A TODAY Show Recommended Read, this beautifully intimate memoir-in-pieces uses one woman's life-long love affair with pop culture as a revelatory lens to explore family, identity, belonging, grief, and the power of female rage. Named a most anticipated book of the year by the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, and a best book of the year so far by Apple Books and Audible.ca. For most of Jen Sookfong Lee's life, pop culture was an escape from family tragedy and a means of fitting in with the larger culture around her. Anne of Green Gables promised her that, despite losing her father at the age of twelve, one day she might still have the loving family of her dreams. Princess Diana was proof that maybe there was more to being a good girl after all. And yet as Jen grew up, she began to recognize the ways in which pop culture was not made for someone like her—the child of Chinese immigrant parents who looked for safety in the invisibility afforded by embracing model minority myths. Ranging from the unattainable perfection of Gwyneth Paltrow and the father-figure familiarity of Bob Ross, to the long shadow cast by The Joy Luck Club and the life lessons she has learned from Rihanna, Jen weaves together key moments in pop culture with stories of her own failings, longings, and struggles as she navigates the minefields that come with carving her own path as an Asian woman, single mother, and writer. And with great wit, bracing honesty, and a deep appreciation for the ways culture shapes us, she draws direct lines between the spectacle of the popular, the intimacy of our personal bonds, and the social foundations of our collective obsessions.

A sharply observed and moving memoir-in-pieces that uses one woman's life-long love affair with pop culture as a revelatory lens to explore family, identity, belonging, grief, and the power of female rage. For most of Jen Sookfong Lee's life, pop culture was an escape from family tragedy and a means of fitting in with the larger culture around her. Anne of Green Gables promised her that, despite losing her father at the age of twelve, one day she might still have the loving family of her dreams, and Princess Diana was proof that maybe there was more to being a good girl after all. And yet as Jen grew up, she began to recognize the ways in which pop culture was not made for someone like her—the child of Chinese immigrant parents who looked for safety in the invisibility afforded by embracing model minority myths. Ranging from the unattainable perfection of Gwyneth Paltrow and the father-figure familiarity of Bob Ross, to the long shadow cast by The Joy Luck Club and the life lessons she has learned from Rihanna, Jen weaves together key moments in pop culture with stories of her own failings, longings, and struggles as she navigates the minefields that come with carving her own path as an Asian woman, single mother, and writer. And with great wit, bracing honesty, and a deep appreciation for the ways culture shapes us, she draws direct lines between the spectacle of the popular, the intimacy of our personal bonds, and the social foundations of our collective obsessions.

Ring Around the Maple is about the condition of children in Canada from roughly 1850 to 2000, a time during which “the modern” increasingly disrupted traditional ways. Authors Cynthia R. Comacchio and Neil Sutherland trace the lives of children over this “long century” with a view to synthesizing the rich interdisciplinary, often multi-disciplinary, literature that has emerged since the 1970s. Integrated into this synthesis is the authors’ new research into many, often seemingly disparate, archival and published primary sources. Emphasizing how “the child” and childhood are sociohistoric constructs, and employing age analytically and relationally, they discuss the constants and the variants in their historic dimensions. While childhood tangibly modernized during these years, it remained a far from universal experience due to identifiers of race, gender, culture, region, and intergenerational adaptations that characterize the process of growing up. This work highlights children’s perspectives through close, critical, “against the grain” readings of diaries, correspondence, memoirs, interviews, oral histories and autobiographies, many buried in obscure archives. It is the only extant historical discussion of Canadian children that interweaves the experiences of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children with those of children from a number of settler groups. Ring Around the Maple makes use of photographs, catalogues, advertisements, government publications, musical recordings, radio shows, television shows, material goods, documentary and feature films, and other such visual and aural testimony. Much of this evidence has not to date been used as historical testimony to uncover the lives of ordinary children. This book is generously illustrated with photographs and ephemera carefully selected to reflect children’s lives, conditions, interests, and obligations. It will be of special interest to historians and social scientists interested in children and the culture of childhood, but will also appeal to readers who enjoy the "little stories" that together make up our collective history, especially when those are told by the children who lived them.

"A Writer's First Aid Kit" is a humorous, yet practical guide for beginners and serious, experienced writers. Rutberg, who has written an extensive collection of books, articles, stage plays, comic books, screenplays, television commercials, children's books and more since receiving a master's degree in fine arts from the University of Southern California in 1980, delivers an honest and frank look at the trials and tribulations of writers dealing within the huge, multi-faceted publishing and entertainment industries, while simultaneously providing a genuine and easy-to-follow guide to good writing. His brutally honest and sometimes hilarious anecdotes, based on his plethora of personal experiences, provide for an entertaining and proactive sojourn through the field of writing while encompassing the emotional highs and lows which almost all writers come to experience. Rutberg blends real life examples and practical suggestions with the technicalities of fine writing as he moves readers through a realistic, comprehensive how-to approach. "A Writer's First Aid Kit" also is a must for the academic world. Included are suggestions for writing books--fiction and nonfiction--screenplays, stage plays, television scripts, magazine articles, children's books, comic books and more.

Jewish humor, with its rational skepticism and cutting social criticism, permeates American popular culture. Scholars of humor--from Sigmund Freud to Woody Allen--have studied the essence of the Jewish joke, at once a defense mechanism against a hostile world and a means of cultural affirmation. Where did this wit originate? Why do Jewish humorists work at the margins of so many diverse cultures? What accounts for the longevity of the Jewish joke? Do oppressed people, as African American author Ralph Ellison suggested, slip their yoke when they change the joke? Citing examples from prominent humorists and stand-up comics, this book examines the phenomenon of Jewish humor from its biblical origins to its prevalence in the modern diaspora, revealing a mother lode of wit in language, literature, folklore, music and history.

"Lights, Camera, Soundtrack surveys over 50 years of rock 'n' roll movies, musicals and performance films. It identifies the top guns involved in each film, provides a storyline, rates the film and reviews its soundtrack." "From pop and rock musicals, like the classic Elvis Presley vehicle Jailhouse Rock and the recent Tenacious D showpiece The Pick of Destiny, to performance films like Woodstock and Dig!, and the bootylicious films of the Blaxpoitation genre, all manner of rock and popular music films are here." "It also includes the films whose soundtracks made a massive impact on their success, such as Trainspotting, Reservoir Dogs, and The Crow." "And a section is dedicated to the rock and pop luminaries who have written film scores, such as Peter Gabriel, Nick Cave, and Ry Cooder."--BOOK JACKET.