Fair World


Book Description

A history of world's fairs and expositions from London to Shanghai 1851-2010.




The World's Fair


Book Description

While reporting the events of the St. Louis World's Fair for her local newspaper in 1906, Laura Ingalls Wilder teams up with Alice Roosevelt to stop the inhuman Anthropological Games.




Tomorrow-Land


Book Description

Motivated by potentially turning Flushing Meadows, literally a land of refuse, into his greatest public park, Robert Moses—New York's "Master Builder"—brought the World's Fair to the Big Apple for 1964 and '65. Though considered a financial failure, the 1964-65 World' s Fair was a Sixties flashpoint in areas from politics to pop culture, technology to urban planning, and civil rights to violent crime. In an epic narrative, the New York Times bestseller Tomorrow-Land shows the astonishing pivots taken by New York City, America, and the world during the Fair. It fetched Disney's empire from California and Michelangelo's La Pieta from Europe; and displayed flickers of innovation from Ford, GM, and NASA—from undersea and outerspace colonies to personal computers. It housed the controversial work of Warhol (until Governor Rockefeller had it removed); and lured Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Meanwhile, the Fair—and its house band, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians—sat in the musical shadows of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, who changed rock-and-roll right there in Queens. And as Southern civil rights efforts turned deadly, and violent protests also occurred in and around the Fair, Harlem-based Malcolm X predicted a frightening future of inner-city racial conflict. World's Fairs have always been collisions of eras, cultures, nations, technologies, ideas, and art. But the trippy, turbulent, Technicolor, Disney, corporate, and often misguided 1964-65 Fair was truly exceptional.




The 1933 Chicago World's Fair


Book Description

Chicago's 1933 world's fair set a new direction for international expositions. Earlier fairs had exhibited technological advances, but Chicago's fair organizers used the very idea of progress to buoy national optimism during the Depression's darkest years. Orchestrated by business leaders and engineers, almost all former military men, the fair reflected a business-military-engineering model that envisioned a promising future through science and technology's application to everyday life. But not everyone at Chicago's 1933 exposition had abandoned notions of progress that entailed social justice and equality, recognition of ethnicity and gender, and personal freedom and expression. The fair's motto, "Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms," was challenged by iconoclasts such as Sally Rand, whose provocative fan dance became a persistent symbol of the fair, as well as a handful of other exceptional individuals, including African Americans, ethnic populations and foreign nationals, groups of working women, and even well-heeled socialites. Cheryl R. Ganz offers the stories of fair planners and participants who showcased education, industry, and entertainment to sell optimism during the depths of the Great Depression. This engaging history also features eighty-six photographs--nearly half of which are full color--of key locations, exhibits, and people, as well as authentic ticket stubs, postcards, pamphlets, posters, and other it




All the World's a Fair


Book Description

Robert W. Rydell contends that America's early world's fairs actually served to legitimate racial exploitation at home and the creation of an empire abroad. He looks in particular to the "ethnological" displays of nonwhites—set up by showmen but endorsed by prominent anthropologists—which lent scientific credibility to popular racial attitudes and helped build public support for domestic and foreign policies. Rydell's lively and thought-provoking study draws on archival records, newspaper and magazine articles, guidebooks, popular novels, and oral histories.




Fair America


Book Description

Since their inception with New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition in the mid-nineteenth century, world's fairs have introduced Americans to “exotic” pleasures such as belly dancing and the Ferris Wheel; pathbreaking technologies such as telephones and X rays; and futuristic architectural, landscaping, and transportation schemes. Billed by their promoters as “encyclopedias of civilization,” the expositions impressed tens of millions of fairgoers with model environments and utopian visions. Setting more than 30 world’s fairs from 1853 to 1984 in their historical context, the authors show that the expositions reflected and influenced not only the ideals but also the cultural tensions of their times. As mainstays rather than mere ornaments of American life, world’s fairs created national support for such issues as the social reunification of North and South after the Civil War, U.S. imperial expansion at the turn of the 20th-century, consumer optimism during the Great Depression, and the essential unity of humankind in a nuclear age.




The Great Jelly World Fair


Book Description

Fox Family Channel's newest preschool series, Jellabies, joins the Reader's Digest family in two popular formats that feature the six loveable, bouncy characters and their adventures making rainbows all over Jelly World. Get a behind-the-scenes look at Jelly World in this popular lift-the-flap format that features an oversize flap on each spread.




Fair New World


Book Description

"It's the most politically incorrect work of art I have ever seen. It's also hilariously funny and scathingly insightful." -- Karen Selick, Canadian Lawyer Magazine "Takes the reader over the edge of the politically unthinkable and unsayable. It may be a nightmare into which we plunge, but it is a poignantly contemporary nightmare. This book just may wake some people up--if anything can." --Kurt Preinsperg, Vancouver Community College "Fair New World is that rare thing: an entirely independent-minded book that is fearless in its satire of existing orthodoxies, no matter which direction they come from . . . It is also great fun to read, making us constantly stop and think as we trip over its hilarious extrapolations from the everyday craziness that surrounds us." --Daphne Patai, University of Massachusetts "Tafler brings into play an abundance of invention, verbal ebullience and wit. These, together with an eye for and relish in the absurd and ridiculous, serve his anger as he satirizes the excesses of feminism and political correctness of the contemporary scene." --Kaye Stockholder, The University of British Columbia "Swiftian in the savagery of its humor, which is directed at the very real and present dangers inherent in radical feminism and political correctness running amok." --Donald Todd, Simon Fraser University Book Description Lou Tafler's Fair New World offers a tonic for toxic political correctness. The novel portrays two dystopias--Feminania and Bruteland--and a utopia, Melior. Most of the action unfolds in Feminania, a polity governed by feminism-run-amok, steeped in denial of the social consequences of sex difference, and obsessed with changing human nature by inane legislation. Bruteland, a backlash state, is run by violent male chauvinists. Melior, Latin for "better," outlines Tafler's vision of political, social, and sexual sanity. As reviewer John Frary observed, Tafler set out to write satire, only to discover that he was writing prophecy. When Fair New World first appeared in 1994, the cancer of political correctness was still confined to academe. As Tafler warned, if left untreated political correctness would spread--as indeed it has--to governments, corporations, K-12 education, media, and society entire. His direst prophecies are highlighted in this edition's Introduction by professor Daphne Patai, who avers: "The world has not heeded Tafler's warnings, nor taken his wit to heart. Instead, readers of Fair New World on the 25th anniversary of its original publication need only look around to see how much the abandonment of wisdom, commonsense, and sanity has flourished in the intervening years." Readers who cherish our formerly unalienable rights and defend our hard-won freedoms will revel in Tafler's merciless mockery of the delusional radicalism and totalitarian ideology that has usurped them. Lou Tafler is the pen-name of philosopher Lou Marinoff, a stalwart defender of individual liberty, and a relentless opponent of identity politics.




A World's Fair for the Global Village


Book Description

Malamud offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Internet Exposition of 1996--a worldwide event which embraced the new technologies of the Internet--and profiles the small group of people who made it happen. The book comes with an audio CD and a CD-ROM for Macintosh and Windows 95. 800 color illustrations.




Orange World and Other Stories


Book Description

From the Pulitzer Finalist and universally beloved author of the New York Times best sellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a stunning new collection of short fiction that showcases Karen Russell’s extraordinary, irresistible gifts of language and imagination. Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In“Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors,” two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. In the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant’s safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void—yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master.