cultural book reviews — AEJMC Hot Topics

Book Review – What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy

What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy. Edward P. Morgan. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. 405 pp.

The late A. J. Liebling, press critic for The New Yorker, proclaimed from time to time that, “By not reporting there are a lot of things you can avoid finding out.” In this book, Edward P. Morgan, university distinguished professor of political science at Lehigh University, recounts what we avoided finding out about the 1960s and how that has shaped our stereotypes of the decade. This book is a must-read for journalists and journalism students not only because it tells us of important media history, but also because of the implications of that history for today. [Read more...]

Book Review – Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media

Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media. Beth A. Haller. Louisville, KY: The Advocado Press, 2010. 213 pp.

Sophisticated and highly readable, Representing Disability in an Ableist World is a work that can be appreciated both by those who are already familiar with disability studies scholarship concerning media and by those who are seeking a comprehensive introduction to it. Written by Beth A. Haller, a professor of journalism at Towson University as well as the author of the popular blog Media dis&dat (http://media-dis-n-dat.blogspot.com/), the work surveys important issues surrounding the representation of disability in culture. [Read more...]

Book Review – Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders

Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders. Michael Curtin and Hemant Shah, eds. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, 2010. 328 pp.

The world is watching India and China, with their liberalized market economies, more than one billion people each, their ancient history with past glories and cultural riches; together, they are seen as formidable competition to the developed world. Yet books focusing on the mass media of these two Asian superpowers are scarce. One is Marcus Franda’s China and India Online: The Politics of Information Technology in the World’s Largest Nations (2002). There are books on media and information and communication technology in the Asian region generally, but most of these are already dated. After more than two decades of liberalization and market growth, the importance of measuring the media’s social and cultural impact in this important region cannot be overemphasized. [Read more...]

Book Review – Lines of Attack: Conflicts in Caricature

Lines of Attack: Conflicts in Caricature. Neil McWilliam, ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 86 pp.

What a hoot this is! Illustrated in color and black and white, Lines of Attack is a catalogue of an exhibition of journalistic caricature as a medium of political commentary held at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art in the first half of 2010. I only wish I’d seen that display. Dick Cheney and former President George Bush (the younger), both widely represented here, can be glad they didn’t.

McWilliam, who teaches art and art history at Duke, along with several student contributors from Duke and the nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, range widely over two specific periods of graphic political expression to demonstrate that while artistic methods and techniques change, some of the basic visual “skewering” process remains much the same. Leaders have always been ridiculed in a variety of ways, some more obvious and blatant than others. [Read more...]

Book Review – Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe

Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe. Anikó Imre. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 257 pp.

Though it has now been more than two decades since the fall of the Iron Curtain, many of us still have little knowledge about life or media in Central or Eastern Europe—let alone experience. Identity Games should help fill that gap, as author Anikó Imre examines the corporate transformation of the post-communist media landscape in the region.

Avoiding both uncritical techno-euphoria and the nostalgic projections (by some) of a simpler and thus better media world under communism, Imre, a faculty member at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema Arts, argues that the demise of Soviet-backed regimes and the transition to transnational capitalism have had crucial implications for understanding the relationships among growing nationalist pride, media globalization, and identity. [Read more...]

Book Review – A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet

A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Marshall T. Poe. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 337 pp.

This has all the signs of becoming a very important book in the field, possibly a landmark study, though such global judgments will have to await both further time and more critical reaction. In any case, understand that this is by no means just another standard media history book.

A professor of history at the University of Iowa with a number of books about Russian history to his credit, Poe has developed a new theoretical approach to the wide sweep of communications change from initial efforts at speech to the present digital era. [Read more...]

Book Review – The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars

The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars. Hugh J. Reilly. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. 162 pp.

Nineteenth-century U.S. press culpability in encouraging heavy-handed military solutions regarding the troublesome Plains Indians is always worth a study. In a word, then, Hugh J. Reilly’s The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars is best described as useful.

Reilly, an associate professor of communication and Native American studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, has collected newspaper accounts and editorials of nearly thirty years of press coverage of what he calls “watershed” events involving primarily Sioux, Cheyenne, and Nez Perce Indians, and their tragic relationships with the U.S. government. [Read more...]

Book Review – Fashioning Teenagers: A Cultural History of Seventeen Magazine

Fashioning Teenagers: A Cultural History of Seventeen Magazine. Kelley Massoni. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010. 256 pp.

Walk into any shopping mall and you’ll see a variety of stores peddling merchandise aimed at teenagers—clothing, jewelry, music, etc. Although this focus on teen consumers might seem like the recent brainchild of a savvy marketing guru, its roots can actually be traced to a magazine.

When Seventeen made its debut in 1944, it was the first publication to recognize the potential of the teenage population, specifically, teenage girls. The magazine was initially created to provide information to teen readers who, up to that point, had no such written material produced specifically for them. The promotion of the magazine ultimately prompted an awareness of this population on the part of marketers and merchandisers, which led to the creation of an industry catering to their retail needs. [Read more...]

Book Review – Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture

Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Jim Collins. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 288 pp.

During the last two decades, the popularity of books has grown exponentially. According to Bowker, book production through traditional avenues in the United States alone has grown from just over 100,000 titles in 1993 to nearly 300,000 in 2008, and the number of fiction titles has more than doubled. This does not account for the more than 750,000 self-published and print-on-demand books published in 2009 alone. In a nutshell, books are big business. In Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Jim Collins, professor of film and television and English at the University of Notre Dame, explores the impact of the convergence of literary, visual, and material cultures on the book publishing industry. [Read more...]

Book Review – Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences

Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences. Philip M. Napoli. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010. 272 pp.

Philip Napoli’s new book, Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences, is a good combination of a critical approach to audience measurement as well as a thorough review of the development of audience information systems. His key argument is that technologies foster the collection and compilation of audience information beyond the traditional exposure model, and allow new dimensions of audience information be incorporated into business use. [Read more...]