Book Review: Chasing the American Dream – Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes by Mark Robert Rank, et al
The American Dream is a concept and ideal that millions of people around the word subscribe to wholeheartedly, to the extent that huge numbers risk everything just to have a chance of achieving it. Chasing the American Dream explains just what that dream is, what it means to a plethora of Americans striving for it and assesses whether it is still possible to achieve in the context of an economic downturn.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790-2010 by Paula T. Connolly
Connolly’s text is well-situated to help lay a foundation for the continuing study of American children’s literature as an individual field unto itself. This ambitious and highly accomplished work examines an extraordinary breadth of material. Connolly situates both the specific popular texts she explores and the genres of which they are representative as a foundation upon which two didactic goals are accomplished vis-à-vis American children and childhood: first, these texts inform the development of children’s identities, both as racialized individuals and as Americans (and all the cultural baggage that American-ness involves), and second, each successive generation of texts generates a complicated understanding of contemporaneous racial politics by reshaping the historical memory established by its precedents.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Atheists in America, edited by Melanie E. Brewster
Brewster’s collection is filled with sorrowful disclosures of inequality, existential torment legitimated by biblical rhetoric and background, and ultimately a sense of overcoming from its eclectic grouping of contributors. The common thread of endurance binds the experiences of these ‘Atheists in America’. This collection informs the reader of the stigma and deep-rooted suspicion which exists in many parts of the United States, often those one would expect to be receptive of minority identities. It is a timely reminder of the value, virtues and antecedents of rational thinking and the humanistic endeavour which can arise from it.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American Unexceptionalism – The Everyman and the Suburban Novel after 9/11 by Kathy Knapp
By ignoring the lack of innovation in fiction after “9/11,” and by continuing to privilege the representation of a singular “event” as the cornerstone of a national literature, American Unexceptionalism can only partially commit to dismantling the exceptionalism played upon by its title.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Sex Scene – Media and the Sexual Revolution by Eric Schaefer
Citing the work of Alan Petigny, and also that of contemporary sexologists such as Alfred Kinsey, editor Eric Schaefer claims that ‘what constituted the sexual revolution was not only a change in manners and morals; that had already been occurring discretely in minds and bedrooms across the nation. It was the fact that sex was no longer a private matter that took place behind closed doors’. (3) Featuring fifteen chapters by sixteen different authors, Sex Scene seeks to argue that ‘what we have come to understand as the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s was actually a media revolution’.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Hidden in the Mix – The African American Presence in Country Music by Diane Pecknold
“Hidden in the Mix is an enjoyable, enlightening and captivating read that finally gives recognition to the African American presence within one of the most successful music genres in the world.”
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