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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisFrom journalist and author of An Ordinary Age, an examination, dismantling, and reconstruction of ambition, where burnout is the symptom of our holiest sin: the lonely way we strive. Ambition—the want, the hunger, the need to achieve—is woven into America’s fabric from the first colonization to capitalism. From our first gold star assignment to acceptance at the “right” college to hustle and grinding our lives, we celebrate our drive, even as we gatekeep who is permitted to strive--and how visibly. Even as we burn out. When we can’t even. When we know: work won’t love us back.All the Gold Stars looks at how the cultural, personal, and societal expectations around ambition are driving the burnout epidemic by funneling our worth into productivity, limiting our imaginations, and pushing us further apart. Through the devastating personal narrative of her own ambition crisis, Stauffer discovers the common factors driving us all, peeling back layers of family expectations, capitalism, and self-esteem that dangerously tie up our worth in our output. Interviews with students, parents, workers, psychologists, labor organizers, and more offer a new definition of ambition and the tools to reframe our lives around true success. All the Gold Stars provides ways for us to reject our current reality and reconceive ambition as more collective, imaginative, and rooted in caring for ourselves and each other.

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Book SynopsisFrom Harvard''s legendary humor publication comes an outrageous, uproariously funny parody of Game of Thrones, in the tradition of their previous bestselling parody book classics Bored of the Rings, Nightlight, and The Hunger Pains. An affectionate but take-no-prisoners send-up of the massive literary and television franchise, Lame of Thrones offers fans a way of reentering the fictional world they have come to love and merrily explodes all of its conventions -- as well as their expectations of the characters -- to hilarious ends. It may even leave you more satisfied than the actual TV ending of Game of Thrones. In fact, if it doesn''t the Lampoon has really dropped the ball. Lame of Thrones will take you to Westopolis, where several extremely attractive egomaniacs are vying to be ruler of the realm and sit on the Pointy Chair. Our hero Jon Dough was a likely bet, but his untimely murder at the hands of his own men of the Night''s Crotch has made that seem less likely. Will Dragon Queen Dennys Grandslam escape from her Clothkhaki captors and return to conquer the world? Or will she just get left in the desert counting grains of sand for the rest of the book? And what about Jon Dough''s siblings? Will they be mentioned? Probably? Almost definitely, yes? It would be weird if they weren''t prominent characters in the book, you say? To find out, read the book you wish George R.R. Martin would write but never will. The Lampoon -- the place where such comedy writers and performers as Conan O''Brien, Colin Jost, B.J. Novak, Patricia Marx, Alan Yang, Andy Borowitz and many more all got their start -- is ready to serve parody notice to the most entertaining, infuriating, and inescapable cultural phenomenon of the past decade.

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Book Synopsis An inspiring, hilarious memoir about learning to resist the pressures of conformity, love yourself for who you are, embrace your flaws, and unlock your true potential.Winner of the African American Literary Award for Memoir!Now cohost of Fox's The Real and SiriusXM's Café Mocha, Loni Love hasn't taken the typical path to becoming America's favorite straight-talking girlfriend and comedian. She was not the child of Hollywood legends and she never wore a size 00. Rather, she grew up in housing projects in Detroit, more worried about affording her next meal than going on a diet. When she moved to Hollywood after graduating college with an engineering degree, seeking to break out in the entertainment world, there was nothing that would convince her to eat the kale salads and quinoa bowls that her colleagues introduced her to, which looked to Love like 'weeds my grandma used to pay me a dollar to pull from her yard.'Still, despite the differences that set her apart in the status-driven world of entertainment where being thin, young, blond, and bubbly is sometimes considered a talent, Love spent years trying to fit in—trying to style her hair just so, dieting, dating the men she thought she was supposed to be with. In this book, she tells the uproariously funny story of how she overcame the trap of self-improvement and instead learned to embrace who she was. As Love writes, 'There's a saying a lot of people live by: 'Fake it till you make it.' For me, it's always been 'fake it, and then have the whole thing blow up in your face.'' I Tried to Change So You Don't Have To explores all of the embarrassing mistakes, terrifying challenges, and unexpected breakthroughs that taught her how, by committing ourselves to our own path, we can take control of our destiny.

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Book SynopsisBy day, Kim Reed was a social worker to the homebound elderly in Brooklyn Heights. By night, she scrambled into Manhattan to hostess at Babbo, where even the Pope would have had trouble scoring a reservation, and A-list celebrities squeezed through the jam-packed entryway like everyone else. Despite her whirlwind fifteen-hour workdays, Kim remained up to her eyeballs in grad school debt. Her training-problem solving, crisis intervention, dealing with unpredictable people and random situations-made her the ideal assistant for the volatile Joe Bastianich, a hard-partying, What''s next? food and wine entrepreneur. He rose to fame in Italy as a TV star while Kim planned parties, fielded calls, and negotiated deals from two phones on the go.Decadent food, summers in Milan, and a reservation racket that paid in designer bags and champagne were fun only inasmuch as they filled the void left by being always on call and on edge. In a blink, the years passed, and one day Kim looked up

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Book SynopsisImagine dating the internet's boyfriend in this illustrated homage to the always charming and often enigmatic Keanu Reeves. This full-colour hardcover contains biographical information as well as illustrated quotes straight from the unicorn-of-a-man himself.

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Book SynopsisCoinciding with the massive growth of consumerism after the Second World War, âeveryday lifeâ has emerged as a crucial site of scholarly exploration. The critical study of quotidian routines, rules, spaces, and objects has become a central concern for scholars working in cultural studies. Furthermore, everyday life has also engaged the close attention of thinkersâincluding philosophers, cultural geographers, historians, and sociologistsâfrom a range of other disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.As research in and around everyday life flourishes as never before, this new four-volume collection from Routledgeâs acclaimed Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of interdisciplinary literature. Edited by a leading scholar, Everyday Life gathers foundational and canonical work, together with innovative and cutting-edge applications and interventions.With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Everyday Life is an essential work of reference. For the novice or advanced student, the collection will be particularly useful as an essential database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. And, for the more advanced scholar, it will be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiarâand sometimes overlookedâtexts. For both, Everyday Life will be valued as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

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Book Synopsis2011 David Easton Award, presented for the best book by the Foundations of Political Theory section of APSA:The Future of Democratic Equality, by Joseph Schwartz, takes on three tasks, and accomplishes all brilliantly. Any one of these tasks well fulfilled would have been a laudable achievement. First, Schwartz argues for the centrality of the question of equality to democratic politics. Second, he critically analyzes and explains the shocking rise in inequality in the United States over the last three decades. This he does with conceptual clarity, rich interdisciplinary analysis, and a thorough examination of hard socioeconomic data. Third, he assails the near absence of concern for this soaring inequality among contemporary political theorists, and offers a cogent, and stinging, explanation that takes to task the disciplineâs preoccupation with difference and identity severed from the pragmatics of democratic equality. The FutureTrade Review* * Winner * * The APSA David Easton Book Award 2011 'The Future of Democratic Equality is a courageous and disciplined effort to tackle a hugely important political problem and intellectual puzzle. It is a must read for anyone who cares about democracy.' – The David Easton Book Award Committee, 2011 "I think very highly of Schwartz’s work: he is one of the few theorists who is concerned with the unity of theory and practice." – Stephen Eric Bronner 2011 David Easton Award, presented for the best book by the Foundations of Political Theory section of APSA: "The Future of Democratic Equality, by Joseph Schwartz, takes on three tasks, and accomplishes all brilliantly. Any one of these tasks well fulfilled would have been a laudable achievement. First, Schwartz argues for the centrality of the question of equality to democratic politics. Second, he critically analyzes and explains the shocking rise in inequality in the United States over the last three decades. This he does with conceptual clarity, rich interdisciplinary analysis, and a thorough examination of hard socioeconomic data. Third, he assails the near absence of concern for this soaring inequality among contemporary political theorists, and offers a cogent, and stinging, explanation that takes to task the discipline’s preoccupation with difference and identity severed from the pragmatics of democratic equality. The Future of Democratic Equality is a courageous and disciplined effort to tackle a hugely important political problem and intellectual puzzle. It well embodies the spirit of the Easton Book Award by providing well-grounded normative theory targeted to an urgent matter of contemporary concern. It is a must read for anyone who cares about democracy." - Respectfully submitted by Leslie Paul Thiele, University of Florida (chair) and Cary J. Nederman, Texas A&M University "Joseph Schwartz is one of the leading progressive political theorists in the country. His recent book is a superb historical narrative and political analysis of both the undemocratic turn in American society and the anti-political turn in American academia. His radical democratic project avoids the pitfalls of a narrow politics of identity and an arrogant politics of old-style left solidarity—and it is powerful and propitious!" --Cornel West, Princeton University "In this excellent book, Joseph Schwartz provides what has been missing in recent political theory: a strong theoretical account of the causes of contemporary inequality and of the politics of citizenship and solidarity necessary to overcome it." --Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study "Joseph Schwartz offers a brilliant critique of the failures of contemporary political theory to address the urgent quandaries of our time. In the process, he points in a direction that would once again place the problems of inequality and class at the center of theoretical inquiry. A welcome intervention indeed!"-- Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Graduate Center of the City University of New York "The Future of Democratic Equality is an important book, and Schwartz succeeds in laying out a comprehensive and invigorating approach for challenging race-to-the-bottom forms of globalization. His book is both sharply argued and politically relevant, and attention to it is sure to benefit both the field of political science and the field of democratic politics itself."—Erin E. O’Brien, University of Massachusetts Boston; reviewed in Perspectives on Politics Table of Contents1. Introduction – Bringing "Difference" and "Identity" Back into the Study of Democratic Equality 2. From Domestic to Global Solidarity 3. Post-Structuralist Political Theory: Living in an Unreal World -- Where’s You? Me? Agency? 4. Can a "Politics of Difference" (or "Identity Politics") Ground a Radical Democratic Conception of Justice? 5. The Rise of Global "Casino Capitalism": Short-Term Financial Profit vs. Long-Term Equitable Growth 6. Does Globalization Necessitate the Demise of Democratic Egalitarian Politics? 7. Racism, Racial Politics, and Undemocratic "Difference": The Challenge for the Politics of Social Solidarity 8. Conclusion – Ending the False Antinomy of "Difference" and "Equality": Towards a Democratic Egalitarian Pluralist Politics

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Book Synopsis A sexual history of the 1990s when the Baby Boomers took over Washington, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue. A definitive look at the captains of the culture wars -- and an indispensable road map for understanding how we got to the Trump Teens.The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido examines the scandal-strafed decade when our public and private lives began to blur due to the rise of the web, reality television, and the wholesale tabloidization of pop culture. In this comprehensive and often hilarious time capsule, David Friend combines detailed reporting with first-person accounts from many of the decade''s singular personalities, from Anita Hill to Monica Lewinsky, Lorena Bobbitt to Heidi Fleiss, Alan Cumming to Joan Rivers, Jesse Jackson to key members of the Clinton, Dole, and Bush teams. The Naughty Nineties also uncovers unsung sexual pioneers, from the enterprising sisters who dreamed up the Brazilian bikini wax to the scientists who, quite by accident, discovered Viagra.

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Book SynopsisA bold, stylish look at the global rise of Korean culture and style in the words and images of those shaping and living it. K-pop, K-fashion, K-drama, K-beauty: over the last decade, K-style has exploded onto the global scene. What is behind this phenomenon? Where does K-Style go from here? Make, Break, Remix: The Rise of K-Style makes no attempt to define or categorize, instead celebrating the eclectic, multi-faceted nature of K-Style and its home city of Seoul. Through interviews with eighteen tastemakers who are shaping K-style across creative sectors, from 1Million Studio's Lia Kim to rock band leader Hwang Soyoon, world famous tattooist Doy to Asiaâs leading designer Teo Yang, Fiona Bae tells untold stories from true insiders, exploring a sense of identity in their work, how living in Seoul affects them and their creative output, and the decade of changes that has brought about the current K-style. Interwoven with these texts, five distinct photo-essays from celebratedTrade Review'For me, constantly thinking about Korean-style storytelling, Make Break Remix is an amazing inspiration. Storytelling consolidates all cultural phenomena from design, fashion and music, and this rare and enchanting book, filled with intimate interviews with trailblazers and images of the daring youth in Seoul, will open your eyes to how creativity across fashion, music, and lifestyle in Korea is collectively generating explosive energy' - Kim Ji-yeon, producer of Netflix series Squid Game'None of the musicians, fashion designers and other young artists in this book are K-pop superstars. They are rather pioneers in subcultures, where K-pop mass trends have often germinated. Through interviews and a rich photographic illustration of the artists’ work and attitudes, this unusual but essential book helps explain what drives K-style today' - Choe Sang-hun, Seoul bureau chief, The New York Times'Make Break Remix takes a deep dive into the cultural juggernaut’s impact on fashion and beyond … this unique ability to “make, break, and remix” has birthed incredible talent via South Korea’s underground' - Dazed'There seems to be a shortage of publications with a credible explanation for the peak popularity of Korean culture. Make Break Remix: The Rise of K-Style takes on two major questions: Why has K-style garnered so much attention and popularity globally? And what lies ahead for the Korean cultural trend? Deep-diving into 16 Korean creators’ creative processes, the book extracts the essence of each creator’s distinct identity and their perspective on the rise of K-style' - Wallpaper*'Introduces readers to some of the Korean stars behind the scenes, the style makers whose creativity and daring make k-style so vibrant' - ForbesTable of ContentsForeword Introduction Photo Essay: Make, break, remix IISE Hwang Soyoon Teo Yang Photo Essay: Trailblazers I Lia Kim Xu Meen Mischief Photo Essay: Portrait of Seoul Doy Serian Heu DPR REM (Scott Kim) Photo Essay: Trailblazers II Lim Kim BAJOWOO Kyuhee Baik Photo Essay: Youth culture Kwangho Lee Nana Youngrong Kim Kim Youngjin Photo Essay: Seoul scenes Commentators: Danny Chung Elaine Y. J. Lee Jason Schlabach K-fashion Directory PAF (Post Archive Faction) The Museum Visitor After Pray Document Seoul Map

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Book SynopsisFrom the author of Future Shock, a striking way out of today’s despair . . . a bracing, optimistic look at our new potentials.The Third Wave makes startling sense of the violent changes now battering our world. Its sweeping synthesis casts fresh light on our new forms of marriage and family, on today's dramatic changes in business and economics. It explains the role of cults, the new definitions of work, play, love, and success. It points toward new forms of twenty-first-century democracy.Praise for The Third Wave   “Magnificent . . . an astonishing array of information.”—The Washington Post   “Imperishably fresh.”—Business Week   “Will mesmerize readers, and rightly so.”—Vogue “Alvin Toffler . . . has written another blockbuster . . . a powerful book.”—The Gua

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