Books about Satirist from Amazon.com

"The FBI was right; this man is dangerous-and funny, and necessary "-George Carlin

"Thanks to Paul Krassner for continuing to be the lobster claw in the tuna casserole of modern America "-Tom Robbins

"Krassner has the uncanny ability to alter your perceptions permanently."-Los Angeles Times

"I told Krassner one time that his writings made me hopeful. He found this an odd compliment to offer a satirist. I explained that he made supposedly serious matters seem ridiculous, and that this inspired many of his readers to decide for themselves what was ridiculous and what was not. Knowing that there were people doing that, better late than never, made me optimistic."-Kurt Vonnegut

Counterculture legend Paul Krassner gazes on the fires of pop culture, politics, and celebrity and returns unscathed to help us make sense of our senseless world, with an introduction by Lewis Black (The Daily Show) and a foreword by Harry Shearer (The Simpsons, Le Show).

From cults to pornography, from Charles Manson to Homer Simpson, from the war on drugs to the invasion of Iraq, from Dolly Parton to Lenny Bruce, from circumcision to propaganda, this collection epitomizes Krassner's credo, "Irreverence is our only sacred cow."

Paul Krassner is the only person in the world ever to win awards from both Playboy (for satire) and the Feminist Party Media Workshop (for journalism), to be inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame at the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, to receive an ACLU Uppie (Upton Sinclair) Award for dedication to freedom of expression, and to be described by the FBI as "a raving, unconfined nut."

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"A PROCESSION of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them--or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile...".
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This book argues that philosophical skepticism helps define the aesthetic experience of the sublime in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature, especially the poetry of Alexander Pope. Skeptical doubt appears in the period as an astonishing force in discourse that cannot be controlled--"doubt's boundless Sea," in Rochester's words--and as such is consistently seen as affiliated with the sublime, itself emerging as an important way to conceive of excessive power in rhetoric, nature, psychology, religion, and politics. This view of skepticism as a force affecting discourse beyond its practitioners' control links Noggle's discussion to other theoretical accounts of sublimity, especially psychoanalytic and ideological ones, that emphasize the sublime's activation of unconscious personal and cultural anxieties and contradictions. But because The Skeptical Sublime demonstrates the sublime's roots in the epistemological obsessions of Pope and his age, it also grounds such theories in what is historically evident in the period's writing.
The skeptical sublime is a concrete, primary instance of the transformation of modernity's main epistemological liability, its loss of certainty, into an aesthetic asset--retaining, however, much of the unsettling irony of its origins in radical doubt. By examining the cultural function of such persistent instability, this book seeks to clarify the aesthetic ideology of major writers like Pope, Swift, Dryden, and Rochester, among others, who have been seen, sometimes confusingly, as both reactionary and supportive of the liberal-Whig model of taste and civil society increasingly dominant in the period. While they participate in the construction of proto-aesthetic categories like the sublime to stabilize British culture after decades of civil war and revolution, their appreciation of the skepticism maintained by these means of stabilization helps them express ambivalence about the emerging social order and distinguishes their views from the more providentially assured appeals to the sublime of their ideological opponents..
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This enjoyable and thought-provoking compilation features words of wisdom, insight, and comedy from 200 famous (and not so well-known) humorists, wits, and satirists of the past, including Tallulah Bankhead, Bernard Baruch, Brendan Behan, Robert Benchley, Ambrose Bierce, Josh Billings, Bertolt Brecht, Vera Brittain, Heywood Broun, Truman Capote, Lewis Carroll, Charlie Chaplin, Lord Chesterfield, Agatha Christie, Cyril Connolly, Benjamin Disraeli, Albert Einstein, Gustave Flaubert, Benjamin Franklin, Paul Goodman, Alice James, Alfred Jarry, Karl Kraus, Andrew Lang, Walter Lippmann, David Lloyd George, Harriet Martineau, Groucho Marx, Mary McCarthy, H. L. Mencken, O. Henry, Dorothy Parker, Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound, Will Rogers, Helen Rowland, Saki, George Bernard Shaw, Fulton J. Sheen, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Logan Pearsall Smith, John Steinbeck, Adlai Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, James Thurber, Lionel Trilling, Mark Twain, E. B. White, and Oscar Wilde. .
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American artist Robert Gwathmey (1903-1988) was a leading member of the Social Realist movement that flourished from the 1930s through the 1950s. Like his fellow Social Realists, Gwathmey sought to use his art to expose privilege and pretense, demand social justice, and call for major changes in the prevailing socioeconomic system.

Gwathmey was an eighth-generation Virginian of Welsh heritage, and throughout his life his main artistic themes were race relations and his native South. He is perhaps best remembered as the first white American painter to depict African Americans in an unromanticized, respectful manner. Using a unique style that combined a deliberate two-dimensional flatness with deep and vivid colors, Gwathmey illuminated the inherent dignity of the tenant farmers and sharecroppers who were his subjects.

As a lifelong activist against injustice, Gwathmey was kept under surveillance by the FBI for nearly thirty years. Using Gwathmey's FBI file, along with numerous interviews and archival records, Michael Kammen crafts a compelling portrait of an engaging American painter in the midst of dramatic social and political change..
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