In this stunning novel, a mother's desperate desire to be somebody, fueled by the memory of a date she once had with Elvis, provokes an intense rivalry with her daughter. Silvie Page, determined to escape the control and frustrations of her mother, has started her own life--she's moved to New York, gotten a job in publishing, met a wonderful man. Still, her entangled and competitive relationship with her mother, Mimi, continues to haunt her. Moving back and forth in time, Another Song About the King explores how the fantasies and experiences of one generation have an impact on the lives of another. Frustrated by her life as a housewife in the sixties, Mimi names her daughter Silvie, as a near anagram of Elvis. Caught up in a fantasy world of the King and fame, Mimi sews clothes from her unique designs but remains mired in unfulfilled artistic ambitions and the need to dominate her family. Yet even as Silvie begins to free herself from Mimi's jealousy and expectations, a family crisis draws her back into her mother's web. Another Song About the King is a rich and moving novel that goes deep into the heart of identity and the complex relationships within a family to reveal the ways in which happiness can be held hostage to the past and a daughter's struggle for freedom can lead to reconciliation, renewal, and love. Written with lyricism, insight, humor, and grace, it introduces a fresh new voice in American fiction, Kathryn Stern.
What force of will and circumstance drove a woman from a comfortable life painting china tea services to one of hardship and loneliness in the battle zones of France and Belgium following the Great War? For western Canadian artist Mary Riter Hamilton (1868-1954), art was her life’s passion. Her tale is one of tragedy and adventure, from homestead beginnings, to genteel drawing rooms in Winnipeg, Victoria and Vancouver, to Berlin and Parisian art schools, to Vimy and Ypres, and finally to illness and poverty in old age. No Man’s Land is the first biographical study of Hamilton, whose work can be found in galleries and art museums throughout Canada. Young and McKinnon’s meticulous research in unpublished private collections brings to light new correspondence between Hamilton and her friends, revealing the importance of female networks to an artist’s well being. Her letters from abroad, in particular, bring a woman’s perspective into the immediate post-war period and give voice to trying conditions. Hamilton’s career is situated within the context of her peers Florence Carlyle, Emily Carr, and Sophie Pemberton with whom she shared a Canadian and European experience.
Women Writers in the United States is a celebration of the many forms of work--written and social, tangible and intangible--produced by American women. Davis and West document the variety and volume of women's work in the U.S. in a clear and accessible timeline format. They present information on the full spectrum of women's writing--including fiction, poetry, biography, political manifestos, essays, advice columns,and cookbooks, alongside a chronology of developments in social and cultural history that are especially pertinent to women's lives. This extensive chronology illustrates the diversity of women who have lived and written in the U.S. and creates a sense of the full trajectory of individual careers. A valuable and rich source of information on women's studies, literature, and history, Women Writers in the United States will enable readers to locate familiar and unfamiliar women's texts and to place them in the context out which they emerged.
A fascinating look at Walt Disney’s last, unfinished project and the controversy that surrounded it. It was going to be Disneyland at the top of a mountain. A vacation destination where guests could ski, go ice skating, or be entertained by a Disney Imagineer-created band of Audio-Animatronic bears. In the summer, visitors could fish, camp, hike, or take a scenic chairlift ride to the top of a mountain. It was the Mineral King resort in Southern California, and it was Walt Disney’s final passion project. But there was one major obstacle to Walt’s dream: the growing environmentalist movement of the 1960s. In Disneyland on the Mountain: Walt, the Environmentalists, and the Ski Resort That Never Was, Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer provide an unprecedented look inside the Mineral King saga, from its origins at the 1960 Winter Olympics to the years-long environmental fight that eventually shut the development down. The fight, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, reshaped the environmental movement and helped to put in place long-reaching laws to protect nature. Although the court battle, coupled with Walt’s death in 1966, meant the end for the Mineral King resort, the ideas and planning behind it have permeated throughout the Walt Disney company and the ski tourism industry in ways that are still seen today. With firsthand interviews and behind-the-scenes details, Disneyland on the Mountain offers incredible access to a part of Disney history that hasn’t been thoroughly explored before, including Walt’s love of nature, how the company changed after Walt’s death, and of course, the story of Mineral King. It’s a tale of man versus nature, ambition versus mortality, and how a gang of scrappy environmentalists took on one of America’s most beloved companies.
What is culture and who has the authority to define it? If culture is comprised of hierarchies, who determines what their standards should be, and how? What are the stakes involved in conceiving some forms of culture as good and others as bad? These may sound like questions from late-twentieth-century American culture wars, but they were already in vigorous dispute a century ago. In The Evangelist and the Impresario, Kathryn Oberdeck explores how a broad range of Americans addressed these questions at the vibrant intersection of religion, vaudeville, and class politics at the turn of the twentieth century. The Evangelist and the Impresario focuses on the intriguing careers of two remarkable public figures: Irish-born socialist Alexander Irvine and Italian-American entertainment mogul Sylvester Poli. Using these two characters as "tour guides," Oberdeck leads readers through a period of upheaval in America's intellectual history when religion and entertainment combined to produce critical cultural debate. The narrative follows Irvine's career as Protestant minister, socialist activist, popular author, and vaudeville actor and Poli's success as a theatrical entrepreneur with a circuit of East Coast vaudeville houses. Examining the varied connections the two men made across the Atlantic and the United States, Oberdeck traces the way Irvine drew on the formulas and themes of Poli's entertainment world to develop novel, popular approaches to evangelism and class politics. As both men sought audiences across lines of class as well as race, ethnicity, and gender, the author contends, their careers demonstrate how these intersecting dimensions of social difference informed definitivedebates about cultural standards among ordinary Americans. Irvine, Poli, and their audiences in theater, religion, and working-class politics pondered these differences in ways that helped to reformulate cultural hierarchies of Protestant uplift and Darwinian struggle into concepts of cultural pluralism. Thus, far from simply recounting biographies, Oberdeck traces cultural trajectories, mapping alliances that shaped the careers of two men whose engagement with popular audiences helped to transform intellectual arguments taking place in the twentieth-century public sphere. By charting connections across their converging paths, this stimulating book shows how Irvine, Poli, and the communities they addressed challenged the cultural vocabularies of class distinction in their era. In the process, it reveals how entertainment audiences, trade-unionist church-goers, working-class mothers, and immigrant thespians, along with cultural elites, helped to shape the terms of twentieth-century cultural debate.
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