Portraiture

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James Badal, [interviewer

In this collection of interviews with major orchestra conductors, James Badal explores the impact of recording technology on contemporary musical culture. Spanning more than a decade with masters such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Christoph von Dohnanyi, and Christopher Hogwood, these discussions offer valuable commentary on the digital revolution and subsequent compact disc explosion. One issue addressed in Recording the Classics is how recordings have significantly raised the general public's level of musical knowledge. Classical music discs provide both entertainment and education - the traditional, ideal vehicles for increasing the appreciation of great music among those who lack access to recital halls and opera houses. However, listening to music in private affords an essentially different experience than that of attending a live concert; both the public and the musicians are absent from the home listening environment.

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Josh Ozersky

"Archie Bunker's America discerns what was literally "in the air" as television networks tried to accommodate cultural and political swings in America from the Vietnam era through the late 1970s. Josh Ozersky's examination of the ways America changed television during a period of intense social upheaval, recuperation, and fragmentation uncovers a bold and beguiling facet of American cultural history. From the political comedy of All in the Family and Maude and the liberal hilarity of Taxi, Soap, and Saturday Night Live to the post-1960s frolics of Three's Company and apolitical programs like Happy Days and Fantasy Island, Ozersky describes the range and power of television as it echoed the larger schemes of American life." "Straightforward, engaging, and liberally illustrated, Archie Bunker's America is peppered with the stories of outsider cops and failed variety shows, of a young Bill Murray and an old Ed Sullivan, of Mary Tyler Moore, Fonzie, and the Skipper, too. Drawing on interviews with television insiders of the era, trade and industry publications, and the programs themselves, Ozersky chronicles the ongoing attempts of prime-time television to program for a fragmented audience - an audience whose greatest common denominator, by 1978, may well have been the act of watching television itself. The book also includes a foreword by renowned media critic Mark Crispin Miller and an epilogue of related commentary by Ozersky on the following decades."--Jacket.

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Jason Horsley

"Using movies to explore the unconscious realms of society in order to reach a better understanding of what drives it, this book examines filmmakers and films that center around schizophrenic themes of alienation, paranoia, breakdown, fantasy, dreams, dementia, violence, and that address--as entertainment--the schizophrenic experience"--Provided by publisher.

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Maris A. Vinovskis

The American Civil War has been the subject of thousands of books and articles, but only a small fraction of this literature examines the impact of the war on society and on the lives of the participants. This volume of essays, which focuses on the North, is intended as an initial reconnaissance by social historians into the study of the Civil War. The first essay, 'Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War?' places the war in the broader context of other American wars by comparing casualty rates. The essay also examines rates of enlistment for the North and the South, and the significance of pensions for Union soldiers and their windows. Subsequent essays look at the support for the war in small towns; the influence of nineteenth-century values and culture on Union soldiers; the nature and role of large-scale relief efforts for soldiers in Philadelphia; and the impact of the war on the politics of Chicago. The final two essays discuss the continuing importance of the war for its survivors: one by looking at those who joined the major national organization of Union veterans; and the other by studying the impact of the Civil War on Union widows in three Northern towns. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the need for historians to rediscover the impact of the Civil War on nineteenth-century society.