AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

Cruel Optimism

Lauren Berlant · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

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

Joseph Heath, Andrew Potter · 376 pages

Media CriticismSociologyPhilosophyNonfiction
❤️

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

Media CriticismSociologyPhilosophyNonfiction
❤️

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

Media CriticismSociologyPhilosophyNonfiction
❤️

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

Media CriticismSociologyPhilosophyNonfiction
❤️

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

Media CriticismSociologyPhilosophyNonfiction
❤️

On Photography

Susan Sontag · 207 pages

On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. Sontag discusses many examples of modern photography, among these, she contrasts Diane Arbus's work with

Media CriticismSociologyPhilosophyNonfiction
❤️

Mythologies

Roland Barthes · 158 pages

"This new edition of MYTHOLOGIES is the first complete, authoritative English version of the French classic, Roland Barthes's most emblematic work"--

SociologyMedia CriticismPhilosophyNonfiction
❤️

Dialectic of Enlightenment

Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno · 192 pages

Media CriticismSociologyPhilosophyNonfiction
❤️

Travels in Hyperreality

Umberto Eco · 324 pages

Media CriticismSociologyPhilosophyNonfiction
❤️
Media CriticismSociologyPhilosophyNonfiction
❤️

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

Media CriticismSociologyPhilosophyNonfiction
❤️

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

Media CriticismSociologyPhilosophyNonfiction
❤️

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.

Media CriticismSociologyPhilosophyNonfiction
❤️

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

Media CriticismSociologyNonfictionEconomics
🙂

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.

Media CriticismSociologyNonfictionEconomics
🙂

The Culture Industry

Theodor W. Adorno · 194 pages

"The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodifie

SociologyMedia CriticismPhilosophyNonfiction
🙂

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

Media CriticismSociologyNonfiction
🙂

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Steven Pinker · 802 pages

From Goodreads: Selected by *The New York Times Book Review* as a Notable Book of the Year The author of *The New York Times* bestseller *The Stuff* of Thought offers a controversial history of violence. Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as *New York Times* bestselling author Steven Pin

SociologyPhilosophyNonfictionEconomics
🙂
Media CriticismSociologyNonfiction
🙂

Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations

bell hooks · 320 pages

Bell hooks, one of America's leading black intellectuals, is also one of our most clear-eyed and penetrating analysts of culture. Outlaw culture--the culture of the margin, of women, of the disenfranchised, of racial and other minorities--lies at the heart of bell hooks' America. Raising her powerful voice against racism and other forms of oppression in the United States, hooks unlocks the politic

Media CriticismSociologyNonfiction
🙂
Media CriticismSociologyNonfiction
🙂

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Jia Tolentino · 303 pages

Media CriticismSociologyNonfiction
🙂
Media CriticismSociologyNonfiction
🙂

Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

Sady Doyle · 324 pages

"From Mary Wollstonecraft--who, for decades after her death, was more famous for her illegitimate child and suicide attempts than for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman--to Charlotte Brontë, Billie Holiday, Sylvia Plath, and even Hillary Clinton, [this book] dissects a centuries-old phenomenon and asks what it means now, in a time when we have unprecedented access to celebrities and civilians al

Media CriticismSociologyNonfiction

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.