Popular Culture History

In Golden Days, acclaimed sports journalist Jack McCallum uses these two teams - the Jerry West/Wilt Chamberlain/Elgin Baylor Lakers and the Stephen Curry/Kevin Durant/Draymond Green Warriors - to trace the dynamic history of the National Basketball Association, which for much of the last half century has marched memorably through the state of California. Tying together the two strands of McCallum's story is Hall of Famer West, the ferociously competitive Laker guard who later became one of the key architects of the Warriors.

Abridged edition: Using portraits of America’s flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country’s recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose?

Noah Lefevre, creator of Polyphonic, explores how our favorite music does more than entertain. From Aretha Franklin carving out her own space in what had been considered a man's world by reworking the chauvinistic lyrics to the 1967's hit "Respect," to Doja Cat's successful backlash against toxic fans of the digital age; from a broken amplifier on "Rocket 88" ushering in the distorted sounds of rock n' roll, to Kendrick Lamar's release of "Alright," which became the unofficial anthem to the BLM protests-each song mirrors the strife, change and progress of our country's narrative.

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series The Get Down, Hip Hop America is the definitive account of the society-altering collision between Black youth culture and the mass media.

Prince Harry has made headlines all over the world with his unruly antics, but instead of being sidelined as the House of Windsor's biggest liability, Prince Henry of Wales has emerged as the jewel in the crown of the modern British Monarchy. Today Harry is the most popular member of the monarchy after Her Majesty herself. He has won the public's heart as the loveable rogue prince and royal heartthrob for girls and women around the world.

To understand how we got here, we have rewind the VHS tape. 90s Bitch tells the real story of women and girls in the 1990s, exploring how they were maligned by the media, vilified by popular culture, and objectified in the marketplace. Trailblazing women like Hillary Clinton, Anita Hill, Marcia Clark, and Roseanne Barr were undermined. Newsmakers like Monica Lewinsky, Tonya Harding, and Lorena Bobbitt were shamed and misunderstood. The advent of the 24-hour news cycle reinforced society's deeply entrenched sexism.

The Beatles left an indelible mark not only on music, but on the culture in which they created it. In a time of great and sudden change, they led a generation into new territory, redefining the social landscape as a place where men and women could try on new roles. They led this change through their music, their public personae, and - under scrutiny - their example. The Beatles Guide to Love & Sex examines all three - the songs, the parts they played in public, and the way they led their lives, for better or worse. John, Paul, George and Ringo began their journey as typical working-class ...

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series The Get Down, this passionate and provocative book tells the complete story of Black music in the last 50 years, and in doing so, outlines the perilous position of Black culture within white American society. In a fast-paced narrative, Nelson George’s book chronicles the rise and fall of “race music” and its transformation into the R&B that eventually dominated the airwaves, only to find itself diluted and submerged as crossover music.

Two world wars, the Civil Rights movement, and a Jheri curl later, Blacks in America continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair. From the antebellum practice of shaving the head in an attempt to pass as a "free" person to the 2013 uproar over an Ohio school that banned Afro puffs, the issues surrounding Black hair continue to linger as we move through the 21stst century.

The Lord of the Rings is intended to be applicable to the real world of relationships, religion, pleasure, pain, and politics. Tolkien himself said that his grand tale of wizards, orcs, hobbits, and elves was aimed at truth and good morals in the actual world.

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, Jacoby surveys an antirationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought".

One of Michiko Kakutani's (New York Times) top 10 books of 2016. A funny thing happened on the way to the digital utopia. We've begun to fall back in love with the very analog goods and ideas the tech gurus insisted that we no longer needed. Businesses that once looked outdated, from film photography to brick-and-mortar retail, are now springing with new life. Notebooks, records, and stationery have become cool again.

Music opinions bring out passionate debate in people, and Steven Hyden knows that firsthand. Each chapter in Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me focuses on a pop music rivalry, from the classic to the very recent, and draws connections to the larger forces surrounding the pairing.

For all of human history, we have made permanent marks on our skin—for multifarious, fascinating, reasons. The oldest preserved tattooed skin that survives is European: Ötzi, the famous ‘Iceman’ mummy, whose body is covered in small tattoo marks, allows us a brief glimpse into the pre-history of the practice. Since then, people in every corner of the world have decided to tattoo themselves, and countless cultures have performed this ancient artistic practice. But for the most part, these fascinating histories remain stubbornly untold.

The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it’s the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists—nearly all of them people of color from some of America’s most overlooked communities—pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country’s youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language.

Drawing on new research and enlivened by Touré's unique pop-cultural fluency, I Would Die 4 U relies on surprising and in-depth interviews with Prince's band members, former girlfriends, musicologists, and even Bible scholars to deconstruct the artist's life and work. Prince's baby boomer status allowed him to play a wise older brother to the latchkey kids of Generation X. Defying traditional categories of race, gender, and sexuality, he nonetheless presented a very traditional conception of religion and God in his music.

Map of the Soul: 7 is a capstone of a three-album project intended to reveal the inner landscape of the human soul that is packed with rich symbolism and woven together with BTS’s signature sound and moves. Starting with the lyrics, this book launches into a deep, engaging examination of the album in the light of the psychology of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. The many layers of meaning embedded in the number 7 are brought to light, along with several fundamental concepts of Jungian psychology.

In Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams, Donald Bogle tells - for the first time - the story of a place both mythic and real: Black Hollywood. Spanning 60 years, this deliciously entertaining history uncovers the audacious manner in which many Blacks made a place for themselves in an industry that originally had no place for them. Through interviews and the personal recollections of Hollywood luminaries, Bogle pieces together a remarkable history that remains largely obscure to this day.

Bond and the Beatles present us with opposing values, visions of the British culture, and ideas about sexual identity. Love and Let Die is the story of a clash between working class liberation and establishment control, and how it exploded on the global stage. It explains why James Bond hated the Beatles, why Paul McCartney wanted to be Bond, and why it was Ringo who won the heart of a Bond Girl in the end.

Fashion Killa is a classic tale of a modern renaissance; of an exclusionary industry gate-crashed by innovators; of impresarios—Sean “Diddy” Combs, Dapper Dan, Virgil Abloh—hoisting hip-hop from the streets to the stratosphere; of supernovas—Lil’ Kim, Cardi B, and Kimora Lee Simmons—allying with kingmakers—Anna Wintour, Donatella Versace, Tommy Hilfiger, and Ralph Lauren; of traditionalist fashion houses—Louis Vuitton, Fendi, and Saint Laurent—transformed into temples of rap gods.