The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed

Intellectuals and Society

Thomas Sowell · 611 pages

This is a book about intellectuals written for the lay person. Its purpose is to unravel the world of intellectuals in order to understand an important social phenomenon how the thinkers of our society mold that society, leaving an impact on people in every walk of life, even if they are basically unknown to the world at large. It is a portion of the population whose activities can have, and have

Cruel Optimism

Lauren Berlant · 342 pages

Lauren Berlant explores individual and collective affective responses to the unraveling of the U.S. and European economies by analzying mass media, literature, television, film, and video.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Mark Fisher · 100 pages

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from po

No Logo

Naomi Klein · 512 pages

"What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands." Billy Bragg from the bookjacket.

Born to Buy

Juliet B. Schor · 289 pages

Ads aimed at kids are virtually everywhere -- in classrooms and textbooks, on the Internet, even at slumber parties and the playground. Product placement and other innovations have introduced more subtle advertising to movies and television. Companies are enlisting children as guerrilla marketers, targeting their friends and families. Even trusted social institutions such as the Girl Scouts are te

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

Jonathan Crary · 144 pages

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life. Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-t

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

Herbert Marcuse · 282 pages

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Jurgen Habermas · 314 pages

This is Jurgen Habermas's most concrete historical-sociological book and one of the key contributions to political thought in the postwar period. It will be a revelation to those who have known Habermas only through his theoretical writing to find his later interests in problems of legitimation and communication foreshadowed in this lucid study of the origins, nature, and evolution of public opini

The Age of American Unreason

Susan Jacoby · 357 pages

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · 456 pages

From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.” One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What hap

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Susan Faludi · 592 pages

*Skillfully Probing the Attack on Women's Rights* "Opting-out," "security moms," "desperate housewives," "the new baby fever"--the trend stories of 2006 leave no doubt that American women are still being barraged by the same backlash messages that Susan Faludi brilliantly exposed in her 1991 bestselling book of revelations. Now, the book that reignited the feminist movement is back in a fi

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

Guy Debord · 94 pages

Presents an update to "Society of the Spectacle" that offers insights into the phenomenon of the spectacle, which is the use of mass media, consumerism, capitalism, and political systems to create a world distorted from reality.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

Owen Jones · 298 pages

"In this groundbreaking investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth'. Moving through Westminster 's lobbies and working-class communities from Dagenham to Dewsbury Moor, Jones lays bare the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, and reveals a far more complex reality: the increasing poverty and desperation o

Seven Days in the Art World

Sarah Thornton · 274 pages

The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Ar

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

Chuck Klosterman · 258 pages

"Countless writers and artists have spoken for a generation, but no one has done it quite like Chuck Klosterman. With an exhaustive knowledge of popular culture and an almost effortless ability to spin brilliant prose out of unlikely subject matter, Klosterman attacks the entire spectrum of postmodern America: reality TV, Internet porn, Pamela Anderson, literary Jesus freaks, and the real differen

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire

Tim Schwab · 496 pages

World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction

Immanuel Wallerstein · 109 pages

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

Neil Postman · 222 pages

With characteristic wit and candor, Neil Postman, our most astute and engaging cultural critic, launches a trenchant--and harrowing--warning against the tyranny of machines over man in the late twentieth century. We live in a time when physical well-being is determined by CAT scan results. Facts need the substantiation of statistical study. The human mind needs "deprogramming" while computers c

Drug Wars

Curtis Marez · 380 pages

Inaugurated in 1984, America's "War on Drugs" is just the most recent skirmish in a standoff between global drug trafficking and state power. From Britain's nineteenth-century Opium Wars in China to the activities of Colombia's drug cartels and their suppression by U.S.-backed military forces today, conflicts over narcotics have justified imperial expansion, global capitalism, and state violence,

Dialectic of Enlightenment

Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno · 192 pages

The Condition of the Working Class in England

Friedrich Engels · 336 pages

"The Condition of the Working Class is the best-known work of Engels, and in many ways still the best study of the working class in Victorian England. It was also Engels's first book, written during his stay in Manchester from 1842 to 1844. Manchester was then at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution and Engels compiled his study from his own observations and detailed contemporary reports. T

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

Peter Pomerantsev · 272 pages

"Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible is a journey into the glittering, surreal heart of 21st century Russia: into the lives of oligarchs convinced they are messiahs, professional killers with the souls of artists, Bohemian theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, supermodel sects, post-modern dictators, and playboy revolutionaries. This is a world erupting with new money and new pow

Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

Noam Scheiber · 384 pages

Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

Jason L. Riley · 210 pages

The author believes that "many efforts by liberals to help the black underclass not only fail but often harm the intended beneficiaries. The intentions behind welfare programs may be noble, but in practice they have slowed the self-development that was necessary for other groups to advance. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they also have a long history o