Uruguay were nineteenth-century Latin American best sellers. But when these stories jumped from the page to the circus stage and beyond, their cultural, economic, and political influence revolutionized popular culture and daily life. In Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay (University of New Mexico Press), William Acree guides readers through the deep history of popular entertainment before turning to circus culture and rural dramas that celebrated the countryside on stage. More than just riveting social experiences, these dramas were among the region’s most dominant attractions on the eve of the twentieth century. Staging Frontiers further explores the profound impacts this phenomenon had on the ways people interacted and on the broader culture that influenced the region. This new, modern popular culture revolved around entertainment and related products, yet it was also central to making sense of social

Everything you use, from your home to your smartphone, from highways to supermarkets, was designed by someone. What did they get right? Where did they go wrong? And what can we learn from how these experts think that can help us improve our own lives? In How Design Makes The World, bestselling author and designer Scott Berkun reveals how designers, from software engineers to city planners, have succeeded and failed us. From the airplane armrest to the Facebook “like” button, and everything in between, Berkun shows how design helps or hinders everyone, and offers a new way to think about the world around you. Whether you spend time in a studio or a boardroom, an office or the outdoors, How Design Makes the World empowers you to ask better questions—and to understand the designs in everything that matters. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more abou

Christina Ward’s newest book American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam, Bananas, and Jell-O (Process Media, 2019) examines a familiar but understudied sub-genre of commercially published cookbooks. Advertising cookbooks were most popular in the middle decades of the 20th century. They are usually published by a company or industry interest group rather than an individual chef or writer, and they serve as instructions for consumers to use the products of that company or industry. As Ward explains, advertising cookbooks introduced American consumers to new convenience foods like Jell-O and SPAM or to unfamiliar ingredients like pineapples and bananas.  Ward tells a history of cookbooks that draws a direct line between Puritan austerity and gender roles, Amelia Simmons, World’s Fairs, Home Economists, and Jell-O recipes. Essentially, Ward argues that American cooks at each stage needed (or wanted) experts to tell them how to eat and cook. Advertising cookbooks fill a specific gap in

The only constant in Western history is change. Susan Lee Johnson, Harry Reid Endowed Chair in the History of the Intermountain West at UNLV, knows this better than most. Author of the Bancroft Prize Winning "Roaring Camp," (2000), Johnson's new book is a testament to the changing nature of Western history. In Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West (UNC Press, 2020) Johnson writes about shifting ideas about the region's meaning across the span of the twentieth century through the lens of two mid-twentieth century "minor historians" of Kit Carson: Quantrille McClung, a librarian at the Denver Public Library, and Bernice Blackwelder, a former CIA employee and radio entertainer. Johnson tells the history of these two women's often mundane, quintessentially American, lives in the urban 20th century West, and their fasciation with Kit Carson, the 19th century explorer (if you ask some historians) or colonizer (if you ask many others). Johnson's intensely personal book is less a history of Carson, and

Why We Cook: Women on Food, Identity, and Connection (Workman, 2021) includes essays, recipes, interviews and profiles of more than 100 women in the world of food; from restaurateurs and activists, to food writers, professional chefs, and home cooks. Curated, researched and beautifully illustrated by author and artist Lindsay Gardner, it brings together the stories and perspectives of a diverse array of female voices who are transforming food across the world. Find more about the book at here. Visit the author’s website here and follow her work on social media @lindsaygardnerart Daniela Gutiérrez Flores is a PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture