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The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
In this most original examination of America’s post-9/11 culture, Susan Faludi shines a light on the country’s psychological response to the attacks on that terrible day. Turning her acute observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a barely acknowledged but bedrock societal drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why, she asks, did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore “traditional” manhood, marriage, and maternity? Why did we react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fueled by hatred of Western emancipation lead us to a regressive fixation on Doris Day womanhood and John Wayne masculinity, with trembling “security moms,” swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the “rescue” of a female soldier cast as a “helpless little girl”? The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a historical anomaly unique to the American experience: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack was forged in traumatizing assaults by nonwhite “barbarians” on town and village. That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms. Brilliant and important, The Terror Dream shows what 9/11 revealed about us—and offers the opportunity to look at ourselves anew. .
Price: $9.00
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Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Faludi lays out a two-fold thesis in this aggressive work: First, despite the opinions of pop-psychologists and the mainstream media, career-minded women are generally not husband-starved loners on the verge of nervous breakdowns. Secondly, such beliefs are nothing more than anti-feminist propaganda pumped out by conservative research organizations with clear-cut ulterior motives. This backlash against the women's movement, she writes, "stands the truth boldly on its head and proclaims that the very steps that have elevated women's positions have actually led to their downfall." Meticulously researched, Faludi's contribution to this tumultuous debate is monumental and it earned the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction. .
Price: $7.75
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Global Backlash: Citizen Initiatives for a Just World Economy (New Millennium Books in International Studies)
Global Backlash is the first book to move beyond the monolithic portrayal of the globalization protests that have escalated since Seattle and are not likely to abate soon. With trenchant analysis and dozens of primary documents from a variety of popular and uncommon sources, Robin Broad explores proposals and initiatives coming from the backlash to answer the question, But what do they want? A range of sophisticated propositions and a vibrant debate among segments of the backlash emerge. Highly readable and analytically powerful, this book is vital to understanding the most potent protest movement of our times. Visit our website for sample chapters!.
Price: $40.96
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The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America
Between 1900 and the 1970s, twenty million southerners migrated north and west. Weaving together for the first time the histories of these black and white migrants, James Gregory traces their paths and experiences in a comprehensive new study that demonstrates how this regional diaspora reshaped America by "southernizing" communities and transforming important cultural and political institutions. Challenging the image of the migrants as helpless and poor, Gregory shows how both black and white southerners used their new surroundings to become agents of change. Combining personal stories with cultural, political, and demographic analysis, he argues that the migrants helped create both the modern civil rights movement and modern conservatism. They spurred changes in American religion, notably modern evangelical Protestantism, and in popular culture, including the development of blues, jazz, and country music. In a sweeping account that pioneers new understandings of the impact of mass migrations, Gregory recasts the history of twentieth-century America. He demonstrates that the southern diaspora was crucial to transformations in the relationship between American regions, in the politics of race and class, and in the roles of religion, the media, and culture..
Price: $13.99
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Prozac Backlash: Overcoming the Dangers of Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and Other Antidepressants with Safe, Effective Alternatives
It seems like it was just yesterday that Prozac was a miracle pill, a medication that could not only make sick people well, but "better than well." By the end of the 1990s, Prozac and similar drugs--Paxil, Zoloft, and others--were being prescribed for everything from depression to anxiety to drug addiction to ADD. About 70 percent of prescriptions for these antidepressants were being written by family physicians, rather than psychiatrists. Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, a psychiatrist who has a private practice and also works for Harvard University Health Services, sees this antidepressant mania as dangerous, even reckless. He notes that these drugs can have severe side effects, including uncontrollable facial and body tics, which could be signs of severe and permanent brain damage. About 50 percent of patients suffer often-debilitating withdrawal symptoms from them, and about 60 percent end up with sexual dysfunction. And Prozac may make a small number of people homicidal or suicidal, or both. But there are alternatives: in Germany, for example, St. John's wort outsells Prozac 25 to 1, showing that doctors and patients there understand that the herbal remedy works as well as the synthetic ones for mild to moderate depression. [Editor's note: St. John's wort has been shown to interfere with the actions of the transplant rejection drug cyclosporin and the AIDS drug indinivir.] And diet, exercise, 12-step programs, and good old-fashioned psychotherapy can work well, too. Even for severe depression requiring medication, Dr. Glenmullen shows how the drugs can be used with other treatments and then discontinued after a year or less. Moreover, Prozac Backlash discusses exactly what depression is and isn't; Dr. Glenmullen reviews hundreds of scientific studies, and discusses numerous case studies from his practice and others. Because of that detail, medical professionals may be this book's most likely readers, but anyone who has been on an antidepressant, or is close to someone who is, will also want to give Prozac Backlash a careful read. The brain you save could be your own. --Lou Schuler.
Price: $1.65
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Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Early American Studies)
The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise According to Rosemarie Zagarri, the debate over women's rights began not in the decades prior to 1848 but during the American Revolution itself. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, this study explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution until the election of Andrew Jackson.
Although the period produced no collective movement for women's rights, women built on precedents established during the Revolution and gained an informal foothold in party politics and male electoral activities. Federalists and Jeffersonians vied for women's allegiance and sought their support in times of national crisis. Women, in turn, attended rallies, organized political activities, and voiced their opinions on the issues of the day. After the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a widespread debate about the nature of women's rights ensued. The state of New Jersey attempted a bold experiment: for a brief time, women there voted on the same terms as men.
Yet as Zagarri argues, this opening for women soon closed. By 1828, women's politicization was seen more as a liability than as a strength, contributing to a divisive political climate that repeatedly brought the country to the brink of civil war. The increasing sophistication of party organizations and triumph of universal suffrage for white males marginalized those who could not vote, especially women. Yet all was not lost. Women had already begun to participate in charitable movements, benevolent societies, and social reform organizations. Through these organizations, women found another way to practice politics.
Spanning the first fifty years of the nation's history, Revolutionary Backlash uncovers women's forgotten role in early American politics and explores an alternative explanation for the emergence of the first women's rights movement. .
Price: $30.98
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The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)
In an examination of transatlantic Puritanism from 1570 to 1638, Theodore Dwight Bozeman analyzes the quest for purity through sanctification. The word "Puritan," he says, accurately depicts a major and often obsessive trait of the English late Reformation: a hunger for discipline. The Precisianist Strain clarifies what Puritanism in its disciplinary mode meant for an early modern society struggling with problems of change, order, and identity. Focusing on ascetic teachings and rites, which in their severity fostered the "precisianist strain" prevalent in Puritan thought and devotional practice, Bozeman traces the reactions of believers put under ever more meticulous demands. Sectarian theologies of ease and consolation soon formed in reaction to those demands, Bozeman argues, eventually giving rise to a "first wave" of antinomian revolt, including the American conflicts of 1636-1638. Antinomianism, based on the premise of salvation without strictness and duty, was not so much a radicalization of Puritan content as a backlash against the whole project of disciplinary religion. Its reconceptualization of self and responsibility would affect Anglo-American theology for decades to come..
Price: $16.98
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Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980
In this nuanced look at white working-class life and politics in twentieth-century America, Kenneth Durr takes readers into the neighborhoods, workplaces, and community institutions of blue-collar Baltimore in the decades after World War II. Challenging notions that the "white backlash" of the 1960s and 1970s was driven by increasing race resentment, Durr details the rise of a working-class populism shaped by mistrust of the means and ends of postwar liberalism in the face of urban decline. Exploring the effects of desegregation, deindustrialization, recession, and the rise of urban crime, Durr shows how legitimate economic, social, and political grievances convinced white working-class Baltimoreans that they were threatened more by the actions of liberal policymakers than by the incursions of urban blacks. While acknowledging the parochialism and racial exclusivity of white working-class life, Durr adopts an empathetic view of workers and their institutions. Behind the Backlash melds ethnic, labor, and political history to paint a rich portrait of urban life--and the sweeping social and economic changes that reshaped America's cities and politics in the late twentieth century..
Price: $13.98
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