Showing titles in Popular Culture

The Bastard Instrument chronicles the history of the electric bass and the musicians who played it, from the instrument’s invention through its widespread acceptance at the end of the 1960s. Although their contributions have often gone unsung, electric bassists helped shape the sound of a wide range of genres, including jazz, rhythm & blues, rock, country, soul, funk, and more.

From the author of The Natural Mother of the Child, an exquisite memoir about an amateur home cook’s hard and fast descent into an obsession with food celebrities, including Dessert Person Claire Saffitz, Smitten Kitchen’s Deb Perelman, Pioneer Woman Ree Drummond, and Ina Garten, the...

Anne Baxter's life was a vibrant tapestry of remarkable talent, personal resilience, and enduring legacy still relevant today even 40 years after her death. By the 1940s and 50s, she had become one of Hollywood's most versatile actresses, delivering iconic performances in films like Guest in the House (1944), Yellow Sky (1948), The Razor's Edge (1946), All About Eve (1950) and The Ten Commandments (1954). Alongside her career, she had three marriages, raised three daughters, and endured periods as a single working mother while juggling the demands of Hollywood.

In the mid-1970s, Misty Knight burst onto the pages of Marvel Comics. Before Storm, Shuri, or Riri, Misty opened the doors of comics as Marvel's first Black woman superhero. A detective and martial artist with a bionic arm that gives her heroic strength, Misty personified the undercurrent of independent Black media and the budding post-soul culture. First appearing in 1975, she broke down stereotypes to become one of the backbone characters of the Marvel Universe.

At the fragile intersection of myth and memory stands a girl—often eclipsed by the legend she became. The Girl Who Would Be Marilyn Monroe dares to strip away the satin, the spotlight, the studio-invented shine, to reveal the tender child beneath: a girl marked not by fame but by longing. Longing for love, for safety, for the kind of permanence the world never offered her. This is not simply another biography. It is a resurrection.

The audiobook edition of this work is narrated by a synthetic voice. No human speaker performed these sentences. The author chose a synthetic narrator because the book asks the listener to examine every bargain between the real and the fabricated, including this one. If the voice troubles you, the trouble is the point. If it does not, that is also worth examining. A counterfeit banknote and a diplomatic white lie are both, in some reductive sense, "fake." Calling them by the same name obscures everything important about them: the intent behind each, the social function each serves, the harm...

Dall'indimenticabile ingegnere-filosofo partenopeo, un autore da 20 milioni di copie. «In questo libro pongo 4 grandi domande: 1 Esiste Dio? 2 Esiste il Destino? 3 Che cos'è il tempo? 4 Che cos'è lo spazio? A esse cerco di trovare, se non proprio una risposta, almeno un tentativo di risposta.»

For over 40 years, Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan has inspired audiences to expand their world view beyond traditional Western forms. Originally published as Castaneda’s master’s thesis in anthropology, Teachings documents Castaneda’s supposed apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan Matus. Dividing the work into two sections, Castaneda begins by describing don Juan’s philosophies, then continues with his own reflections.

A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book A GoodReads Reader's Choice In One Summer Bill Bryson, one of our greatest and most beloved nonfiction writers, transports readers on a journey back to one amazing season in American life. The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the...

Aliens Among Us: They're Not Aliens – They're Not Human: The Cryptoterrestrials and Origins of UAP What if the "aliens" buzzing our fighters, shutting down nuclear silos, and dancing across our radars aren't visitors from distant stars... but something far older, far closer, and already calling Earth home? In this gripping, no-BS debrief from retired fighter pilot and longtime UAP investigator Greg Pasden (call sign "Paz"), four battle-hardened veterans—pilots and intel officers who've locked radars on the impossible—sit you down in the ready room for the conversation the world isn't ...

From a New York Times media correspondent, a dishy history of the Condé Nast magazine empire, home of Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and more, focusing on its glitzy heyday from the 1980s through the 2000s. For decades, Condé Nast and its glittering magazines defined how to live the good...

A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book Named one of the Best Books of the Year by TIME, NPR, Elle, and The Boston Globe “Searing… rigorously researched but never stuffy… Gilbert has compiled perhaps the first comprehensive examination of turn-of-the-millennium mainstream...

An NPR Book Concierge Best Book of 2018! A stunning story about how power works in the modern age--the book the New York Times called "one helluva page-turner" and The Sunday Times of London celebrated as "riveting...an astonishing modern media conspiracy that is a fantastic read." Pick up the...

""Water Mirror Echo is a remarkable story of a man, the traditions and communities that created him, and the new worlds he made possible. Like Bruce Lee himself, Jeff Chang is blessed with the vision to see things we do not yet see, thinking and writing with a restless, chasm-crossing, almost...

From Jon King, legendary front man of iconic post-punk band Gang of Four, comes a memoir to remember. To Hell with Poverty! documents King’s story from a south London slum and working-class background to international success as core musician, lyricist, writer, and producer in the legendary post-punk/funk band Gang of Four.

Do you really choose what you like—or were you trained to like it? Ranch, Sriracha, & the Illusion of Choice is a sharp, provocative cultural investigation into America’s most common condiments—and what they reveal about control, comfort, and manufactured preference. Using ranch dressing, ketchup, mayonnaise, hot sauce, A1, soy sauce, and more as case studies, Kevin L. Whitworth uncovers how modern taste was engineered through convenience culture, industrial food systems, marketing psychology, and childhood conditioning.

A TikTok teenager declares Helen Keller a fraud. A newspaper editorial accuses Robert Goddard of not understanding high school physics. A Broadway critic announces that Tennessee Williams has lost his gift. A federal agent handcuffs Billie Holiday to her deathbed. In each case, the culture performs the same operation: it takes a person of extraordinary achievement, finds a vulnerability, and uses that vulnerability to replace the achievement with an image — the meme, the pigeon man, the wine commercial, the mug shot, the infidel. From Genius to Joke identifies the recurring mechanism ...

There is no shortage of earnest books about the cultural significance of musicians like David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon. But George Michael does not attract such attention. The music he produced is not generally deemed worthy of serious analysis, yet such dismissals overlook how...

Crossing continents and cultures from antiquity to the present, The Garden encompasses a global history of the garden, the place where culture and nature converge. The uniqueness of the book will come not only from its global scope – the embracing of East and West, English aristocrats and...

It's hard to imagine our world without its stars and celebrity geniuses—they become a part of our culture and history, seeming permanent and preordained. But as Cass Sunstein shows in this startling book, that is far from the case. Focusing on both famous and forgotten (or simply overlooked) artists and luminaries in music, literature, business, science, politics, and other fields, he explores why some individuals become famous and others don't, and offers a new understanding of the role of greatness, luck, and contingency in the achievement of fame.