In the 1960s and 70s, a new youth consciousness emerged in Western Europe which gave this period its distinct character. This volume demonstrates how international developments fused with national traditions, producing specific youth cultures that became leading trendsetters of emergent post-industrial Western societies.

This book is about the Americanization of Yugoslav culture and everyday life during the nineteen-sixties. After falling out with the Eastern bloc, Tito turned to the United States for support and inspiration. In the political sphere the distance between the two countries was carefully maintained, yet in the realms of culture and consumption the Yugoslav regime was definitely much more receptive to the American model. For Titoist Yugoslavia this tactic turned out to be beneficial, stabilising the regime internally and providing an image of openness in foreign policy. Coca-Cola Socialism addresses the link between cultural diplomacy, culture, consumer society and politics. Its main argument is that both culture and everyday life modelled on the American way were a major source of legitimacy for the Yugoslav Communist Party, and a powerful weapon for both USA and Yugoslavia in the Cold War battle for hearts and minds. Radina Vučetić explores how the Party used American culture in order to promote its own values and what life in this socialist and capitalist hybrid system looked like for ordinary people who lived in a country with communist ideology in a capitalist wrapping. Her book offers a careful reevaluation of the limits of appropriating the American dream and questions both an uncritical celebration of Yugoslavia’s openness and an exaggerated depiction of its authoritarianism.

"Metromarxism" discusses Marxism's relationship with the city from the 1850s to the present by way of biographical chapters on figures from the Marxist tradition, including Marx, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, and David Harvey. Each chapter combines interesting biographical anecdotes with an accessible analysis of each individual's contribution to an always-transforming Marxist theory of the city. He suggests that the interplay between the city as center of economic and social life and its potential for progressive change generated a major corpus of work. That work has been key in advancing progressive political and social transformations.

Kinky Friedman is a Jewish Texan country-and-western singer tunred Greenwich Village amateur detective, with a collection of smelly cigars, a cat, and two former—but simultaneous—girlfriends named Judy. Shortly after the possibly suspicious death of one of his closest friends, Kinky finds himself short one Judy, as Uptown Judy vanishes under mysterious circumstances. Before long, the death and the disappearance seem to be connected, along with Elvis impersonators, a missing documentary film, and a five-year-old mob murder. It’ll take the Kinkster, with an assist from the Village Irregulars and Downtown Judy, to wrap this case like a New York Tex-Mex, decidedly nonkosher burrito. “Kinky is a hip hybrid of Groucho Marx and Sam Spade.”—Chicago Tribune

As a jazz musician, filmmaker, anthropologist, sexologist, and crime novelist, the boundlessly curious German autodidact Ernest Borneman exemplified the conflicting cultural and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. In this long-awaited English translation, acclaimed historian Detlef Siegfried chronicles Borneman’s journey from a young Jewish Communist in Nazi Berlin to his emergence as a celebrated (and reliably controversial) transatlantic polymath. Through an innovative structure organized around the human senses, this biography memorably portrays a figure whose far-flung obsessions comprised a microcosm of postwar intellectual life.

Examines the increasing problem of sexual abuse of children in the world and considers the legal and social strategies that are being adopted to combat these issues particularly in the area of the Internet where there is a growing number of Web sites devoted to child pornography and sexual perversion.

The field of material culture, while historically well established, has recently enjoyed something of a renaissance. Methods once dominated by Marxist- and commodity-oriented analyses and by the study of objects as symbols are giving way to a more ethnographic approach to artifacts. This orientation is the cornerstone of the essays presented in Material Cultures. A collection of case studies which move from the domestic sphere to the global arena, the volume includes examinations of the soundscape produced by home radios, catalog shopping, the role of paper in the workplace, and the relationship between the production and consumption of Coca-Cola in Trinidad. The diversity of the essays is mediated by their common commitment to ethnography with a material focus. Rather than examine objects as mirages of media or language, Material Cultures emphasizes how the study of objects not only contributes to an understanding of artifacts but is also an effective means for studying social values and contradictions.

Putting Greece back on the cultural and political map of the “Long 1960s,” this book traces the dissent and activism of anti-regime students during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967-74). It explores the cultural as well as ideological protest of Greek student activists, illustrating how these “children of the dictatorship” managed to re-appropriate indigenous folk tradition for their “progressive” purposes and how their transnational exchange molded a particular local protest culture. It examines how the students’ social and political practices became a major source of pressure on the Colonels’ regime, finding its apogee in the three day Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 which laid the foundations for a total reshaping of Greek political culture in the following decades.

If the World Wars defined the first half of the twentieth century, the sixties defined the second half, acting as the pivot on which modern times have turned. From popular music to individual liberties, the tastes and convictions of the Western world are indelibly stamped with the impact of this tumultuous decade. Framing the sixties as a period stretching from 1958 to 1974, Arthur Marwick argues that this long decade ushered in nothing less than a cultural revolution – one that raged most clearly in the United States, Britain, France, and Italy. Marwick recaptures the events and movements that shaped life as we know it: the rise of a youth subculture across the West; the sit-ins and marches of the civil rights movement; Britain's surprising rise to leadership in fashion and music; the emerging storm over Vietnam; the Paris student uprising of 1968; the growing force of feminism, and much more. For some, it was a golden age of liberation and political progress; for others, an era in which depravity was celebrated, and the secure moral and social framework subverted. The sixties was no short-term era of ecstasy and excess. On the contrary, the decade set the cultural and social agenda for the rest of the century, and left deep divisions still felt today.

Walmart. Coca-Cola. BP. Toyota. The world economy runs on the profits of transnational corporations. Politicians need their backing. Non-profit organizations rely on their philanthropy. People look to their brands for meaning. And their power continues to rise. Can these companies, as so many are now hoping, provide the solutions to end the mounting global environmental crisis? Absolutely, the CEOs of big business are telling us: the commitment to corporate social responsibility will ensure it happens voluntarily. Peter Dauvergne challenges this claim, arguing instead that corporations are still doing far more to destroy than protect our planet. Trusting big business to lead sustainability is, he cautions, unwise — perhaps even catastrophic. Planetary sustainability will require reining in the power of big business, starting now.