Taken for Granted


Book Description

A Fox News political analyst tackles some of our communities’ toughest challenges with timely insight from his own life: the story of how conservative values helped a kid from the South Side of Chicago find a life of opportunity. “A must-read.”—Brian Kilmeade, bestselling author of Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers Born to a mother consumed by drugs and raised by his grandmother in poverty on the South Side of Chicago, Gianno Caldwell saw firsthand how lawmakers from both parties have failed African American voters on issues like poverty, welfare, and education. But as someone who beat the odds growing up under a fear-based mentality that limits what people can achieve, Caldwell believes there’s another way. In this groundbreaking book, the Fox News analyst describes his personal journey while detailing a hopeful vision for a nation no longer beholden to identity politics and self-limitations. Trapped within the expectations and traditions of our communities, families, political parties, faith, race, and gender, we fail to challenge our politicians and ourselves to create real change. Now more than ever, we need to confront preconceived notions about the Democrats and Republicans, public policy, and American history. Looking at the obstacles facing urban communities, such as crime, education, and social mobility, Caldwell digs beneath the statistics. By spotlighting the moments that enabled his rise to success, he proffers steps that can help more people overcome the odds—whether through policy reform or the heroic efforts of men and women who are already working to make a difference in their own communities.




Taken for Granted


Book Description

Why is the term "openly gay" so widely used but "openly straight" is not? What are the unspoken assumptions behind terms like "male nurse," "working mom," and "white trash"? Offering a revealing and provocative look at the word choices we make every day without even realizing it, Taken for Granted exposes the subtly encoded ways we talk about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, social status, and more. In this engaging and insightful book, Eviatar Zerubavel describes how the words we use - such as when we mark "the best female basketball player" but leave her male counterpart unmarked-provide telling clues about the things many of us take for granted. By marking "women's history" or "Black History Month," we are also reinforcing the apparent normality of the history of white men. When we mark something as being special or somehow noticeable, that which goes unmarked-such as maleness, whiteness, straightness, and able-bodiedness-is assumed to be ordinary by default. Zerubavel shows how this tacit normalizing of certain identities, practices, and ideas helps to maintain their cultural dominance-including the power to dictate what others take for granted. A little book about a very big idea, Taken for Granted draws our attention to what we implicitly assume to be normal-and in the process unsettles the very notion of normality.




Witcraft


Book Description

An ambitious new history of philosophy in English that broadens the canon to include many lesser-known figures Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that “philosophy should be written like poetry.” But philosophy has often been presented more prosaically as a long trudge through canonical authors and great works. But what, Jonathan Rée asks, if we instead saw the history of philosophy as a haphazard series of unmapped forest paths, a mass of individual stories showing endurance, inventiveness, bewilderment, anxiety, impatience, and good humor? Here, Jonathan Rée brilliantly retells this history, covering such figures as Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Mill, James, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Sartre. But he also includes authors not usually associated with philosophy, such as William Hazlitt, George Eliot, Darwin, and W. H. Auden. Above all, he uncovers dozens of unremembered figures—puritans, revolutionaries, pantheists, feminists, nihilists, socialists, and scientists—who were passionate and active readers of philosophy, and often authors themselves. Breaking away from high-altitude narratives, he shows how philosophy finds its way into ordinary lives, enriching and transforming them in unexpected ways.




Taken for Grantedness


Book Description

An examination of how the mobile phone has become part of the fabric of society—as did such earlier technologies as the clock and the car. Why do we feel insulted or exasperated when our friends and family don't answer their mobile phones? If the Internet has allowed us to broaden our social world into a virtual friend-net, the mobile phone is an instrument of a more intimate social sphere. The mobile phone provides a taken-for-granted link to the people to whom we are closest; when we are without it, social and domestic disarray may result. In just a few years, the mobile phone has become central to the functioning of society. In this book, Rich Ling explores the process by which the mobile phone has become embedded in society, comparing it to earlier technologies that changed the character of our social interaction and, along the way, became taken for granted. Ling, drawing on research, interviews, and quantitative material, shows how the mobile phone (and the clock and the automobile before it) can be regarded as a social mediation technology, with a critical mass of users, a supporting ideology, changes in the social ecology, and a web of mutual expectations regarding use. By examining the similarities and synergies among these three technologies, Ling sheds a more general light on how technical systems become embedded in society and how they support social interaction within the closest sphere of friends and family.




A Dictionary of Media and Communication


Book Description

The most accessible and up-to-date dictionary of its kind, this wide-ranging A-Z covers both interpersonal and mass communication, in all their myriad forms, encompassing advertising, digital culture, journalism, new media, telecommunications, and visual culture, among many other topics. This new edition includes over 200 new complete entries and revises hundreds of others, as well as including hundreds of new cross-references. The biographical appendix has also been fully cross-referenced to the rest of the text. This dictionary is an indispensable guide for undergraduate students on degree courses in media or communication studies, and also for those taking related subjects such as film studies, visual culture, and cultural studies.




Taken for Granted


Book Description

When Nina comes to terms with her unhappy marriage and underachieving adult daughter, she seeks a change, finding unlikely solace in Richard, who has own marital issues.




Taken for Granted


Book Description

A Fox News political analyst tackles some of our communities’ toughest challenges with timely insight from his own life: the story of how conservative values helped a kid from the South Side of Chicago find a life of opportunity. “A must-read.”—Brian Kilmeade, bestselling author of Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers Born to a mother consumed by drugs and raised by his grandmother in poverty on the South Side of Chicago, Gianno Caldwell saw firsthand how lawmakers from both parties have failed African American voters on issues like poverty, welfare, and education. But as someone who beat the odds growing up under a fear-based mentality that limits what people can achieve, Caldwell believes there’s another way. In this groundbreaking book, the Fox News analyst describes his personal journey while detailing a hopeful vision for a nation no longer beholden to identity politics and self-limitations. Trapped within the expectations and traditions of our communities, families, political parties, faith, race, and gender, we fail to challenge our politicians and ourselves to create real change. Now more than ever, we need to confront preconceived notions about the Democrats and Republicans, public policy, and American history. Looking at the obstacles facing urban communities, such as crime, education, and social mobility, Caldwell digs beneath the statistics. By spotlighting the moments that enabled his rise to success, he proffers steps that can help more people overcome the odds—whether through policy reform or the heroic efforts of men and women who are already working to make a difference in their own communities.




Taken for granted


Book Description

There are so many things that we take for granted. Walking, dre3ssing ourselves and tying up our shoelaces. Technology, like facebook, mobile phones, television and electricity. Even going to the car and going up the street, BUT what would happen if we couldnt do any of these simple tasks. WHAT if you mever see your Mother again. Never hear her voice, never see her smile, She has gone. Was she taken for granted. How do you fare. We dont evere contemplate that going to visit Mum is an event that cant happen. WELL IT CAN. In just 5 short months our mother was taken for ever. Did l take her for granted. Do you take your Mum for granted. YOU BE THE JUDGE..




TAKEN FOR GRANTED


Book Description

A battle of the sexes? Sally Alexander felt as if everyone in her life was taking her for granted—Ben and Molly but most of all her husband, Sam. After twelve years of marriage surely she wasn't expecting too much that her husband should remember her thirty-ninth birthday! Yes, he was a busy doctor, but her life was hectic, too! And no, this time he wouldn't win her over with his lovemaking. In the ensuing fight, Sally issued a challenge—reverse their roles! She was a qualified doctor, too—it was how they had met—and she needed to be more than just a housewife and mother. Sam picked up the gauntlet…but had they drifted too far apart to save their marriage?




Inconspicuous Consumption


Book Description

From kitschy novelties and wildly unappetizing food products to beautifully functional items such as garlic presses and toothpick dispensers, Inconspicuous Consumption is a delightful celebration of the sometimes elegant, sometimes ridiculous fringes of our late-20th-century culture. 50 photos. 192 pp. Author interviews & national radio campaign. National publicity. 15,000 print.