From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art. In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken-with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie& Fitch, and his fraternity-is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, a first-generation Taiwanese...

Some events that transform a nation are frozen in time. Others pass with little public awareness, and we only appreciate their momentous nature long after they occur. Regardless, these events are few and-almost always-far between. But in 1969, four such events took place within the span of only 100 days. In this book, cultural historian Harlan Lebo looks back at the first moon landing, the Manson family murders, Woodstock, and the birth of the Internet...

Essays about 1990s popular culture, politics, sports, literature, music--

While traditional industries like textile or lumber mills have received a majority of the scholarly attention devoted to southern economic development, Faith in Bikinis presents an untold story of the New South, one that explores how tourism played a central role in revitalizing the southern economy and transforming southern culture after the Civil War. Along the coast of the American South, a culture emerged that negotiated the more rigid religious,...

With the nation reeling from the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s era, imaginings of the white South as a place of stability represented a bulwark against unsettling problems, from suburban blandness and empty consumerism to race riots and governmental deceit. A variety of individuals during and after the civil rights era, including writers, journalists, filmmakers, musicians, and politicians, envisioned white southernness as a manly,...

Today's domestic-advice writers--women such as Martha Stewart, Cheryl Mendelson, and B. Smith--are part of a long tradition, notes Sarah Leavitt. Their success rests on a legacy of literature that has focused on the home as an expression of ideals. Here, Leavitt crafts a fascinating genealogy of domestic advice, based on her readings of hundreds of manuals spanning 150 years of history.Over the years, domestic advisors have educated women about everything...

In 1969, the nearly nine-months pregnant celebrity Sharon Tate loses her life and the life of her unborn child horrifying hundreds of millions of Americans. Only 26 years old when she died, the story of Sharon's life becomes of less public interest than learning about the hippie lives of her murderers. Despite this, Sharon possesses a formidable arsenal of relatively unseen visual media for planners to work with. In the ensuing decades, the justice...