This book will explain how to motivate Millennials and show you how to capitalize on the great potential of our often-maligned generation. To do this, we’ll explain how to get past the stereotypes and explain who Millennials really are. You’ll gain a new perspective as we shine a light on the family dynamics that shaped us. If you’re a Boomer, we learned our values from you. If you’re a Gen Xer, you share many of these same values. We’ll also explore how to create the business structures a...

Contributions by Derek T. Buescher, Travis L. Cox, Trischa Goodnow, Jon Judy, John R. Katsion, James J. Kimble, Christina M. Knopf, Steven E. Martin, Brad Palmer, Elliott Sawyer, Deborah Clark Vance, David E. Wilt, and Zou YizhengOne of the most overlooked aspects of the Allied war effort involved a surprising initiative--comic book propaganda. Even before Pearl Harbor, the comic book industry enlisted its formidable army of artists, writers, and editors to dramatize the conflict f...

One of the great American iconoclasts holds forth on politics, war, books and writers, and his personal life in a series of conversations—including his last published interview.During his long career Kurt Vonnegut won international praise for his novels, plays, and essays. In this new anthology of conversations with Vonnegut—which collects interviews from throughout his career—we learn much about what drove Vonnegut to write and how he viewed his w...

The story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, and melodrama has turned everything—news, politics, religion, high culture—into one vast public entertainment.Neal Gabler calls them "lifies," those blockbusters written in the medium of life that dominate the media and the national conversation for weeks, months, even years: the death of Princess Diana, the trial of O.J. Simpson, Kenneth Starr vs. William Jefferson Clinton. Real Life as Entertainment is hardly a new phe...

Myth and the Greatest Generation calls into question the glowing paradigm of the World War II generation set up by such books as The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw.Including analysis of news reports, memoirs, novels, films and other cultural artefacts Ken Rose shows the war was much more disruptive to the lives of Americans in the military and on the home front during World War II than is generally acknowledged. Issues of racial, labor unrest, juvenile delinque...

The one guide every creative nonfiction writer needs to turn to when being "creative."Writers of memoir and narrative nonfiction are experiencing difficult days with the discovery that some well-known works in the genre contain exaggerations--or are partially fabricated. But what are the parameters of creative nonfiction? Keep It Real begins by defining creative nonfiction. Then it explores the flexibility of the form--the liberties and the boundaries that allow writers to...

For more than 60 years, Captain America was one of Marvel Comics' flagship characters, representing truth, strength, liberty, and justice. The assassination of his alter ego, Steve Rogers, rocked the comic world, leaving numerous questions about his life and death.This book discusses topics including the representation of Nazi Germany in Captain America Comics from the 1940s to the 1960s; the creation of Captain America in light of the Jewish American experience; ...

**A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award"The definitive book about Depression culture for our time." —San Francisco Chronicle**Hailed as one of the best books of 2009 by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, this vibrant portrait of 1930s culture masterfully explores the anxiety and hope, the despair and surprising optimism of distressed Americans during the Great Depression. Morris Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer called "one ...

Lawrence Epstein's The Haunted Smile tackles a subject both poignant and delightful: the story of Jewish comedians in America. For the past century and more, American comedy has drawn its strength and soul from the comic genius of Jewish performers and writers. An incomplete listing of names makes the point: The Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, Fanny Brice, George Burns, Milton Berle, Jackie Mason, Joan Rivers, Rodney Dangerfield, Mel Brooks, Alan King, Mort Sahl, Buddy Hackett, Woody A...

The most celebrated American novelist of the past half-century, an indispensable figure of postmodernism worldwide, Thomas Pynchon notoriously challenges his readers. This Companion provides tools for meeting that challenge. Comprehensive, accessible, lively, up-to-date and reliable, it approaches Pynchon's fiction from various angles, calling on the expertise of an international roster of scholars at the cutting edge of Pynchon studies. Part I covers Pynchon's fiction novel-by-novel from ...

Charles Bukowski disliked academics, as this academic and readable book points out from page one onward of its introduction, "Charles Bukowski vs. American Ways." Begun before Bukowski died in 1994, Charles Bukowski: Autobiographer, Gender Critic, Iconoclast was the first doctoral dissertation on his prose and poetry up to that date, and it is offered now for fans and academics alike-no more need for black-market sales.Chapter One, "Placing Bukowski," introduces Bukowski's...

**A Financial Times Best Book of the Year"Brando’s Smile returns us to the power of his greatest performances." —Dan Chiasson, New York Review of Books**When people think about Marlon Brando they think of the movie star, the hunk, the scandals. Here, Susan L. Mizruchi—who gained unprecedented access to Brando’s letters, audiotapes, revised screenplays, and books—reveals the complex man whose intelligence belies the high-school dropout. She shows h...