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Bernays' honest and practical manual provides much insight into some of the most powerful and influential institutions of contemporary industrial state capitalist democracies.--Noam Chomsky
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.--Edward Bernays
A seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought and public relations, Edward Bernays (1891-1995), pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he famously dubbed engineering of consent. During World War I, he was an integral part of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise and sell the war to the American people as one that would Make the World Safe for Democracy. The CPI would become the blueprint in which marketing strategies for future wars would be based upon.
Bernays applied the techniques he had learned in the CPI and, incorporating some of the ideas of Walter Lipmann, as well as his uncle, Sigmund Freud, became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic and corporate manipulation of the population. His 1928 bombshell Propaganda lays out his eerily prescient vision for using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science and education. To read this book today is to frightfully comprehend what our contemporary institutions of government and business have become in regards to organized manipulation of the masses.
Over the past few years, we have witnessed a growing wave of anti-LGBTQ+ bills and policies across the United States. According to the ACLU, in 2023 alone, 507 anti-LGBTQ bills were proposed in 47 states; among these, 84 have been passed into law.
The targets of many of these legislative attacks have been the most vulnerable among us--transgender and LGBTQ+ youth. From Don't Say Gay laws to healthcare restrictions, anti-LGBTQ+ policies are impacting trans and queer youth in almost every sphere of their lives, including the medical care they can access, the sports teams they can play on, what they are allowed to talk about in the classroom, and the books they are allowed to check out from the library. The results of this discrimination are often deadly, with over half of transgender and non-binary youth seriously contemplating suicide, and many others falling victim to violent hate crimes inspired by this hostile climate.
Trans Kids, Our Kids: Stories and Resources from the Frontlines of the Movement for Transgender Youth shares the stories of transgender youth and their families, exploring the choices they are making to survive in today's environment. The book also gives voice to the medical providers who are providing care to transgender youth, as well as the activists, teachers and faith leaders who are leading the resistance efforts.
By contextualizing and sharing these stories, as well as offering resources and next steps, Trans Kids aims to both narrativize the pain and fear experienced by everyday Americans in this cultural moment, as well as highlighting the courage, hope, and resilience of transgender and LGBTQ+ youth, their families, and the people who support them.
Doublespeak is the language of non-responsibility, carefully constructed to appear to communicate when it fact it doesn't. In this lively and eye-opening expose, originally published in 1989, linguist William Lutz identifies the four most common types of doublespeak--euphemism, jargon, gobbledygook or bureaucratese, and inflated language--showing how each is used in business, advertising, medicine, government, and the military. In this seminal book, Lutz articulates that the goal of doublespeak is to distort reality and corrupt thought.
There was a book. Oh man was there a book. It is still to this day a book I mention it to any book lover if asked for a recommendation. The best books stick with you, often reminding you of the power, and potential, of storytelling, and House of Leaves is one of those books.--Michael Seidlinger, in this Bookmarked volume on Mark Z. Danielweski's classic of experimental contemporary literature, House of Leaves.
Michael J. Seidlinger is the author of several novels, including Falter Kingdom, The Strangest, The Fun We've Had, and The Laughter of Strangers. He serves as Electric Literature's Book Reviews Editor, as well as Publisher-in-Chief of Civil Coping Mechanisms, an indie press specializing in innovative fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He's coping.
Sissy is used to being on the outside. The new kid at school, in the West Country of England, she observes the other girls like they're foreign creatures. At home, her troubled mother lets Sissy fend for herself.
But after Sissy fights a boy in the playground one day at school, she's no longer alone. Thrown into a secret friendship with the charismatic, apparently fearless, Tegan, the unlikely pair grow so close they feel like one being, wrapped around each in bed at sleepovers, sending photographs to men they meet in the online chat rooms of the 1990s, and scaring each other with reports of the girls being snatched at night in their small town.
On the precipice of girlhood, Sissy learns there's danger in both being desired and desiring too much. As past traumas return to haunt her and Tegan, and present-day threats circle ever closer, growing up seems like the only way out. But a ritual to beckon their womanhood has unintended consequences. In its aftermath, as Sissy's make believe world bleeds into her daily life, she feels her body transforming into something strange and terrifying.
With deft notes of magical realism and a constant psychological acuity, Amphibian is a tender, haunting coming-of-age debut, about desire, precocity and the intensity of early friendships that have the power to upend our lives.
Nicknamed the father of public relations, Edward Bernays (1891-1995) was a pioneer in the fields of propaganda and PR. Combining theories on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays elucidated how corporations and politicians could manipulate public opinion. His seminal 1928 book, Propaganda laid out how propaganda could be used to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science and education, while his 1923 classic, Crystallizing Public Opinion, set down the principles that business and government have used to influence public attitudes over the past century.
The Edward Bernays Reader: From Propaganda to the Engineering of Consent, is the first comprehensive volume of the writings of this influential and controversial figure. In addition to featuring extended excerpts from Crystallizing Public Opinion and Propaganda, this book also includes the full text of Bernays' classic 1947 essay, The Engineering of Consent, on the application of scientific principles and practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs, as well as extensive selections of his other writings on subjects including education, war propaganda, and polling. Taken together, the material in this book offers the most complete look to date at the work of a man whose ideas are considered the single most important influence on modern propaganda, public relations, and spin.
Winner of the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction
Winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature
In one of Chekhov's stories, a character says that every happy man should have someone who taps at his door with a little hammer, reminding him that there are unhappy people in the world. Reading Celeste Mohammed's novel-in-stories makes me think of that magical little tap - except that the door opens not to a vision of unhappiness, but to a world crammed with life that you never knew existed.-Claire Adam
The residents of Pleasantview come to vivid light in this extraordinary debut from Celeste Mohammed. Each slice of life in this Trinidadian village cuts clean to the bone, revealing how people are both complicated and complicit in the way we break each other's hearts and bodies. From the riveting opening to the aching end, Mohammed's gift for giving voice to each character is glorious.-Tracey Baptiste
As James Joyce did for Dublin, Celeste Mohamed holds up a polished mirror to the inhabitants of the fictitious Trinidadian town of Pleasantview and dares the reader to take an unflinching look at a multi-ethnic society that is vibrant and joyous but riddled with corruption and the exploitation of women, the young, and the vulnerable. Mohamed's writing is smart, funny, and enlivened by everyday Trinidadian vernacular, creating rich and lively portraits of a range of Trini characters. A formidable debut, Pleasantview's razor-sharp observations of misogyny and the abuse of power are leavened by humor and a pitch-perfect ear for the language of human.-Tony Eprile
Pleasantviewoffers the reader a sharp and fearless view of the dark underbelly of life in Trinidad, filled with unforgettable characters that we meet in do-or-die situations. Marked by male violence, political underhandedness, and economic desperation, Pleasantview also demonstrates Mohamed's remarkable range as a writer as she moves seamlessly from callousness to tenderness, humor to sorrow, lyricism to minimalism in work that lingers in the reader's mind long after the final page. This is a thrilling debut.-Laurie Foos
These stories are full of unexpected twists and connections and infused with humour. They herald the arrival of an intriguing new voice.-Ingrid Persaud
Celeste Mohamed forces you to travel with her characters. You see their lives and their world as they do, on foot. You walk in her characters' shoes. Mohamed is a skillful storyteller, so the journey educates and exhilarates you, Mohamed invents a clear, crackling town/district, Pleasantview, a bustling, hustling side of Trinidad, where few of us have ever been, or will ever go. Pleasantview forces us to look at how we behave when uncontained, when unconstrained, when our lack of morality unmoors us.-A.J. Verdelle
Coconut trees. Carnival. Rum and coke. To many outsiders, these idyllic images represent the so-called easy life in Caribbean nations such as Trinidad and Tobago. However, the reality is far different for those who live there-a society where poverty and patriarchy savagely rule, and where love and revenge often go hand in hand.
Written in a combination of English and Trinidad Creole, Pleasantview reveals the dark side of the Caribbean dream. In this novel-in-stories about a fictional town in Trinidad, we meet a political candidate who sets out to slaughter endangered turtles for fun, while his rival candidate beats his outside woman so badly she ends up losing their baby. On the night of a political rally, the abused woman exacts a very public revenge, the trajectory of which echoes through Pleasantview, ending with
One of the best books around for demystifying the deliberately mysterious arts of advertising.--Salon
Fascinating, entertaining and thought-stimulating.--The New York Times Book Review
A brisk, authoritative and frightening report on how manufacturers, fundraisers and politicians are attempting to turn the American mind into a kind of catatonic dough that will buy, give or vote at their command--The New Yorker
Originally published in 1957 and now back in print to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, The Hidden Persuaders is Vance Packard's pioneering and prescient work revealing how advertisers use psychological methods to tap into our unconscious desires in order to persuade us to buy the products they are selling.
A classic examination of how our thoughts and feelings are manipulated by business, media and politicians, The Hidden Persuaders was the first book to expose the hidden world of motivation research, the psychological technique that advertisers use to probe our minds in order to control our actions as consumers. Through analysis of products, political campaigns and television programs of the 1950s, Packard shows how the insidious manipulation practices that have come to dominate today's corporate-driven world began. Featuring an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller, The Hidden Persuaders has sold over one million copies, and forever changed the way we look at the world of advertising.
Vance Packard (1914-1996) was an American journalist, social critic, and best-selling author. Among his other books were The Status Seekers, which described American social stratification and behavior, The Waste Makers, which criticizes planned obsolescence, and The Naked Society, about the threats to privacy posed by new technologies.
Brilliantly addressing issues such as class struggle, female friendship, women's autonomy, and literary creation itself, Ferrante's hyperrealist, intense storytelling is a saga of a highly specific place and history, yet somehow also transcends them, resonating on profoundly personal levels with readers of every background.
Gina Frangello grew up in poverty in inner-city Chicago two decades after Ferrante's most famous characters, Lenu and Lila grew up in Naples. Despite these geographic and cultural differences, Frangello felt that Ferrante was writing about my youth, my life, my relationships, my struggles.
In the latest volume in the Bookmarked series, Gina Frangello contemplates Ferrante's Neapolitan novels through the lens of memoir, literary criticism, and issues of authorial identity and gender. Should who Ferrante is matter? And more importantly, what is it about Lenu and Lila's story that taps into such universal truths that makes readers feel that Ferrante is writing specifically to them?
Compelling, shocking, and gritty with intrigue.--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A real eye-opener that questions how well the country's security is being protected.--Kirkus (starred review)
In an analysis of five hundred terrorism-related cases brought since September 11th, the journalist Trevor Aaronson found that nearly half of them involved a confidential informant. In some cases, the threat posed by the target was remote.--Evan Osnos, The New Yorker
The Terror Factory is a well-researched and fast-paced exposé of the dubious tactics the FBI has used in targeting Muslim Americans with sting operations since 2001.--Michael German, Reason
A groundbreaking work of investigative journalism into the FBI's questionable counterterroism tactics, The Terror Factory exposes how the Bureau built a network of more than 15,000 informants after 9/11 whose primary purpose was to infiltrate Muslim communities to create and facilitate phony terrorist plots so that the Bureau could then claim it was winning the war on terror.
This tenth anniversary edition of The Terror Factory further updates the activities of the FBI over the past decade, focusing on the Justice Department's prosecution of hundreds of defendants on international terrorism charges that emerged from FBI stings. In many of these stings, informants or undercover agents provided all the money and weapons for the terrorist plot, and sometimes even the ideas -- raising significant questions about whether any of these people would have committed crimes were it not for the FBI's encouragement. This new edition of the book also examines how the FBI is assigning informants to infiltrate right-wing groups, in order to expand the Bureau's counterrorism program beyond Muslim Americans.
He was the most important scholar of privacy since Louis Brandeis.--Jeffrey Rosen
In defining privacy as the claim of individuals...to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them is communicated, Alan Westin's 1967 classic Privacy and Freedom laid the philosophical groundwork for the current debates about technology and personal freedom, and is considered a foundational text in the field of privacy law.
By arguing that citizens retained control over how their personal data was used, Westin redefined privacy as an individual freedom, taking Justice Louis Brandeis' 19th century definition of privacy as a legal right and expanding it for use in modern times. Westin's ideas transformed the meaning of privacy, leading to a spate of privacy laws in the 1970s, as well as prefiguring the arguments over privacy that have come to dominate the internet era. This all new edition of Privacy and Freedom features an introduction by Daniel J. Solove, John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School.
There is no collective bargaining without the strike. Joe Burns' Strike Back helps awaken the labor movement to our collective power. This book belongs in the hands of every unionist who wants to build power for working people through militant grassroots activism. --SARA NELSON, President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO
During the 1960s and 1970s, teachers, police, firefighters, sanitation workers and many other public employees rose up to demand collective bargaining rights in one of the greatest upsurges in labor history. These workers were able to transform the nature of public employment, winning union recognition for millions and ultimately forcing reluctant politicians to pass laws allowing for collective bargaining and even the right to strike. Strike Back uncovers this history of militancy to provide tactics for a new generation of public employees facing unprecedented attacks on their labor rights.
This newly updated edition discusses many significant recent developments for public employee unions, including the Supreme Court decision in Janus and the 2018 teacher strike wave. Featuring a foreword by Eric Blanc, author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers' Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics.
There are several competing brands on the store shelf. What will cause the shopper to purchase one product over another? Is it the brand name, the brand-identifying image, the design of the package, the color, or ads about the product that the consumer might have seen? In this 1959 classic, Cheskin answers these and many other questions by presenting his insights into human motivation as expressed in purchasing decisions. Bringing psychological insights to bear on market research, Cheskin shows how motivations that can indicate acceptance and value of brands, along with packaging, are the bearers of meaning for products. By investigating these deep connections, Cheskin demonstrates how marketers can effectively position products for sale in the marketplace.
Louis Cheskin (1907-1981) was a marketing innovator who observed that people's perceptions of products were directly related to aesthetic design. Cheskin discovered that most people make unconscious assessments of a product based on secondary sensory input associated with the product, such as its color or shape, which contribute to a general impression which he called sensation transference. This concept revolutionized advertising and marketing.
Genuine, unrestrained musings, both political and personal, on life as a Black woman in contemporary America...A highly rewarding, commiserating nod as well as an astute rallying cry.--KIRKUS (starred review)
Concise essays that clearly convey that the fight for racial justice must continue in the face of backlash. A must-purchase for all collections.--LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)
Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me And Has Failed is imbued with the same kind of unapologetic, raw and unflinching honesty as McLarin's previous work, which makes it a welcome and timely read. McLarin wrangles boldly with topics such as aging and anti-Blackness, and in these essays I feel seen at a time when we--Black women approaching sixty and beyond--feel invisible, and/or seen in the worst possible light. --DEESHA PHILYAW, author, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
These essays are a wake-up call. A call to arms. A collective North Star. This is the voice of a Black woman writer who knows who she is. A writer who speaks in a voice perfect for this moment when we are simultaneously all falling down and being lifted to new heights.--MARITA GOLDEN, author, The New Black Woman: Loves Herself, Has Boundaries, Heals Every Day
The Black female body in peril, a gun purchased in response to the surge of white nationalism, the loss of racial innocence--the cumulative effect of these and the other essays in this provocative, exquisite collection confirms two things: there are prophets among us whom we ignore at our peril, and the spirit of Baldwin lives on. And for anyone familiar with McLarin's work, you will find in Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me And Has Failed confirmation of this too: her assessments of America's social landscape remain as powerful as the love she holds for her family, her friends, and her race. --JERALD WALKER, author, How To Make A Slave and Other Essays, finalist for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction
...come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
―from Lucille Clifton, won't you celebrate with me.
What does periracial mean? It's a word I made up while casting about for a way to capture both the chronic nature of structural injustice and inequity of America and my own weariness. A way to label life under that particular tooth in the zipper of interlocking systems of oppression bell hooks called imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. (What a lot to resist. No wonder we're so tired!) To capture the endless cycle of progress and backlash which has shaped my one small life here in America during the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. To counter the idea―now largely abandoned but innocently believed for most of my adult life by white Americans on both ends of the political spectrum― that America has ever been post-racial. To suggest that I suspect, at this sad rate, we never will be.―Kim McLarin, on the meaning of Periracial
With accumulated wisdom and sharp-eyed clarity, Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me And Has Failed addresses the joys and hardships of being an older Black woman in contemporary, periracial America. Award-winning author Kim McLarin utilizes deeply personal experiences to illuminate the pain and power of aging, Blackness and feminism, in the process capturing the endless cycle of progress and backlash that has long shaped race and gender.
At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf is the story of a twelve-year-old Parisian Jewish girl in World War II France, living in hiding as a Catholic orphan with a family in a small village.
When Danielle Marton's father is killed during the early days of the German Occupation, her mother sends her to live in a quiet farming town near Limoges in Vichy France. Now called Marie-Jeanne Chantier, Danielle struggles to balance the truth of what's happened to her family and her country with the lies she must tell to keep herself safe. At first, she's bitter about being left behind by her mother, and horrified at having to milk the cow and memorize Catholic prayers for church. But as the years pass and the Occupation worsens, Danielle finds it easier to suppress her former life entirely, and Marie-Jeanne becomes less and less of an act. By the time she's fifteen and there is talk amongst the now divided town of an Allied invasion, not only has Danielle lost the memories of her father's face and the smell of her mother's perfume, but her very self, transforming into a strict Catholic and an anti-Semitic, fervent disciple of fascism.
An exposé of the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals, The Waste Makers is Vance Packard's pioneering 1960 work on how the rapid growth of disposable consumer goods was degrading the environmental, financial, and spiritual character of American society.
The Waste Makers was the first book to probe the increasing commercialization of American life-the development of consumption for consumption's sake. Packard outlines the ways manufacturers and advertisers persuade consumers to buy things they don't need and didn't know they wanted, including the two-of-a-kind of everything syndrome-two refrigerators in every home-and appeals to purchase something because it is more expensive, or because it is painted in a new color. The book also brought attention to the concept of planned obsolescence, in which a death date is built into products so that they wear out quickly and need to be replaced. By manipulating the public into mindless consumerism, Packard believed that business was making us more wasteful, imprudent, and carefree in our consuming habits, which was using up our natural resources at an alarming rate.
A prescient book that predicted the rise of American consumer culture, this all new edition of The Waste Makers features an introduction by best-selling author Bill McKibben.
Vance Packard (1914-1996) was an American journalist, social critic, and best-selling author. Among his other books were The Hidden Persuaders, about how advertisers use psychological methods to get people to buy the products they sell; The Status Seekers, which describes American social stratification and behavior; and The Naked Society, about the threats to privacy posed by new technologies.
With its openly bleeding heart and philosopher's spirit, the odd and undeniably affecting Ghostlove explores ways in which we haunt ourselves.--Paul Tremblay, New York Times Book Review
...a grave yet hilarious meditation on insanity, depression, companionship, and leaving everything behind.--Publishers Weekly
This is a ghost story of the highest order. A spellbinding work that isn't afraid to examine the wonderful, terrifying, and beautiful vulnerability of the human experience. --Seth Fried, author of The Municipalists and The Great Frustration
William Rook is an occultist living in a haunted brownstone in upstate New York. There he has encountered many marvelous and confusing occurrences: an ever-shifting bloodstain on his study floor; his own cynical doppelgänger; a three-winged pigeon; and, most importantly, June, the ghost living in his bedroom. June is everything William has hoped to find--by turns playful and serious, petulant and flirtatious. But she is also secretive and sad, trapped in a hopeless limbo, her past a mystery she won't reveal. William becomes determined to help her, engaging daily in a series of experiments, rituals, and spells. But success means letting June move on, and the more William learns of her past and present, the less sure he is that he's ready to let her go.
Timely exposé of Russia's vast disinformation campaign from a Finnish journalist persecuted for her persistent reporting of its brazen abuses...a damning portrait of Putin and his autocratic, manipulative regime.--Kirkus
Jessikka Aro has written a frightening and fascinating book, chronicling Russian information warfare in irrefutable detail. Exposing Putin's trolls is dangerous, vital, and ultimately heroic work.--Anne-Marie Slaughter
By exposing Putin's institutionalized trolling operations Jessikka Aro has gone where no one has had the courage to go before and has done so at great peril. Ms. Aro has done the world a huge service by showing us how these tactics work so we can better defend ourselves going forward.--Bill Browder
An important book for those who want to understand the complex and confusing ways reality is manufactured in the digital era. Aro's story shines a bright light on the dark world of online information manipulation operations that can upend the lives of individuals and the health of democracies.--Liz Wahl
A chilling account of Russian information warfare, Putin's Trolls exposes the individuals and organizations behind the Kremlin's coordinated, military-style social media operations against the West.
In this courageous and unflinching book, award-winning journalist Jessikka Aro interweaves her own dramatic story as a target of Russian social media propaganda with accounts from many internationally known critics of the Kremlin, who share their own stories of being targeted by Russia's multifaceted cyber warfare campaigns. As Jessikka began to investigate the impact of the Kremlin's troll operations outside of Russia, she learned that private citizens in many other countries were being victimized by Kremlin-designed information campaigns. These actions were frequently conducted through an organized troll factory led by Russia's security and intelligence apparatus, using unregulated social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Many of the disinformation campaigns were centered around the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent occupation of the Crimean Peninsula.