A bloody body hung on a cross and they wondered what God was doing. Then, on Sunday morning, they said, Ah! The Prestige! Jesus told simple stories called parables. We hear them and hear them. Suddenly they begin to unravel, light floods in, and we say, Ah! The Prestige!,/p>

In The Prestige of Violence Sally Bachner argues that, starting in the 1960s, American fiction laid claim to the status of serious literature by placing violence at the heart of its mission and then insisting that this violence could not be represented. Bachner demonstrates how many of the most influential novels of this period are united by the dramatic opposition they draw between a debased and untrustworthy conventional language, on the one hand, and a violence that appears to be prelinguistic and unquestionable, on the other. Genocide, terrorism, war, torture, slavery, rape, and murder are major themes, yet the writers insist that such events are unspeakable. Bachner takes issue with the claim made within trauma studies that history is the site of violent trauma inaccessible to ordinary representation. Instead, she argues, both trauma studies and the fiction to which it responds institutionalize an inability to address violence. Examining such works as Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, Bachner locates the postwar prestige of violence in the disjunction between the privileged security of wealthier Americans and the violence perpetrated by the United States abroad. The literary investment in unspeakable and often immaterial violence emerges in Bachner's readings as a complex and ideologically varied literary solution to the political geography of violence in our time.

Occupational Prestige in Comparative Perspective provides information pertinent to the study of the nature of inequality in human society. This book discusses that stratification is inevitable in complex societies as they are characterized by a highly developed division of labor into distinct occupational roles. Organized into five parts encompassing 10 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the nature of occupational prestige systems that is rooted in power relations. This text then examines the extent of intrasocial variation in occupational prestige evaluations. Other chapters consider the contrast between the consensus that characterizes occupational prestige evaluations and the lack of consensus that characterizes the evaluation of other social categories. This book discusses as well the basic pattern of occupational evaluations and the worldwide uniformity in occupational evaluations. The final chapter deals with the development of the occupational scale and discusses it potential uses. This book is a valuable resource for sociologists.

Although somewhat more specialized than the Atlantic set because of Prestige's emphasis on jazz, this work is valuable for record collectors and researchers. American Reference Books Annual