"Arnold: Schwarzenegger and the Movies" is the first comprehensive, in-depth book to examine one of modern cinema's most celebrated and divisive screen presences. Tracing Schwarzenegger's entire film career and life from teenage bodybuilder to Governor of California, Saunders blends close textual readings of the major films, including "Pumping Iron", "Conan the Barbarian", The "Terminator" series, "Twins" and "True Lies", with salient historical context and biographical detail, demonstrati...

A cornucopia of comment from Canada’s most opinionated man — a man seen, read, and listened to by millions of Canadians each week.Canada’s most distinctive commentator presents his fearless and thought-provoking views on a head-spinning range of subjects, from Dr. Johnson’s greatness to Bono’s gratingness, from doubts about Obama to utter belief in Don Cherry, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s outstanding oeuvre to — well, Pamela Anderson.The topics are as eclectic and wide ran...

Published in conjunction with the PEN American Center, Burn This Book is a powerful collection of essays that explore the meaning of censorship and the power of literature to inform the way we see the world, and ourselves.As Americans we often take our freedom of speech for granted. When we talk about censorship we talk about China, the former Soviet Union, or the Middle East. But recent political developments—including the passage of the Patriot Act—have ...

Forty years after Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Gay Talese launched the New Journalism movement, Robert S. Boynton sits down with nineteen practitioners of what he calls the New New Journalism to discuss their methods, writings and careers.The New New Journalists are first and foremost brilliant reporters who immerse themselves completely in their subjects. Jon Krakauer accompanies a mountaineering expedition to Everest. Ted Conover works for nearly a year as a prison...

From the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and playwright: an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from a filmmaker who’s always played by his own rules.Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Why are there so many producers listed in movie credits? And what on earth do those producers do anyway? Refreshingly unafraid to offend, Mamet provides hilarious, surprising, and refreshingly forthright answers to these and ...

Accessible, entertaining, anecdotal. A good introduction to issues in contemporary civics as well as a measured and thoughtful response to major themes and figures in cultural studies.Civility in politics is a subject throughout, and analyses of both Obama's rhetoric and the use of lowest-common-denominator insults in public debate will be well-timed going into the 2012 election campaignNot just formal essays: some are dialogues, some personal meditations, some direct addre...

Are you tired of bland, overly earnest reading guides that discuss the same old books? Read This Next by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittlemark is the answer. A smart, irreverent, honest, and truly hilarious guide to your 500 new favorite books, Read This Next is aimed at those readers and book groups that are looking for great reading suggestions with more variety and spice than the usual book club picks—while offering food for thought and laughter in equal measure.Ready to discover ...

In a series of feisty and ultimately hopeful essays, one of America's sharpest social critics casts a shrewd eye over contemporary culture to reveal the worst -- and the best -- of our habits of discourse, tendencies in education, and obsessions with technological novelty. Readers will find themselves rethinking many of their bedrock assumptions: Should education transmit culture or defend us against it? Is technological innovation progress or a peculiarly American addiction? When everyone...

"A loving and breezy set of essays" on today's most addictive TV shows from "an incisive and hilarious critic" ( Slate).Television is not what it once was. Award-winning author and critic Clive James spent decades covering the medium, and witnessed a radical change in content, format, and programming, and in the very manner in which TV is watched.Here he examines this unique cultural revolution, providing a brilliant, eminently entertaining analysi...

Narrative has been central to human life for millennia, and the twentieth century has been preeminently the age of the story. Mass culture and mass leisure have enabled us to spend far more time absorbing stories, real and imaginary, than any of our ancestors. Whether or not this has been to our benefit is one of the questions raised by journalist and 1999 CBC Massey lecturer Robert Fulford. Narrative, Fulford points out, is how we explain, how we teach, how we entertain ourselves - often ...

The story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, and melodrama has turned everything—news, politics, religion, high culture—into one vast public entertainment.Neal Gabler calls them "lifies," those blockbusters written in the medium of life that dominate the media and the national conversation for weeks, months, even years: the death of Princess Diana, the trial of O.J. Simpson, Kenneth Starr vs. William Jefferson Clinton. Real Life as Entertainment is hardly a new phe...

In The Long March, Roger Kimball, the author of Tenured Radicals, shows how the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s and '70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and affecting our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. Believing that this dramatic change "cannot be understoo...