Death and the American Dream

Death and the American Dream PDF

Author: Daniel Cano

Publisher: Bilingual Review Press (AZ)

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13:

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Fiction. Latino/Latina Studies. The year is 1915. Although he lacks newspaper experience, Mexican emigrant Pepe Rios lands a job as a Spanish-language reporter in Los Angeles, thanks to the wealthy husband of a former lover. While most newcomers end up working in the fields, Pepe is thrust into a new milieu rife with political unrest. Robber barons, anarchists, and communists struggle with one another, and the news is filled with the exploits of Hearst, Darrow, Flores Magon, and Zapata. Awash in political intrigue and high society, Pepe attempts to uncover the truth about his best friend's death, but his quest for truth just might unravel his new life and force him to face an uncomfortable realization about his past. The author peppers this tantalizing and suspenseful novel with Pepe's journal entries, giving the character depth and dimension as he describes his former life in Mexico and his dreams for the future.

The American Dream Is Not Dead

The American Dream Is Not Dead PDF

Author: Michael R. Strain

Publisher: Templeton Foundation Press

Published: 2020-02-25

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1599475588

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Populists on both sides of the political aisle routinely announce that the American Dream is dead. According to them, the game has been rigged by elites, workers can’t get ahead, wages have been stagnant for decades, and the middle class is dying. Michael R. Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, disputes this rhetoric as wrong and dangerous. In this succinctly argued volume, he shows that, on measures of economic opportunity and quality of life, there has never been a better time to be alive in America. He backs his argument with overwhelming—and underreported—data to show how the facts favor realistic optimism. He warns, however, that the false prophets of populism pose a serious danger to our current and future prosperity. Their policies would leave workers worse off. And their erroneous claim that the American Dream is dead could discourage people from taking advantage of real opportunities to better their lives. If enough people start to believe the Dream is dead, they could, in effect, kill it. To prevent this self-fulfilling prophecy, Strain’s book is urgent reading for anyone feeling the pull of the populists. E. J. Dionne and Henry Olsen provide spirited responses to Strain’s argument.

Mad Men, Death and the American Dream

Mad Men, Death and the American Dream PDF

Author: Elisabeth Bronfen

Publisher: Diaphanes

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783037345504

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Matthew Weiner s series "Mad Men," garnering awards, fandom and critical acclaim, has come to be viewed as a powerful time capsule. Given the precision with which the show invokes the visual culture as well as the political scene of the 1960s, it has been prasied for bringing back to the T.V. screen this watershed moment in American history. In her sophisticated study, Elisabeth Bronfen treats Lionsgate s serial drama, that aired from 2007-2015, as a signficant DVD novel of the early 21st century. Her claim is that it not only thrives on a significant double voicing, reviving the literature, film, music and fashion of the past "within" and "for" the cultural concerns of the present, and as such speaking both about the past and about the present. With Don Draper an embodiment of the prototypical con man, his precarious journey from poverty to fame and prosperity can also be seen as a continuation of the moral perfectionism so key to the American literary tradition. His fall and spiritual recovery is as much an individual story as a comment on the state of the nation. The notions of family and home he works (and fights) for are necessary symbolic fictions, with advertisement disclosing them as such. At the same time, the pitches Don Draper is such a creative genius at, tap into collective desires that are as much about fantasies of personal happiness as they are about buying into the America project. If we need myths to offer imaginary solutions for conflicts that can not be resolved in political reality, "Mad Men" self-consciously reflects on the role television has come to play in this work of the cultural imaginary, both fragile and fruitful. We identify and sympathize with the people in this series not despite but because they are fictional representations, different yet also a mirror of ourselves. "

Songs of the Doomed

Songs of the Doomed PDF

Author: Hunter S. Thompson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2002-12

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0743240995

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A collection of essays by Hunter Thompson that chart the high and low moments of his thirty-year career as a journalist

Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman PDF

Author: Arthur Miller

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1998-05-01

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 110104215X

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The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity—and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room. "By common consent, this is one of the finest dramas in the whole range of the American theater." —Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times "So simple, central, and terrible that the run of playwrights would neither care nor dare to attempt it." —Time

Behold, America

Behold, America PDF

Author: Sarah Churchwell

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2018-10-09

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1541673425

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A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book of 2018 The unknown history of two ideas crucial to the struggle over what America stands for In Behold, America, Sarah Churchwell offers a surprising account of twentieth-century Americans' fierce battle for the nation's soul. It follows the stories of two phrases--the "American dream" and "America First"--that once embodied opposing visions for America. Starting as a Republican motto before becoming a hugely influential isolationist slogan during World War I, America First was always closely linked with authoritarianism and white supremacy. The American dream, meanwhile, initially represented a broad vision of democratic and economic equality. Churchwell traces these notions through the 1920s boom, the Depression, and the rise of fascism at home and abroad, laying bare the persistent appeal of demagoguery in America and showing us how it was resisted. At a time when many ask what America's future holds, Behold, America is a revelatory, unvarnished portrait of where we have been.

Transaction Man

Transaction Man PDF

Author: Nicholas Lemann

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2019-09-10

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0374713782

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An Amazon Best History Book of 2019 "A splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people." —Ryan Cooper, Washington Monthly Over the last generation, the United States has undergone seismic changes. Stable institutions have given way to frictionless transactions, which are celebrated no matter what collateral damage they generate. The concentration of great wealth has coincided with the fraying of social ties and the rise of inequality. How did all this come about? In Transaction Man, Nicholas Lemann explains the United States’—and the world’s—great transformation by examining three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras. Adolf Berle, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s chief theorist of the economy, imagined a society dominated by large corporations, which a newly powerful federal government had forced to become benign and stable institutions, contributing to the public good by offering stable employment and generous pensions. By the 1970s, the corporations’ large stockholders grew restive under this regime, and their chief theoretician, Harvard Business School’s Michael Jensen, insisted that firms should maximize shareholder value, whatever the consequences. Today, Silicon Valley titans such as the LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman hope “networks” can reknit our social fabric. Lemann interweaves these fresh and vivid profiles with a history of the Morgan Stanley investment bank from the 1930s through the financial crisis of 2008, while also tracking the rise and fall of a working-class Chicago neighborhood and the family-run car dealerships at its heart. Incisive and sweeping, Transaction Man is the definitive account of the reengineering of America and the enormous impact it has had on us all.

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