Book Reviews

Transfers ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-178

Richard Vahrenkamp, The German Autobahn 1920-1945: Hafraba Visions and Mega Projects Peter MerrimanAlexandra Boutros and Will Straw, Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture Fabian KrögerTed Conover, Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today Rudi VoltiPradeep Thakur, Tata Nano: The People's Car Thomas BirtchnellEmmanuela Scarpellini, Material Nation: A Consumer's History of Modern Italy Massimo MoraglioKuntala lahiri-Dutt and David J. Williams, Moving Pictures: Rickshaw Art of Bangladesh Tracy Nichols BuschPatrick Laviolette, Extreme Landscapes of Leisure: Not a Hap-Hazardous Sport Carroll Pursell

Author(s):  
Alexandra Wilson

La bohème is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world. But how did it come to be so adored? Drawing on an extremely broad range of sources, Alexandra Wilson traces the opera’s rise to global fame. Although the work has been subjected to many hostile critiques, it swiftly achieved popular success through stage performances, recordings, and filmed versions. Wilson demonstrates how La bohème acquired even greater cultural influence as its music and dramatic themes began to be incorporated into pop songs, film soundtracks, musicals, and more. In this cultural history of Puccini’s opera, Wilson offers a fresh reading of a familiar work. La bohème was strikingly modern for the 1890s, she argues, in its approach to musical and dramatic realism and in flouting many of the conventions of the Italian operatic tradition. Considering the work within the context of the aesthetic, social, and political debates of its time, Wilson explores Puccini’s treatment of themes including gender, poverty, and nostalgia. She pays particular attention to La bohème’s representation of Paris, arguing that the opera was not only influenced by romantic mythologies surrounding the city but also helped shape them. Wilson concludes with a consideration of the many and varied approaches directors have taken to the staging of Puccini’s opera, including some that have reinvented the opera for a new age. This book is essential reading for anyone who has seen La bohème and wants to know more about its music, drama, and cultural contexts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. v-vi
Author(s):  
Claudia Mitchell

This Special Issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal represents another milestone in the history of the journal, coming, as it does, out of the second international conference of the International Girls’ Studies Association (IGSA) that was hosted by Notre Dame University, South Bend, Indiana, in 2019. As the guest editors, Angeletta Gourdine, Mary Celeste Kearney, and Shauna Pomerantz highlight in their introduction, the conference itself and the Special Issue set in motion the type of dialogue and conversation that is crucial to challenging and changing the world of inequities and disparities experienced by girls. For a relatively new area of study that has roots in feminism and social change, critical dialogue about inclusion and exclusion and about ongoing reflexivity and questioning must surely be at the heart of girls studies. The guest editors capture this admirably when they replace the question “What is girlhood studies?” with the provocative and generative question, “What can girlhood studies be?” The articles and book reviews in this Special Issue tackle what girls studies could be in so many different ways, ranging from broadening and deepening notions of intersectionality and interdisciplinarity to ensuring a place for the article, “Where are all the Girls and Indigenous People at IGSA@ND?” co-authored by the girls who belong to the Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia group. Such an account offers a meta-analysis of the field of girlhood studies, but so did the call for the Special Issue as a whole. It is commendable that this team of co-editors assembled and curated a series of articles that reveal the very essence of the problematic that girlhood studies seeks to address.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Piitz

This applied thesis is focused on the full cataloguing and contextualizing of a collection of one hundred and sixteen postcards at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) depicting scenes of Toronto a the beginning of the twentieth century. Twenty-seven publishers representing international, national and regional manufacturers are identified with their imprint on the verso of the postcard. The applied thesis includes a literature survey discussing a rationale for the cataloguing of postcards, as well as a brief overview of the history of postcards and the history of the urbanization of the City of Toronto. A description and analysis of the AGO postcards provides information about the production cycle of postcards, the scope of commercial photography and the dissemination of photographic imagery in Toronto. The thesis also examines the way images were altered in the production cycle and the manner in which photographers and publishers exchanged photographs intended for postcard production.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Piitz

This applied thesis is focused on the full cataloguing and contextualizing of a collection of one hundred and sixteen postcards at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) depicting scenes of Toronto a the beginning of the twentieth century. Twenty-seven publishers representing international, national and regional manufacturers are identified with their imprint on the verso of the postcard. The applied thesis includes a literature survey discussing a rationale for the cataloguing of postcards, as well as a brief overview of the history of postcards and the history of the urbanization of the City of Toronto. A description and analysis of the AGO postcards provides information about the production cycle of postcards, the scope of commercial photography and the dissemination of photographic imagery in Toronto. The thesis also examines the way images were altered in the production cycle and the manner in which photographers and publishers exchanged photographs intended for postcard production.


Author(s):  
Liudmila Burtseva ◽  
Svetlana Cojocaru ◽  
Constantin Gaindric ◽  
Galina Magariu ◽  
Tatiana Verlan

In this chapter the authors introduce the digital-divide concept to the reader, bring its different definitions, and describe the short history of the problem. The basic figures and facts, which characterize the information and communication technologies’ usage in different countries and regions, are given as well. Also, basic indicators that allow the monitoring of the country’s advancement on the way to bridging the digital divide are stated. The main purpose for the authors was to show that the digital divide is not only (and not as much) a technical problem, but rather a social and political one. Hence, the approaches to this problem decision, both in the world community as a whole and in separate countries, are described.


2021 ◽  
pp. 389-410
Author(s):  
Anjali Albuquerque ◽  
Neha P Chaudhary ◽  
Gowri G Aragam ◽  
Nina Vasan

Stanford Brainstorm, the world’s first lab for mental health innovation, taps into the combined potential of academia and industry—bridging medicine, technology, and entrepreneurship—to redesign the way the world views, diagnoses, and treats mental illness. Convergence science has facilitated Brainstorm’s emergence as a pivotal protagonist in the history of the mental health innovation field. In turn, Brainstorm has catalyzed innovation within mental health by applying convergent approaches to tackle the scope, immediacy, and impact of mental illness. Stanford Brainstorm’s thinking about mental health represents a shift in the discipline of psychiatry from a focus on one-to-one delivery to collaborative and sustainable solutions for millions.


evacuation of blood occurred at a time when I was in great pain and already despaired of, I might even have died from suppuration. As it was, it was this that saved me, the evacuation of blood. To prove that in this too I am telling the truth, and that I was subjected to illness such as to reduce me to a desperate condition, as a result of the blows I received from these men, read the doctor’s deposition and that of the people who visited me. Depositions [13] So the fact that the blows I received were not slight or insignificant but that I found myself in extreme danger because of the outrageous behaviour and the violence of these people, and so the action I have brought is far less serious than they deserve, this has I think been made clear to you on many counts. And I imagine that some of you are wondering what on earth Konon will dare to say in reply to this. Now I want to warn you about the argument I am informed he has contrived; he will attempt to divert the issue away from the outrage of what was done and reduce it to laughter and ridicule. [14] And he will say that there are many individuals in the city, the sons of decent men, who in the playful manner of young people have given themselves titles, and they call some ‘Ithyphallics’, others ‘Down-and-outs’; that some of them love courtesans and have often suffered and inflicted blows over a courtesan, and that this is the way of young people. As for my brothers and myself, he will misrepresent all of us as drunken and violent but also as unreasonable and vindictive. [15] Personally, judges, though I have been angered by the treatment I have received, my indignation and feeling of having been outraged would be no less, if I may say so, if these statements about us by Konon here are regarded as the truth and your ignorance is such that each man is taken for whatever he claims or his neighbour alleges him to be, and decent men get no benefit at all from their normal life and habits. [16] We have not been seen either drunk or behaving violently by anyone in the world, nor do we think we are behaving unreasonably if we demand to receive satisfaction under the laws for the wrongs done to us. We agree that his sons are ‘Ithyphallics’ and ‘Down-and-outs’, and I for my part pray to the gods that this and all else of the sort may recoil upon Konon and his sons. [17] For these are the men who initiate each other into the rites of Ithyphallos and commit the sort of acts which decent people find it deeply shameful even to speak of, let alone do.

2002 ◽  
pp. 96-96

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-139
Author(s):  
Sharon Zukin

Profiling New York–based venture capitalists and VC firms that have been established in the city since the early 2000s, the chapter examines their risky but privileged perch between Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Interviews with VCs are juxtaposed with the post–World War II history of venture capital as a distinctive form of investment and management. The VCs’ equally distinctive commitment to New York is then contrasted with the increasing geographical dispersal of their investment funds to other regions of the world. Meanwhile, the integration of some corporate and VC members of the tech “community” into New York’s business establishment suggests the formation of a local tech-financial elite, updating C. Wright Mills’s critique of the institutional bases of power.


Author(s):  
Liudmila Burtseva ◽  
Svetlana Cojocaru ◽  
Constantin Gaindric ◽  
Galina Magariu ◽  
Tatiana Verlan

In this chapter the authors introduce the digitaldivide concept to the reader, bring its different definitions, and describe the short history of the problem. The basic figures and facts, which characterize the information and communication technologies’ usage in different countries and regions, are given as well. Also, basic indicators that allow the monitoring of the country’s advancement on the way to bridging the digital divide are stated. The main purpose for the authors was to show that the digital divide is not only (and not as much) a technical problem, but rather a social and political one. Hence, the approaches to this problem decision, both in the world community as a whole and in separate countries, are described.


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