The author draws upon the humanities and social sciences to analyze the meaning and significance of this form of aberrant play. Dance of the Sleepwalkers is descriptive of a freak form of amusement but, more importantly, it identifies the posture of Americans living in modern times, the automaton!

Of all the family gatherings in her childhood, one stands out in Amina's memory. It is 1979, in Salem India, when a visit to her grandmother's house escalates into an explosive encounter, pitching brother against brother, mother against son. In its aftermath, Amina's father Thomas rushes his family back to their new home in America. And while at first it seems that the intercontinental flight has taken them out of harm's way, his decision sets off a chain of events that will forever haunt Thomas and his wife Kamala; their intellectually furious son, Akhil and the watchful young Amina. Now, twenty years later, Amina receives a phone call from her mother. Thomas has been acting strangely and Kamala needs her daughter back. Amina returns to the New Mexico of her childhood, where her mother has always filled silences with food, only to discover that getting to the truth is not as easy as going home. Confronted with Thomas's unwillingness to talk, Kamala's Born Again convictions, and the suspicion that not everything is what it seems, Amina finds herself at the centre of a mystery so tangled that to make any headway, she has to excavate her family's painful past. And in doing so she must lay her own ghosts to rest.

The author draws upon the humanities and social sciences to analyze the meaning and significance of this form of aberrant play. Dance of the Sleepwalkers is descriptive of a freak form of amusement but, more importantly, it identifies the posture of Americans living in modern times, the automaton!

A chilling and masterfully crafted teen horror novel guaranteed to keep the pages turning, the mind reeling, and the lamp on any reader's bedside table on long after midnight. Privileged and popular Caleb Mason is celebrating his high school graduation when he receives a mysterious, disturbing letter from his long-lost childhood playmate, Christine. Caleb and his jokester friend Bean decide to travel to his tiny hometown of Hudsonville, Florida, to find her. Upon arrival, they discover the town has taken a horrifying turn for the worse. Caleb's childhood home is abandoned and his father has disappeared. Children are going missing. The old insane asylum has reopened, and Christine is locked inside. Her mother, a witch, is consumed with madness, and Christine's long-dead twin sister whispers clues to Caleb through the static of an a.m. radio. The terrifying prophesies of the spirits are coming to pass. Sixteen clocks are ticking; sixty-six murdered souls will bring about the end of the world. As Caleb peels back layer after layer of mystery, he uncovers a truth more horrible than anything he had imagined, a truth that could only be uttered by the lips of the dead.

This informative two-volume set provides readers with an understanding of the fads and crazes that have taken America by storm from colonial times to the present. Entries cover a range of topics, including food, entertainment, fashion, music, and language. Why could hula hoops and TV westerns only have been found in every household in the 1950s? What murdered Russian princess can be seen in one of the first documented selfies, taken in 1914? This book answers those questions and more in its documentation of all of the most captivating trends that have defined American popular culture since before the country began. Entries are well-researched and alphabetized by decade. At the start of every section is an insightful historical overview of the decade, and the set uniquely illustrates what today's readers have in common with the past. It also contains a Glossary of Slang for each decade as well as a bibliography, plus suggestions for further reading for each entry. Students and readers interested in history will enjoy discovering trends through the years in such areas as fashion, movies, music, and sports.

This book presents the Great Depression through the lens of 13 films, beginning with movies made during the Depression and ending with films from the 21st century, and encourages readers to examine the various depictions of this period throughout history. The Great Depression on Film is a unique guide to how the Great Depression was represented and is remembered, making it an excellent resource for students or anyone interested in film history or U.S. history. Each film is set in a different sector of American life, focusing on such topics as white supremacy, political protest, segregation, environmental degradation, crime, religion, the class system, and popular culture in the U.S. during the 1930s. This book is indispensable for clearing away misconceptions fostered by the movies while acknowledging the power of film in shaping public memory. The book separates fact from fiction, detailing where the movies are accurate and where they depart from reality, and places them in the larger context of historical and social events. Eyewitness or journalistic accounts are referenced and quoted in the text to help readers differentiate between ideas, attitudes, and events presented in the films, as well as the historical facts which inspired those films.

Despite the claim of many a Borscht Belt comic that he is a practitioner of "the world's second-oldest professsion," stand-up comedy is a young and distinctly American literary form. It was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century when, enabled by unprecedented prosperity and the right to free expression, that monologists began appearing in American vaudeville halls. Yet even though it has since become an entertainment industry mainstay, stand-up comedy has received precious little scholarly attention. The Legacy of the Wisecrack: Stand-up Comedy as the Great American Literary Form looks at the theory of stand-up comedy, its literary dimensions, and its distinctly American qualities as it provides a detailed history of the forces that shaped it. The study concludes with a look at the works of specific comedians such as Steven Wright, whose three decades of performances comprise a single picaresque tale, and Richard Pryor, whose 1982 masterpiece Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip serves as modern America's answer to Dante Aligheri's epic poem, Inferno. The result is one of the first serious treatments of stand-up comedy as a literary form.

A Companion to American Art presents 35 newly-commissioned essays by leading scholars that explore the methodology, historiography, and current state of the field of American art history. Features contributions from a balance of established and emerging scholars, art and architectural historians, and other specialists Includes several paired essays to emphasize dialogue and debate between scholars on important contemporary issues in American art history Examines topics such as the methodological stakes in the writing of American art history, changing ideas about what constitutes “Americanness,” and the relationship of art to public culture Offers a fascinating portrait of the evolution and current state of the field of American art history and suggests future directions of scholarship

Berlin, 1932. In the final weeks of the Weimar Republic, as Hitler and his National Socialist party angle to assume control of Germany, beautiful girls are seen sleepwalking through the streets. Then, a young woman of mysterious origin, with her legs bizarrely deformed, is pulled dead from the Havel River. Willi Kraus, a high ranking detective in Berlin's police force, begins a murder investigation. A decorated World War I hero and the nation's most famous detective, Willi also is a Jew. Despite his elite status in the criminal police, he is disturbed by the direction Germany is taking. Working urgently to identify the dead woman and solve the murder, Willi finds his superiors diverting him at every turn, and is forced to waste precious time on a politically-sensitive missing person case. Colleagues seem to avoid him; a man on a streetcar stops him from reading a newspaper over his shoulder; he is uncomfortably aware of being watched. But he persists, and soon enters the dangerous Berlin underworld of debauched nightclubs, prostitutes with secrets to hide, and a hypnotist with troubling connections. As he moves through darkness closer to the truth, Willi begins to understand that much more than the solution to a murder is at stake. What he discovers will mean that his life, the lives of his friends and family, and Germany itself will never be the same The Sleepwalkers is a powerful, dramatic debut thriller of a nation's unstoppable corruption, featuring a good man trapped between his duty to serve and his grave doubts about what, and who, he serves.

Drawing on cutting-edge science and intimate personal stories, an essential and paradigm-shifting book for readers struggling with fatigue, burnout, stress, and trauma—and for all of us who sometimes feel like we have been pushed past our breaking point. In How We Are, the health psychologist and author Vincent Deary explored the process of habit and change in everyday life. In How We Break, a deeply compassionate and illuminating exploration of suffering, he examines what happens when we are pushed to our limit. Deary is a practitioner health psychologist who also works in a fatigue clinic and specializes in interventions that help people cope with whatever life has thrown at them. The big traumas in life, he points out, are relatively rare. Much more common is when too many things go wrong at once, or we are exposed to a prolonged period of difficulty or precarity. When we are subjected to too much turbulence—when the world shrinks to nothing but our daily coping—we become unhappy, worried, hopeless, exhausted. In other words, we break. Breaking, he shows us, is embodied, as our physical and mental distress are linked, and happens when the same systems that enable us to navigate through life become dysregulated. But if we understand how the turbulence and overwhelm of life affects us, then we have a better chance of overcoming the challenges. Drawing on clinical case studies, trailblazing scientific research, intimate personal stories, and illuminating references from philosophy, literature, and film, How We Break offers a consoling and deeply felt new vision of everyday human struggling, and it makes a bold case for the power of rest and recuperation.