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The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America
David Hajdu · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe · 416 pages
One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Test is the seminal work on the hippie culture, a report on what it was like to follow along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched out on the "Transcontinental Bus Tour" from the West Coast to New York, all the while introducing acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks, stagi
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
Adam Higginbotham · 538 pages
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses
Kevin Birmingham · 424 pages
For more than a decade, the book that literary critics now consider the most important novel in the English language was illegal to own, sell, advertise or purchase in most of the English-speaking world. James Joyce's big blue book, "Ulysses, " ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of "Ulysses "was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. All of the
The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read!
Jim Trombetta · 304 pages
Uncovers a rare visual treasury of some of the most important and neglected stories in American literature--the pre-Code horror comics of the 1950s. Censored out of existence by Congress in an infamous televised US Senate subcommittee hearing investigating juvenile delinquency, these rare comic book images are culled from a collection of several hundred, many of which have been rarely seen since t
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Steven Levy · 455 pages
Today, technology is cool. Owning the most powerful computer, the latest high-tech gadget, and the whizziest website is a status symbol on a par with having a flashy car or a designer suit. And a media obsessed with the digital explosion has reappropriated the term "computer nerd" so that it's practically synonymous with "entrepreneur." Yet, a mere fifteen years ago, wireheads hooked on tweaking e
Marvel Comics: The Untold Story
Sean Howe · 490 pages
Interweaves history, anecdotes, and analysis with more than one hundred interviews with Marvel insiders to reveal how Marvel, which introduced brightly costumed caped crusaders in the 1960s, became one of the most dominant pop cultural forces in contemporary America.
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf · 129 pages
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the m
The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book
Peter Finn, Petra Couvee
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 576 pages
Drawing on his own experiences before, during, and after his 11 years of incarceration and exile, Solzhenitsyn reveals with torrential narrative and dramatic power the entire apparatus of Soviet repression. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims, we encounter the secret police operations, the labor camps and prisons, the uprooting or extermination of whole populations. Yet we also wi
Hope Against Hope
Nadezhda Mandelstam · 431 pages
The story of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who suffered continuous persecution under Stalin, but whose wife constantly supported both him and his writings until he died in 1938. Since 1917 The Modern Library prides itself as The Modern Library of the World’s Best Books. Featuring introductions by leading writers, stunning translations, scholarly endnotes and reading group guides. Production values emp
Hip: The History
John Leland · 405 pages
Hip: The History is the story of how American pop culture has evolved throughout the twentieth century to its current position as world cultural touchstone. How did hip become such an obsession? From sex and music to fashion and commerce, John Leland tracks the arc of ideas as they move from subterranean Bohemia to Madison Avenue and back again. Hip: The History examines how hip has helped shape -
The Fifties
David Halberstam · 808 pages
The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon, but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the A
When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II
Molly Guptill Manning · 288 pages
"When America entered World War II in 1941, [it] faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations. In 1943, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 mil
A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-Day Iraq
Fernando Baez · 354 pages
A product of 10 years' research and support from leading American and European universities, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books traces the tragic story which encapsulates: the smashed tablets of ancient Sumer; the widespread looting of libraries in post-war Iraq; the levelling of the Library of Alexandria; the burning of books by Crusaders and Nazis; and censorship against authors. Wi
Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream
Jay Stevens · 413 pages
Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love
David Talbot · 480 pages
Salon founder David Talbot chronicles the cultural history of San Francisco and from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when figures such as Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, and Bill Walsh helped usher from backwater city to thriving metropolis.
Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
Jeff Chang, D.J. Kool Herc · 546 pages
Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop has been a generation-defining global movement. In a post-civil rights era rapidly transformed by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop gave voiceless youths a chance to address these seismic changes, and became a job-making engine and the Esperanto of youth rebellion. Hip-hop crystallized a multiracial generation's worldview
The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Jill Lepore · 432 pages
A cultural history of Wonder Woman traces the character's creation and enduring popularity, drawing on interviews and archival research to reveal the pivotal role of feminism in shaping her seven-decade story.
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956
Anne Applebaum · 613 pages
In the follow-up to her previous book "Gulag," the author, a journalist delivers a history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union, to its surprise and delight, found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Josef Stalin and his
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood
Mark Harris · 496 pages
The epic human drama behind the making of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967-Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Doctor Doolittle, and Bonnie and Clyde-and through them, the larger story of the cultural revolution that transformed Hollywood, and America, foreverIt's the mid-1960s, and westerns, war movies and blockbuster musicals-Mary Poppins, The
Library: An Unquiet History
Matthew Battles · 258 pages
On the survival and destruction of knowledge, from Alexandria to the Internet. Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved but also shaped, inspired, and obliterated knowledge.Matthew Battles, a rare books librarian and a gifted narrator, takes us on a spirited foray from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries, from the Vatican to the british L
You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom
Nick Cohen · 352 pages