Eurotrash

Eurotrash PDF

Author: David Harsanyi

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2021-10-26

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0063066025

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Why should America try to be more like countries that are worse in nearly every way? Europe has been declining under the weight of its antiquated institutions, economic fatigue, moral anemia and cultural surrender. Yet American politicians, technocrats, academics, and pundits argue, with increasing popularity, that Americans should look across the Atlantic for solutions to the nation’s problems, including on issues like health care, the welfare state, immigration, and a bloated bureaucracy. In Eurotrash, David Harsanyi argues we are looking in the wrong place. By every economic and societal measure, the United States is more tolerant than Europe. It is more welcoming of immigrants, but also far more successful at assimilating them. Minorities do far better in United States. Our economy is dominant. Only one European company appears in top 10 corporate powerhouses in the world and only seven in the top 50. Americans make up nearly half of the list. Americans are far more charitable and happier than Europeans. Our slightly lower life expectancy and our slightly higher infant mortality rate are not a result of substandard care, but a statistical misunderstanding based on the fact we treat every life as one worth saving. In this biting, fast-moving, and well-researched polemic, Harsanyi debunks prevailing notions about European supremacy and makes an unapologetic case for American exceptionalism, offering insight and reasoned arguments to counter current policy prescriptions.

Alternative Europe

Alternative Europe PDF

Author: Ernest Mathijs

Publisher: Wallflower Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9781903364932

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Whether defined by comic excesses, cult horrors, or surreal vampire experimentations, trash and exploitation cinema represents the alternative face of European film. Although extremely popular with post-war audiences, these historically significant traditions of 'Eurotrash' have often been ridiculed or ignored by an established film criticism eager to define 'legitimate' European cinema as either avant-garde or socially realist. Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 investigates these previously under-explored national traditions of film culture, with essays and festival reports uncovering the social and cultural trends and tensions within a wide range of European exploitation movies. The volume considers such engaging and challenging topics as Russian, Belgian and Italian horror cinema, Gothic musclemen movies, Nazi 'sexploitation' cycles, German erotic cinema and 1970s European 'rogue cop' thrillers. Alternative Europe also includes interviews with trash directors and icons such as Brian Yuzna, J'rg Buttgereit and Giovanni Lombardo Radice.

Team 7-Eleven

Team 7-Eleven PDF

Author: Geoff Drake

Publisher: VeloPress

Published: 2011-08-01

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 1937716058

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In 1980, there were exactly four professional bike racers in America. Six years later, an American cycling team would wear the coveted yellow jersey of the Tour de France. And that same team would go on to win Italy's greatest race--the Giro d'Italia--only two years later. Team 7-Eleven is the extraordinary story of how two Olympic speed skaters, Jim Ochowicz and Eric Heiden, pulled together a small group of amateur cyclists and turned them into one of the greatest cycling teams the sport has known. From humble beginnings in a barn in Pennsylvania to soaring victories in the French Alps, Team 7-Eleven is the complete history that has never been fully told--until now. The 7-Eleven Cycling Team--Team 7-Eleven for short--launched the careers of American cycling superstars Andy Hampsten, Davis Phinney, Bob Roll, Ron Kiefel, and many more. It also changed the cycling world, creating a new team structure based on multiple stars, unified goals, and personal sacrifice for the greater good. And yet at the time it was formed, the number of American cyclists with world-class experience could be counted--literally--on one hand. And the number of American teams that competed in Europe's biggest races was exactly zero. Team 7-Eleven is the amazing story of how two cycling fans found one exceptional sponsor and created the greatest American cycling team of its era. Written with the enthusiastic cooperation of the team members, Team 7-Eleven will impress cycling fans with behind-the-scenes stories of the team's founding, its growing pains, and its lasting success as the team that established America as a powerhouse in the world of professional cycling.

The Acid House

The Acid House PDF

Author: Irvine Welsh

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9780393312805

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"Irvine Welsh's scintillating, disturbing, and altogether outrageous collection of stories—the basis for the 1998 cult movie directed by Paul McGuigan"--

The Economic Weapon

The Economic Weapon PDF

Author: Nicholas Mulder

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 0300259360

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Tracing the history of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder combines political, economic, legal, and military history to reveal how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations.This timely study casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous.

The Book of Ralph

The Book of Ralph PDF

Author: John McNally

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-05-11

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 1439105502

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All of us need a Ralph in our lives. Chicago, 1978. Hank Boyd, a solid B+ student, a good kid, wants eighth grade to be his special year. But when Ralph, an oddball troublemaker who ' s been held back twice, gets the idea that he and Hank are pals, Hank's year devolves into an odyssey as frightening as it is hilarious. John McNally, acclaimed author of Troublemakers, deftly portrays the astonishing, sometimes terrifying world of adolescence in 1970s America: The adult world becomes increasingly untrustworthy, the economy plummets, and families seem to be falling apart, yet the two boys manage to create their own small moments of transcendence. At once wary and full of wonder, Hank and Ralph will win your heart with their outrageous, poignant, and occasionally scary antics -- and they will teach you something about the ties that bind us together, hold us back, and redeem us.

Rouge Street

Rouge Street PDF

Author: Shuang Xuetao

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2022-04-19

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1250835860

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"Rouge Street gives voice to an intriguing cast of characters left behind by China’s economic miracle . . . Shuang pulls no punches . . . From start to finish, his scope is close to the ground, his language sparingly emotive and unobtrusive. He never flinches. As a result, we don’t look away either." —Jing Tsu, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) Introduced by Madeleine Thien, author of the Booker finalist novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing From one of the most highly celebrated young Chinese writers, three dazzling novellas of Northeast China, mixing realism, mysticism, and noir. An inventor dreams of escaping his drab surroundings in a flying machine. A criminal, trapped beneath a frozen lake, fights a giant fish. A strange girl pledges to ignite a field of sorghum stalks. Rouge Street presents three novellas by Shuang Xuetao, the lauded young Chinese writer whose frank, fantastical short fiction has already inspired comparisons to Ernest Hemingway and Haruki Murakami. Located in China’s frigid Northeast, Shenyang, the author’s birthplace, boasts an illustrious past—legend holds that the emperor’s makeup was manufactured here. But while the city enjoyed renewed importance as an industrial hub under Mao Zedong, China’s subsequent transition from communism to a market economy led to an array of social ills—unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorce, suicide—that gritty Shenyang epitomizes. Orbiting the toughest neighborhood of a postindustrial city whose vast, inhospitable landscape makes every aspect of life a struggle, these many-voiced missives are united by Shuang Xuetao’s singular style—one that balances hardscrabble naturalism with the transcendent and faces the bleak environs with winning humor. Rouge Street illuminates not only the hidden pains of those left behind in an extraordinary economic boom but also the inspirations and grace they, nevertheless, manage to discover.

Ultimate Blogs

Ultimate Blogs PDF

Author: Sarah Boxer

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2008-02-12

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0307389324

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“What are you working on?” “An anthology of blogs.” “I didn’t know you had a blog.” “I don’t. It’s an anthology of other people’s blogs.” “How do you find good blogs?” “I read. I surf. I look at blog contests. I follow links. I ask people about the blogs they like.” “Is a good blog hard to find?” “Yes. Very.” A Book of Blogs? WTF!! Sarah Boxer, a former New York Times reporter and critic, travels through the blogosphere (more than 80 million blogs — and counting) and finds some masterpieces along the way. Among the bloggers in the anthology are: two fashion critics mocking the inexplicable “fugliness” of celebrities a Marine Corps lieutenant stationed in Fallujah in 2006 a 19-year old student in Singapore cheerfully pining for her ex an illustrator’s tiny saga of a rodent and his ball of crap Odysseus’s sidekick telling his side of the Iliad and Odyssey Revealing and deceptive, grand and niggling, worldly and parochial, these blogs comprise a snapshot of life on the wild, wild Web.