by Eric C. Schneider (2008)
"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.
Marcia Rose
Four generations of successful women and the price they pay for their success. They are Leah, a 1920s radical writer; Jo, a World War II photographer; Sarah, a singer and songwriter; and Annie, a comedian. By the author of The Hospital.
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.
von Ulrich Klan und Dieter Nelles
Die Arbeit umfasst die Herkunftsgeschichte der Freien Arbeiterunion (FAUD) sie stellt mit dem regionalen Schwerpunkt Ruhrgebiet deren politische Betätigung in der Märzrevolution 1920 oder den Erwerbslosenunruhen dar und schildert die innerorganische Kontroversen um Strategie und Taktik. Der zweite Teil widmet sich den internen Gruppen und Themen wie z.B. Jugendautonomie, Syndikalistische Arbeiterjugend Nacktkultur, Frauenbünde sowie freie Schulen. (Quelle: aLibro)
Daniel W, Lehman
"John Reed and the Writing of Revolution examines Reed's writing from a different critical perspective - one informed by a theoretical and practical understanding of literary nonfiction. In both politics and writing, John Reed defied fashion. In his short career, Reed transcended the traditional creative arts of fiction, poetry, and drama in favor of deeply researched histories composed with the cadence of fiction and the power of fact. Reed thereby alienated literary critics who had idealized timeless artistry against the rough-and-tumble world of historical details and political implications.". "Working from a close investigation of rare articles, manuscripts, and the Reed papers at Harvard as well as from Reed's published work, Daniel W. Lehman offers the first detailed literary study of the man who followed Pancho Villa into battle; wrote literary profiles of such characters as Henry Ford, William Jennings Bryan, and Billy Sunday; explicated the Byzantine factionalism of Eastern Europe; and witnessed the storming of the Winter Palace and the birth of Soviet Russia."--BOOK JACKET.