Wild in the Streets


Book Description

This beautifully illustrated book pairs poetry with nonfiction, telling the fascinating stories of the animals who have found homes in our city landscapes across the world, from the pythons traveling Singapore's sewers to the monkeys living in India's temples. Humans may have built towns and cities, but we aren't the only ones who live in them. Given the smallest chance--a park, a garden, a window box; a basement, a subway tunnel, a bridge--wildlife manages to survive in the city. Among colorful illustrated pages buzzing with city life and animal activity, you'll discover the host of wild animals who live among humans: butterflies, bats, spiders, honeybees, coyotes, and more. Each animal's story is told through a short poem accompanied by an informational paragraph. Some poems are comical, some poignant, and all make the reader see the world in a different way. After a rousing exploration of animal life, find definitions of the various types of poetry forms used in the book: haiku, cinquain, sonnet, terza rima, villanelle, triolet, reverso, acrostic, and free verse. Look around--you may discover neighbors you didn't know you had!




Wild in the Streets


Book Description

This beautifully illustrated book pairs poetry with nonfiction, telling the fascinating stories of the animals who have found homes in our city landscapes across the world, from the pythons traveling Singapore's sewers to the monkeys living in India's temples. Humans may have built towns and cities, but we aren’t the only ones who live in them. Given the smallest chance—a park, a garden, a window box; a basement, a subway tunnel, a bridge—wildlife manages to survive in the city. Among colorful illustrated pages buzzing with city life and animal activity, you'll discover the host of wild animals who live among humans: butterflies, bats, spiders, honeybees, coyotes, and more. Each animal’s story is told through a short poem accompanied by an informational paragraph. Some poems are comical, some poignant, and all make the reader see the world in a different way. After a rousing exploration of animal life, find definitions of the various types of poetry forms used in the book: haiku, cinquain, sonnet, terza rima, villanelle, triolet, reverso, acrostic, and free verse. Look around—you may discover neighbors you didn't know you had!




Dancing in the Streets


Book Description

From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes Barbara Ehrenreich's fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species' attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports. Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future. "Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead."—Terry Eagleton, The Nation




Tearing Down the Streets


Book Description

From New York to San Francisco, Times Square to the Tenderloin, graffiti artists, young people, radical environmentalists, and the homeless clash with police on city streets in an attempt take back urban spaces from the developers and "disneyfiers". Drawing on more than a decade of first-hand research, this lively account goes inside the worlds of street musicians, homeless punks, militant bicycle activists, high-risk "BASE jump" parachutists, skateboarders, outlaw radio operators, and hip hop graffiti artists, to explore the day-to-day skirmishes in the struggle over public life and public space.




LIFE


Book Description

LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.




American Fun


Book Description

Here is an animated and wonderfully engaging work of cultural history that lays out America’s unruly past by describing the ways in which cutting loose has always been, and still is, an essential part of what it means to be an American. From the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Americans have defied their stodgy rules and hierarchies with pranks, dances, stunts, and wild parties, shaping the national character in profound and lasting ways. In the nation’s earlier eras, revelers flouted Puritans, Patriots pranked Redcoats, slaves lampooned masters, and forty-niners bucked the saddles of an increasingly uptight middle class. In the twentieth century, fun-loving Americans celebrated this heritage and pushed it even further: flappers “barney-mugged” in “petting pantries,” Yippies showered the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills, and B-boys invented hip-hop in a war zone in the Bronx. This is the surprising and revelatory history that John Beckman recounts in American Fun. Tying together captivating stories of Americans’ “pursuit of happiness”—and distinguishing between real, risky fun and the bland amusements that paved the way for Hollywood, Disneyland, and Xbox—Beckman redefines American culture with a delightful and provocative thesis. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)




A Walk on the Wild Side


Book Description

With its depiction of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, "A Walk on the Wild Side" tells, in Algren's own words, "something about the natural toughness of women and men, in that order".




Road Trip to Nowhere


Book Description

How a new generation of counterculture talent changed the landscape of Hollywood, the film industry, and celebrity culture. By 1967, the commercial and political impact on Hollywood of the sixties counterculture had become impossible to ignore. The studios were in bad shape, still contending with a generation-long box office slump and struggling to get young people into the habit of going to the movies. Road Trip to Nowhere examines a ten-year span (from 1967 to 1976) rife with uneasy encounters between artists caught up in the counterculture and a corporate establishment still clinging to a studio system on the brink of collapse. Out of this tumultuous period many among the young and talented walked away from celebrity, turning down the best job Hollywood—and America—had on offer: movie star. Road Trip to Nowhere elaborates a primary-sourced history of movie production culture, examining the lives of a number of talented actors who got wrapped up in the politics and lifestyles of the counterculture. Thoroughly put off by celebrity culture, actors like Dennis Hopper, Christopher Jones, Jean Seberg, and others rejected the aspirational backstory and inevitable material trappings of success, much to the chagrin of the studios and directors who backed them. In Road Trip to Nowhere, film historian Jon Lewis details dramatic encounters on movie sets and in corporate boardrooms, on the job and on the streets, and in doing so offers an entertaining and rigorous historical account of an out-of-touch Hollywood establishment and the counterculture workforce they would never come to understand.




We Are the Mutants


Book Description

An offbeat odyssey through the most daring and disruptive phase of American cinema since the advent of sound — during the most transformative and tumultuous period of American history since the Civil War. We Are the Mutants is a critical reassessment of what is arguably the most discussed and beloved stretch of movies in Hollywood history. Documenting the period between the arrival of US combat troops in Vietnam and the end of President Ronald Reagan’s second term, it forgoes the usual and restrictive exemplars of “auteur cinema,” and instead focuses on an eclectic selection of films and genres — horror, documentary, disaster, vigilante action, neo-noir, post-apocalyptic sci-fi — to track this period's tumultuous transformation in American life, culture, and politics. Covering everything from Rosemary’s Baby and Enter the Dragon to Escape from New York and Fatal Attraction, and from manufactured blockbusters and studio sleepers to forgotten Bs and cult classics, We Are the Mutants re-writes the history of modern American cinema, and in doing so, the history of America itself.




The Sci-Fi Movie Guide


Book Description

From the trashy to the epic, from the classics to today's blockbusters, this cinefile’s guidebook reviews nearly 1,000 of the biggest, baddest, and brightest from every age and genre of cinematic science fiction! Once upon a time, science fiction was only in the future. It was the stuff of drive-ins and cheap double-bills. Then, with the ever-increasing rush of new, society-altering technologies, science fiction pushed its way to the present, and it busted out of the genre ghetto of science fiction and barged its way into the mainstream. What used to be mere fantasy (trips to the moon? Wristwatch radios? Supercomputers capable of learning?) are now everyday reality. Whether nostalgic for the future or fast-forwarding to the present, The Sci-Fi Movie Guide: The Universe of Film from Alien to Zardoz covers the broad and widening range of science-fiction movies. You’ll find more than just Star Wars, Star Trek, and Transformers, with reviews on many overlooked and under-appreciated gems and genres, such as ... Monsters! Pacific Rim, Godzilla, The Thing, Creature from the Black Lagoon Superheroes: Thor, Iron Man, X-Men, The Amazing Spider-man, Superman Dystopias: THX 1138, 1984, The Hunger Games Avant-garde masterpieces: Solaris, 2001, Brazil, The Man Who Fell to Earth Time travel: 12 Monkeys, The Time Machine, Time Bandits, Back to the Future Post-apocalyptic action: The Road Warrior, I Am Legend, Terminator Salvation Comedy: Dark Star, Mars Attacks!, Dr. Strangelove, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, Mystery Science Theater 3000 Aliens! The Day the Earth Stood Still, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Signs Mad scientists! Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Abominable Dr. Phibes Shoot-em-ups: Aliens, Universal Soldier, Starship Troopers What the...?: Battlefield Earth, Prayer of the Rollerboys, Repo: The Genetic Opera, Tank Girl, The 10th Victim Animation: WALL-E, Akira, Ghost in the Shell Small budgets, big ideas: Donnie Darko, Primer, Sound of My Voice, Computer Chess Neglected greats: Things to Come, Children of Men Epics: Metropolis, Blade Runner, Cloud Atlas and many, many more categories and movies!! In addition to the nearly one thousand science fiction film reviews, this guide includes fascinating and fun Top-10 lists and sidebars that are designed to lead fans to similar titles they might not have known about. The Sci-Fi Movie Guide: The Universe of Film from Alien to Zardoz will help ensure that you will never again have to worry about what to watch next. Useful both as a handy resource or a fun romp through the film world of science fiction. It also includes a helpful bibliography and an extensive index, adding to its usefulness.