This original and engaging work chronicles the social history of the perception of feminine beauty in America from the fashionable pallor (occasionally... induced by doses of arsenic) of the antebellum years to the debut of bare limbs in Atlantic City in 1921 and the impact of Hollywood stars since the 1940s. With meticulous research Lois Banner charts the shifting models of American beauty: the Steel-Engraving Lady, ethereal and submissive with her oval face and heart-shaped mouth; the Voluptuous Woman; the boyish Soubrette; the Gibson Girls and the advance of naturalness; the great and small revolutions of taste and decorum that express not only changing ideals of beauty but the currents of American society itself.

On a typical suburban street in a typical suburban town,there is an ordinary family living the American dream. But look closer. Lester Burnham's wife,... Carolyn, regards him with contempt, his daughter, Jane, thinks he's a loser, and his boss is positioning him for the ax. Captivated by Jane's sultry high school friend Angela, Lester decides to make a few changes in his mere existence—changes that are less mid-life crisis than a life reclaimed.The freer he gets, the happier he gets, which is even more maddening to his wife and daughter. Complicating matters, Lester finds an unexpected ally in Ricky, the teenage son of the new next-door neighbors, who sees life through a camera lens that has lately focused on Jane Burnham. In pursuit of his new vision of the American dream, Lester is about to learn that the ultimate freedom comes at the ultimate price. The 1999 winner of five Academy Awards®, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, American Beauty boasts an accomplished cast led by two-time Academy Award® Best Actor winner Kevin Spacey (The Usual Suspects) and Oscar® nominee Annette Bening (The Grifters).The ensemble cast also includes Thora Birch (Ghost World),Wes Bentley (The Claim), Mena Suvari (American Pie),Peter Gallagher (Mr. Deeds), Allison Janney (NBC's The West Wing), Scott Bakula (NBC's Quantum Leap), Sam Robards (A.I.: Artificial Intelligence), and Chris Cooper (Adaptation). American Beauty marks the feature film directorial debut of award-winning theater director Sam Mendes (The Blue Room, Cabaret). The film is produced by Dan Jinks (Nothing to Lose) and Bruce Cohen (The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas) from an original screenplay by Alan Ball (HBO's Six Feet Under). Stan Wlodkowski (One Hour Photo) and Alan Ball are the co-producers.

During the last Ice Age, a thousand-mile-wide land bridge connected Siberia and Alaska, creating the region known as Beringia. Over twelve thousand... years ago, a procession of large mammals and the humans who hunted them crossed this bridge to America. Much of the Russian evidence for this migration has until now remained largely inaccessible to American scholars. American Beginnings brings together for the first time in one volume the most up-to-date archaeological and palaeoecological evidence on Beringia from both Russia and America."An invaluable resource. . . . It will no doubt remain the key reference book for Beringia for many years to come."—Steven Mithen, Journal of Human Evolution"Extraordinary. The fifty-six contributors . . . represent the most prominent American and Russian researchers in the region."—Choice"Publication of this well-illustrated compendium is a great service to early American and especially Siberian Upper Paleolithic archaeology."—Nicholas Saunders, New Scientist"This is a great book . . . perhaps the greatest contribution to the archaeology of Beringia that has yet been published. . . . This is the kind of book to which archaeology should aspire."—Herbert D.G. Maschner, Antiquity

Jin Wang starts at a new school where he’s the only Chinese-American student. When a boy from Taiwan joins his class, Jin doesn’t want to be... associated with an FOB like him. Jin just wants to be an all-American boy, because he’s in love with an all-American girl. Danny is an all-American boy: great at basketball, popular with the girls. But his obnoxious Chinese cousin Chin-Kee’s annual visit is such a disaster that it ruins Danny’s reputation at school, leaving him with no choice but to transfer somewhere he can start all over again. The Monkey King has lived for thousands of years and mastered the arts of kung fu and the heavenly disciplines. He’s ready to join the ranks of the immortal gods in heaven. But there’s no place in heaven for a monkey. Each of these characters cannot help himself alone, but how can they possibly help each other? They’re going to have to find a way—if they want fix the disasters their lives have become. American Born Chinese is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature, the winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, an Eisner Award nominee for Best Coloring and a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

A tour-de-force by rising indy comics star Gene Yang, American Born Chinese tells the story of three apparently unrelated characters: Jin Wang, who... moves to a new neighborhood with his family only to discover that he’s the only Chinese-American student at his new school; the powerful Monkey King, subject of one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables; and Chin-Kee, a personification of the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, who is ruining his cousin Danny’s life with his yearly visits. Their lives and stories come together with an unexpected twist in this action-packed modern fable. American Born Chinese is an amazing ride, all the way up to the astonishing climax. American Born Chinese is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature, the winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, an Eisner Award nominee for Best Coloring and a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

A tour-de-force by rising indy comics star Gene Yang, American Born Chinese tells the story of three apparently unrelated characters: Jin Wang, who... moves to a new neighborhood with his family only to discover that he’s the only Chinese-American student at his new school; the powerful Monkey King, subject of one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables; and Chin-Kee, a personification of the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, who is ruining his cousin Danny’s life with his yearly visits. Their lives and stories come together with an unexpected twist in this action-packed modern fable. American Born Chinese is an amazing ride, all the way up to the astonishing climax. American Born Chinese is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature, the winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, an Eisner Award nominee for Best Coloring and a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Esquire Top 9 Books of the YearMidwest Booksellers Choice Award FinalistBooklist Editor's Choice 2011 Best BookPublishers Weekly 20 Top Indie Sleeper... HitsWBEZ Chicago Top 10 Books of 2011We were exposed to these phenomena in order that we might learn something, but of course the lessons we learn are not always those we are taught . . .So begins Matthew Garth’s story of the fall of 1962, when the shooting of a young woman on Thanksgiving Day sets off a chain of unsettling events in Willow Falls, Minnesota. Matthew first sees Louisa Lindahl in Dr. Dunbar’s home office, and at the time her bullet wound makes nearly as strong an impression as her unclothed body. Fueled over the following weeks by his feverish longing for this mysterious woman—as well as by a deep desire for the comfort and affluence that appears to surround the Dunbars—Matthew finds himself drawn into a series of confrontations he never expected, the results of which will change his life irrevocably and give lie to his version of the American dream.Immersive, heartbreaking, and richly evocative of time and place, this long-awaited new novel marks the return of a great American storyteller.

It is a tale as familiar as our history primers: A deranged actor, John Wilkes Booth, killed Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre, escaped on foot, and... eluded capture for twelve days until he met his fiery end in a Virginia tobacco barn. In the national hysteria that followed, eight others were arrested and tried; four of those were executed, four imprisoned. Therein lie all the classic elements of a great thriller. But the untold tale is even more fascinating.Now, in American Brutus, Michael W. Kauffman, one of the foremost Lincoln assassination authorities, takes familiar history to a deeper level, offering an unprecedented, authoritative account of the Lincoln murder conspiracy. Working from a staggering array of archival sources and new research, Kauffman sheds new light on the background and motives of John Wilkes Booth, the mechanics of his plot to topple the Union government, and the trials and fates of the conspirators.Piece by piece, Kauffman explains and corrects common misperceptions and analyzes the political motivation behind Booth’s plan to unseat Lincoln, in whom the assassin saw a treacherous autocrat, “an American Caesar.” In preparing his study, Kauffman spared no effort getting at the truth: He even lived in Booth’s house, and re-created key parts of Booth’s escape. Thanks to Kauffman’s discoveries, readers will have a new understanding of this defining event in our nation’s history, and they will come to see how public sentiment about Booth at the time of the assassination and ever since has made an accurate account of his actions and motives next to impossible–until now.In nearly 140 years there has been an overwhelming body of literature on the Lincoln assassination, much of it incomplete and oftentimes contradictory. In American Brutus, Kauffman finally makes sense of an incident whose causes and effects reverberate to this day. Provocative, absorbing, utterly cogent, at times controversial, this will become the definitive text on a watershed event in American history.From the Hardcover edition.

A classic tragedy, American Buffalo is a story of three men struggling in the pursuit of their distorted vision of the American Dream. By turns touching... and cynical, poignant and violent, American Buffalo is a piercing story of how people can be corrupted into betraying their ideals and those they love.

Drama / Characters: 3 maleScenery: InteriorBest American Play, New York Drama Critics' Circle Award during the 1976-77 season, this volatile drama... starred Robert Duvall in the original Broadway production and has seen revivals with Al Pacino and most recently on Broadway with John Leguizamo in 2008. In a Chicago junk shop three small time crooks plot to rob a man of his coin collection, the showpiece of which is a valuable "Buffalo nickel". These high-minded grifters fancy themselves businessmen pursuing legitimate free enterprise. But the reality of the three- Donny, the oafish junk shop owner; Bobby, a young junkie Donny has taken under his wing and "Teach", a violently paranoid braggart- is that they are merely pawns caught up in their own game of last-chance, dead-end, empty pipe dreams. "Gripping drama"-The New York Times "Mamet is an actor's playwright...[He] senses the possibilities inarticulateness affords a savvy actor."-Women's Wear Daily "It isn't often that a play with a dramatic intensity of American Buffalo comes to the Broadway theatre."-New York Post

"In American Busboy, a wry anti-mythology, the anti-hero busboy in an anonymous Clam Shack! tangles with the monotonous delirium of work, the... indignities and poor pay of unskilled labor, the capricious deus ex machina of mean-spirited middle management, the zombified consumption of summer tourists, while jostling for the goddess-like attentions of waitresses and hostesses-all battered up in sizzlingly crisp wit and language, and deep-fried in a shiny glaze of surrealism." -Lee Ann Roripaugh

Most people believe that large corporations wield enormous political power when they lobby for policies as a cohesive bloc. With this controversial... book, Mark A. Smith sets conventional wisdom on its head. In a systematic analysis of postwar lawmaking, Smith reveals that business loses in legislative battles unless it has public backing. This surprising conclusion holds because the types of issues that lead businesses to band together—such as tax rates, air pollution, and product liability—also receive the most media attention. The ensuing debates give citizens the information they need to hold their representatives accountable and make elections a choice between contrasting policy programs.Rather than succumbing to corporate America, Smith argues, representatives paradoxically become more responsive to their constituents when facing a united corporate front. Corporations gain the most influence over legislation when they work with organizations such as think tanks to shape Americans' beliefs about what government should and should not do.

In this expanded and revised edition of American Businesses in China, the authors provide readers with a close understanding of the breathtaking... technological and cultural evolution of 21st century China. After several decades of economic globalization, the Chinese have emerged as quite successful in their economic relationships with the West despite several ideological differences.Case studies of American businesses that have been successful in China also include a new chapter detailing American corporate participation in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Reflecting upon the changing nature of Chinese consumerism and international corporate behavior, the authors close with specific suggestions for those interested in doing business in China.

It s safe to say that since the first appearance of Thomas McCraw s contribution to Harlan Davidson s American History Series in 2000, American business... has taken some of the most dramatic, perhaps most incredible, turns in its history.Far more than an update, the second edition of one of our most popular texts has been carefully revised and reorganized not only to include necessary new coverage but to present more fully and forcefully the book s central argument and major themes, making this new edition even more teachable for instructors and accessible to student readers.Unique in the market for its breadth of coverage and depth of analysis, the new edition of our uncommonly readable book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas K. McCraw will continue as a classic supplementary text in a variety of undergraduate as well as graduate courses and seminars.Featuring three banks of striking photographs and a completely up-to-date bibliographic essay, this compact, enjoyable work will be highly appreciated by all students of U.S. business history and the art of administration.