Showing results for "jonathan auerbach"

Dark Borders connects anxieties about citizenship and national belonging in midcentury America to the sense of alienation conveyed by American film noir. Jonathan Auerbach provides in-depth interpretations of more than a dozen of these dark crime thrillers, considering them in relation to U.S. national security measures enacted from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. The growth of a domestic intelligence-gathering apparatus before, during, and after the Second World War raised unsett...

How and why did public opinion—long cherished as a foundation of democratic government—become an increasing source of concern for American Progressives?Following World War I, political commentator Walter Lippmann worried that citizens increasingly held inaccurate and misinformed beliefs because of the way information was produced, circulated, and received in a mass-mediated society. Lippmann dubbed this manipulative opinion-making process “the manufacture of consen...

When Jack London died in 1916 at age forty, he was one of the most famous writers of his time. Eighty years later he remains one of the most widely read American authors in the world. The first major critical study of London to appear in a decade, Male Call analyzes the nature of his appeal by closely examining how the struggling young writer sought to promote himself in his early work as a sympathetic, romantic man of letters whose charismatic masculinity could carry more signifi...

A riveting narrative account of how prediction markets are changing our world and transforming the very nature of democracy.“In The Big Bet**, Michael Auerbach explores the past, present, and future of the prediction market ... This is a dazzling and entertaining book ... But it is also an urgent warning about what we might gamble away if we become a society that wagers on everything.” —Patrick Radden Keefe, author of**

In the wake of the decolonization movement in South Africa and around the world, this edited work presents fresh evidence and advances new arguments on the politics and economics of colonial biomedical knowledge in South Africa and other parts of the African continent. Covering a richly diverse set of fields---including human genetics, obstetrics, occupational therapy, medical photography and the vaccine sciences---the book demonstrates the troubled histories and the enduring effects of im...

Part science fiction, part dystopian fantasy, part radical socialist tract, Jack London's The Iron Heel offers a grim depiction of warfare between the classes in America and around the globe. Originally published nearly a hundred years ago, it anticipated many features of the past century, including the rise of fascism, the emergence of domestic terrorism, and the growth of centralized government surveillance and authority. What begins as a war of words ends in scenes of h...

Like the characters in the popular dime novels of the time, London's heroes display such manly virtues as courage, loyalty, and steadfastness as they conftont the merciless frozen expanses of the north. Yet London breaks free of stereotypical figures and one-dimensional plots to explore deeper psychological and social questions of self-mastery, masculinity, and racial domination. The uneasy relationship between the Native Americans and whites lies at the heart of many of the stories, while...

THE way led along upon what had once been the embankment of a railroad. But no train had run upon it for many years. The forest on either side swelled up the slopes of the embankment and crested across it in a green wave of trees and bushes. The trail was as narrow as a man's body, and was no more than a wild-animal runway. Occasionally, a piece of rusty iron, showing through the forest-mould, advertised that the rail and the ties still remained. In one place, a ten-inch tree, bursting thr...

All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me.—Oh, and trust me, so have you, my reader that is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience of your childhood. You were then not fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic, a soul in flux, a consciousness and an identity in the process of forming—ay, of forming and forgetting.You have forgotten much, my reader,...

A Daughter of the Snows (1902) is Jack London's first novel. Set in the Yukon, it tells the story of Frona Welse, "a Stanford graduate and physical Valkyrie" who takes to the trail after upsetting her wealthy father's community by her forthright manner and befriending the town's prostitute. She is also torn between love for two suitors: Gregory St Vincent, a local man who turns out to be cowardly and treacherous; and Vance Corliss, a Yale-trained mining engineer.

Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950) known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism. As a writer, Orwell produced literary criticism and poetry, fiction and polemical journalism; and is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fict...

Night and Day, Woolf’s second novel, was published in 1919 and for the most part is conventional, dealing with current issues including women’s suffrage, marriage and not-marriage through the lives of a few principal characters. Katherine Hilbery represents the autobiographical element, the grand-daughter of a famous poet and with a mother who, combined with the past, exercises a significant impression on her life. Another of the principal characters, Mary Datchett, chooses to work even th...