While conventional wisdom has it that humor embodies a spirit of renewal and humility, a dispirited form of comedy thrives in a media-saturated and politically charged environment.When Comedy Goes Wrong examines how, beginning in the late-twentieth and carrying into the early twenty-first century, a certain comic dispirit found various platforms for disheartening cultural politics. From the calculated follies on talk radio programs like the Rush Limbaugh Show through the c...

According to the popular maxim, a nation at war reveals its true character. In this incisive work, Chris Gilbert examines the long history of US war politics through the lens of political cartoons to provide new, unique insights into American cultural identity.Tracing the comic representation of American values from the First World War to the War on Terror, Gilbert explores the power of humor in caricature to expose both the folly in jingoistic virtues and the sometimes-strange for...

A critical examination of how pleasure and pain are constructed, represented, and contested within American public culture.Mainstream news and social media often highlight presentations of pain that invite a voyeuristic, pleasurable experience, whether the result of war, disasters, crime, accidents, or other catastrophes. This collection of essays explores pleasurable pains and painful pleasures, showing how they pervade contemporary western public culture...

An examination of two seemingly incongruous areas of study: classical models of argumentation and modern modes of digital communicationWhat can ancient rhetorical theory possibly tell us about the role of new digital media technologies in contemporary public culture? Some central issues we currently deal with—making sense of information abundance, persuading others in our social network, navigating new media ecologies, and shaping broader cultural currents—also pre...

In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war. This paradox of in/visibility concerns the gap between the experiences of war zones and the visual, mediated experience of war in public, popular culture, which absents and renders invisible the former. Large portions of the domestic public ex...

For 40 years, Fischer’s Mastery of Surgery has provided expert, highly illustrated coverage of the procedures that general surgeons and trainees need to know. The fully revised eighth edition, under the editorial leadership of Drs. E. Christopher Ellison, Gilbert R. Upchurch Jr., Philip A. Efron, Steven D. Wexner, Nancy D. Perrier, V. Suzanne Klimberg, John H. Stewart IV, Valerie W. Rusch, Jon C. Gould, Susan Galandiuk, Timothy M. Pawlik, William C. Chapman, Benjamin K. Poulose, Peter K. H...

Has truth become a casualty of America’s increasingly caustic and volatile political culture? Truth in the Public Sphere seeks to understand the significance of truth for the everyday world of human communication. To this end, this book explores the place of truth in several facets of the public sphere: language, ethics, journalism, politics, media, and art. Featuring an international group of contributors from across the humanities and social sciences, this collection is a definitive supp...

Primate Adaptation and Evolution, Fourth Edition provides key features of extant families and references to more detailed texts. The book sets the scene and creates space for a thorough updating of exciting developments in primate paleontology and a reconstruction through early hominid species of our own human origins. This updated version covers recent developments in primate paleontology, the latest taxonomy, and includes new visuals, including helpful illustrations and evolutionary tree...

Djupe and Gilbert investigate the political influence of church and how membership in organized religious bodies shapes the political life of members. Djupe and Gilbert's goal in this inquiry is to re-center scholarly attention on the voluntary association as an essential element of American civic and political life. They develop a theoretical framework that captures the multifaceted elements of church life that affect individual political attitudes and actions. Political information from ...

The award-winning guide to developing ethics, trust, and authenticity in business and life—and achieving results that matter.Being trusted is the foundation of our greatest personal freedoms. In a time of deepening divisions and "alternative facts," trust and authenticity grow more precious by the hour.The Noble Edge: Reclaiming an Ethical World One Choice at a Time provides an inspirational conversation spiced with personal stories, humorous anecd...

In Subjectivity, sixteen leading scholars examine the turn to the subject in modern philosophy and consider its historical antecedents in ancient and medieval thought. Some critics of modernity reject the turn to the subject as a specifically modern error, arguing that it logically leads to nihilism and moral relativism by divorcing the human mind from objective reality. Yet, some important thinkers of the last half-century--including Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, John Finnis, and Bernard Lo...

Worship is the work of the people of God. Patterns of worship shape how we pray and how we live. Despite its centrality to church life, worship is too often taken for granted as something a congregation experiences rather than collectively creates. The Work of the People simply and clearly explains the structure of worship, the actions and words we use in liturgy, the environment in which it all happens--in other words, what we are doing and why. This book will guide congregations in worsh...