Herds and Hermits: America's Lone Wolves and Submissive Sheep

As a nation often celebrated for its commitment to independence and fearless individualism, America has at the same time learned to despise, discredit and dismiss the solitary and reclusive mentality. To the contrary, this inquiry is a paean vigorously endorsing America's lone wolves, cultural hermits, and all such solitary, marginalized figures who are the cultural bedrock of the nation that detests them.

Decoding Culture offers a concise and accessible account of the development of cultural studies from the late 1950s to the 1990s. Focusing on the significant theoretical and methodological assumptions that have informed the cultural studies project, Decoding Culture.

This timely and major text reassesses the contemporary practice of cultural studies. In recent years cultural studies perspectives have proliferated through a range of traditional academic disciplines, providing a fertile source of new ideas beyond the sphere of the academy. Simultaneously, cultural studies has itself been subject to critical scrutiny.

The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream

The American Dream is not dead, says Rifkin, but it's showing its years. Contrasting definitively American fantasies of individual autonomy, material wealth, and cultural assimilation with an emerging European vision of community relationships, quality of life, and cultural diversity, Rifkin argues that the great bloodshed of the twentieth century liberated Europeans from their past, better preparing them for global citizenship in the twenty-first century.

At the outset of Jacques Barzun's colossal book From Dawn to Decadence 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, the author admits that when asked by friends how long he has been writing his book, he can only answer-a lifetime. All of Western life and thought can be found somewhere in From Dawn to Decadence. Portraits of Martin Luther, Shakespeare, Descartes, Florence Nightingale and James Joyce jostle alongside snapshots of cities at turning points in history.