"Focusing on a handful of performers - Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, the Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman, and Elvis Presley - Greil Marcus opens up the American story of ambition and defeat, dreams and lies. This fifth edition includes an updated version of the ever-expanding Notes and Discographies section, exploring the evolution and continuing impact of the performers and recordings featured in this book."--BOOK JACKET.

"For more than thirty years, Michael Eric Dyson has played a prominent role in the nation as a public intellectual, university professor, cultural critic, social activist and ordained Baptist minister. He has presented a rich and resourceful set of ideas about American history and culture. Now for the first time he brings together the various components of his multihued identity and eclectic pursuits. Entertaining Race is a testament to Dyson's consistent...

"All These Wonders features voices both familiar and new. Storytellers include Louis C.K., Tig Notaro, John Turturro, and Meg Wolitzer, as well as a hip hop "one hit wonder," an astronomer gazing at the surface of Pluto for the first time, and a young female spy risking everything as part of Churchill's "secret army" during World War II. They share their ventures into uncharted territory--and how their lives were changed forever by what they found...

Explains how the influences of dreamers, zealots, hucksters, and superstitious groups shaped America's tendency toward a rich fantasy life, citing the roles of individuals from P.T. Barnum to Donald Trump in perpetuating conspiracy theories, self-delusion, and magical thinking. "In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, one of our sharpest observers, Kurt Andersen, demonstrates that what's happening in our country today--this strange, post-truth,...

"The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that David Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. It is the decade of Joe McCarthy and the young Martin Luther King, the Korean War and Levittown, Jack Kerouac and Elvis Presley." "Halberstam not only gives us the titans of the age - Eisenhower, Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon - but also Harley Earl, who put...

Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful...