From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art. In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken-with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity-is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, a first-generation Taiwanese American who has a 'zine and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become best friends, a friendship built of late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of his best friend-his memories-Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

 

 

The changes triggered by the global financial crisis in 2008, the immigration flows and the covid-19 pandemic in contemporary societies have transformed the way individuals communicate, create content, and 'consume' publicly available information. Consequently, political, societal, and financial pressures have led to alternative forms of media practice and representations and disrupted the core relationships and dynamics between politics, journalism, and society. This edited book examines the key challenges in political discourse and journalistic practice in times of crisis. It focuses on European paradigms and links political rhetoric and media challenges with the societal, political, and financial crises from 2008 until the present.

 

 

 

 

Few developments in contemporary politics are more striking than the frequency with which the term "fascist" is used to describe specific actors and groups. This marks a qualitative shift in our political discourse. For decades, "fascist" was an epithet used to brand one's political opponents, regardless of political ideology or governing philosophy, but most often to attack a specific individual. With the rise of extremist parties and candidates in Europe, the U.S., and around the globe, however, even mainstream political commentators have begun using the term "fascism" to describe what they see as a dangerous movement that has revived and repackaged many of the strategies long thought to have been relegated to the margins of political rhetoric. This book defines and interprets the common persuasive devices that characterize fascist discourse to understand the nature of its enduring appeal, and which has resurfaced as one of the most pressing problems of our time. A definition of fascism that guides the contributors here draws from the work of Kenneth Burke: the sustained and systematic deployment of rhetorical devices aimed at promoting the cult of irrationality by identifying both the victimhood and the inborn dignity of a newly crystalized social group, sanctioned by tradition, whose rebirth requires the spiritualization of injustice and internal and external purification through redemptive violence. This definition has much in common with established understandings of fascism, but a rhetorical approach emphasizes less how fascism manifests itself in parties, platforms, regimes, movements, and organizations, but rather on the tendencies in language itself that make these manifestations possible. Introductory chapters focus on general theories of fascism drawn from 20th-century history and theory. The remaining chapters investigate specific historical figures and their relationship to contemporary rhetorics. As indicated by their titles, each chapter focuses on defining a specific rhetorical device that seems characteristic of fascist rhetoric. This book does not promise a comprehensive inquiry into all aspects of fascism. The topics were selected by the authors based on their own expertise and because they illuminate a specific rhetorical device. A reader, by the end, should have acquired many of the conceptual critical resources by which to identify familiar fascist strategies of persuasion and propaganda.

 

The Midwest Farmer's Daughter presents the untold history and renewed cultural currency of an American icon at a time when fully 30 percent of new farms in the United States are woman-owned. It ranges widely from Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres to Laura Ingalls Wilder's commentaries for the Missouri Ruralist; from the critical importance of rural girls and young women to organizations such as the Farm Bureau, 4-H, and FFA to the entrepreneurial role today's female agriculturalists and sustainable farm advocates play in farmers' markets, urban farms, and community-supported agriculture.

Imagine a more controversial Rosie the Riveter--a generation older and more outlandish for her time. She was the "farmerette" of the Woman's Land Army of America (WLA), doing a man's job on the home front during World War I. From 1917 to 1920 the WLA sent more than twenty thousand urban women into rural America to take over farm work after the men went off to war and food shortages threatened the nation. These women, from all social and economic strata, lived together in communal camps and did what was considered "men's work": plowing fields, driving tractors, planting, harvesting, and hauling lumber. The Land Army was a civilian enterprise organized and financed by women. It insisted on fair labor practices and pay equal to male laborers' wages for its workers and taught women not only agricultural skills but also leadership and management techniques. Despite their initial skepticism, farmers became the WLA's loudest champions, and the farmerette was celebrated as an icon of American women's patriotism and pluck.The WLA's short but spirited life foreshadowed some of the most significant social issues of the twentieth century: women's changing roles, the problem of class distinctions in a democracy, and the physiological and psychological differences between men and women. The dramatic story of the WLA is vividly retold here using long-buried archival material, allowing a fascinating chapter of America's World War I experience to be rediscovered.