Like mother, like daughter

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Eric C. Schneider

"Through interviews with former junkies and clinic workers and in-depth archival research, Schneider also chronicles the dramatically shifting demographic profile of heroin users. Originally popular among working-class whites in the 1920s, heroin became associated with jazz musicians and Beat writers in the 1940s. Musician Red Rodney called heroin the trademark of the bebop generation. "It was the thing that gave us membership in a unique club," he proclaimed. Smack takes readers through the typical haunts of heroin users - 52nd Street jazz clubs, Times Square cafeterias, Chicago's South Side street corners - to explain how young people were initiated into the drug culture." "Smack recounts the explosion of heroin use among middle-class young people in the 1960s and 1970s. It became the drug of choice among a wide swath of youth, from hippies in Haight-Ashbury and soldiers in Vietnam to punks on the Lower East Side. Panics over the drug led to the passage of increasingly severe legislation that entrapped heroin users in the criminal justice system without addressing the issues that led to its use in the first place. The book ends with a meditation on the evolution of the war on drugs and addresses why efforts to solve the drug problem must go beyond eliminating supply."--Jacket.

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Ian Gordon

Contending that comic strips contributed to the expansion of a mass consumer culture driven by visual images, Ian Gordon shows how, in addition to embellishing a wide array of goods with personalities, the comics themselves increasingly promoted consumerist values and upward mobility. He details how "Gasoline Alley" advocated the enjoyment of cars and how 1920s working girl Winnie Winkle became an avid seeker of a middle-class lifestyle. Documenting the invention of the comic book in the 1940s, Gordon also describes the emergence of a super-licensed Superman, whose girlfriend Lois Lane even went on a shopping spree during a period of wartime rationing. Emerging just as Americans were beginning to define themselves less by what they made and believed and more by what they bought, comic strips were from the outset commodities sold by syndicates to newspapers nationwide. Ian Gordon demonstrates that the strips' most enduring role has been not only to mirror a burgeoning consumer culture but also to actively promote it.

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Anne Capeci

During the 1920s, as Billy, Finn, and Dannie investigate a series of thefts in a railroad workers camp, they also find themselves searching for Billy's missing cousin, nine-year-old Mim.

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Paul Davies

The conclusions reached in The Ideal Real are not the same as those reached by most commentary on Beckett's works. Most Beckett criticism seeks falsely to over-simplify or align Beckett's point of view with existentialism, the absurd, or the pessimistic nihilism underlying much postmodern thought. Beckett, though one of the century's leading intellects, was also an intuitive who realized the Western empirical mind was an out-dated program that had long ceased to be of any help in understanding the human situation. The "disintegration" of mind and body felt by his characters reflects the disastrous effect of the continued imposition of that "reason-ridden" consciousness. At the same time it opens the door to a new possibility. . The Beckett heroes, whose experiences are discussed in this book, were conditioned by a "humanistic" education much like Beckett's; but they come to find that the self they were taught to see as their own is nonexistent. Having nothing in their acquired personality to cope with this crisis, Murphy, Molloy, Moran, Malone, and all that follow find themselves dying to their old self, to everything a Western liberal education could think of as self. Early on, Beckett saw clues to the situation in the work of Jung, the "mind doctor" who represented the opposite of the empirical tradition. Jung, like the esoteric schools, saw a potential human whose development was sometimes delayed or prevented by the very system the claimed to "educate" and "civilize" the personality. The existence of this potential self has been doubted by many modern thinkers, but Beckett's stories show "a soul denied in vain" since it is the enabler of all speech, whether apparently denying or affirming. No knowledge can be considered apart from the knower. In The Ideal Real, Paul Davies argues that Beckett saw this potential self emerging in the world of imagination and symbol, especially in this age where language alone has come to be seen as the vehicle of education and the determiner of identity. He renders in prose the collapse of the illusive world of self to which the European cult of personality devoted three centuries, and witnesses its annihilation in the death before death - the white light of contemporary physics, the "void" of Zen - from which all trace of personality has fallen. From the 1920s to Beckett's last year, this study follows all the stages his fiction writing went through in order to face this matter uncompromisingly. The perspective taken by Davies sees the postmodern critical climate as an inadequate and reductive context within which to contemplate and comment on works of art. It seeks to recognize that creative imagination is a vital aspect of all mental activity that is not doomed to the inferno of Beckett's lost world.