New Books in Popular Culture

Psychedelics are not terribly new. And the drug mescaline is certainly not new. Mike Jay's new book, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (Yale University Press, 2019), tells two trippy stories: one that is about Indigenous use and another about Western society's adoption of the drug in culture and medicine. He discusses perceptions of mescaline in science, culture, and the psychedelic renaissance. The book - and the discussion - is eye-opening.Mike Jay is a freelance writer and public intellectual. He is the author of over a dozen books and regularly contributes to the the London Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal and the Literary Review. He works as a curator and exhibit designer for the Wellcome Trust in London.Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Video games are a significant part of popular entertainment in the twenty-first century. From Words with Friends to Grand Theft Auto, most people spend at least some of their leisure time with video games. In his book, Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music (Oxford University Press, 2018), William Gibbons examines the intersection between video games and classical music. From close readings of the scores of specific games to an analysis of games with characters related to classical music, Gibbons asks what happens when highbrow art meets lowbrow entertainment. Often classical music enhances the visual and storytelling elements of a game by sonically marking characters or situations as wealthy or sophisticated, as also happens in film and TV scores. Gibbons finds unexpected connections and layering of signification as video game scores exploit musical references from sources as far flung as Stanley Kubrick’s films to Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. He ends the book with an account of how orchestras are trying to use the immense popularity of gaming to raise money and attract new audiences by playing concerts of video game music.William Gibbons is an associate professor of musicology and Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Texas Christian University. His research centers on how canonical classical music repertoires function outside their initial time of compositions. In addition to his first book, Building the Operatic Music (University of Rochester Press), he has published numerous journal articles including in American Music, 19th-Century Music Review, and Opera Quarterly, and has co-edited a volume on video game music published in 2014 and another forthcoming later this year both from Routledge Press.Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Academic discussions of ethnic food have tended to focus on the attitudes of consumers, rather than the creators and producers. In this ground-breaking new book, The Ethnic Restaurateur (Bloomsbury, 2016), Krishnendu Ray reverses this trend by exploring the culinary world from the perspective of the ethnic restaurateur.Focusing on New York City, he examines the lived experience, work, memories, and aspirations of immigrants working in the food industry. He shows how migrants become established in new places, creating a taste of home and playing a key role in influencing food cultures as a result of transactions between producers, consumers and commentators.Based on extensive interviews with immigrant restaurateurs and students, chefs and alumni at the Culinary Institute of America, ethnographic observation at immigrant eateries and haute institutional kitchens as well as historical sources such as the US census, newspaper coverage of restaurants, reviews, menus, recipes, and guidebooks, Ray reveals changing tastes in a major American city between the late 19th and through the 20th century.Written by one of the most outstanding scholars in the field, The Ethnic Restaurateur is an essential read for students and academics in food studies, culinary arts, sociology, urban studies and indeed anyone interested in popular culture and cooking in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Howard Philips Smith has been investigating and writing about the gay history of New Orleans for over two decades. Raised on a small farm in rural Southern Mississippi, he studied French literature and taught English in a French lycée in Bordeaux thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship before moving to New Orleans in the 1980s. After a decade in the Crescent City, Smith moved to Los Angeles and completed his novel The Cult of the Mask, based on the experiences of New Orleans’ gay community before the onslaught of AIDS. The research for this work resulted in two books: Unveiling the Muse and Southern Decadence. In this interview, we discuss Unveiling the Muse: The Lost History of Gay Carnival in New Orleans (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) a thorough investigation of the history of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras krewes.Gay Carnival krewes were first formed in New Orleans in the late 1950s, growing out of costume parties. Their balls were often held in clandestine locations to avoid harassment. Despite their rich history and important contribution to the city’s defining festival, gay New Orleans Carnival remained a hidden and almost lost history thanks in part to moments of crisis such as the AIDS epidemic and Hurricane Katrina. In Unveiling the Muse Howard Philips Smith not only recovers the story of these organizations and the fascinating people behind it, but also compiles an impressive collection of information/documents/sources/images that will certainly be extremely useful to those investigating not only the history of New Orleans, but also of festivities and of queer urban experiences across the globe. The book contains a list of all the balls, themes, and royalty of each krewe, along with stunning images of the colorful ephemera associated with the gay Mardi Gras balls: posters, invitations, costume and stage set sketches, and programs. Also of note are the photographs of the everyday lives and celebrations of queer people in the city in the post-World War II era, which help Philips contextualize these stories.Isabel Machado is a Brazilian historian, living and teaching in Mexico while finishing a book about Carnival in Mobile, Alabama. Her new project is an investigation of different generations of artists and performers who challenge gender normativity in Monterrey, Nuevo León. She also works as an Assistant Producer for the Sexing History podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

David Resnick combines two of his passions, movies and education, in his book, Representing Education In Film: How Hollywood Portrays Educational Thought, Settings and Issues (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Films are powerful messengers which both project and reflect particular values, ideas and social behavior. Using many examples of Hollywood movies, Resnick analyzes the way movies perform in a variety of formal and informal educational settings, including sports, arts and religion. In this lively and engaging interview David Resnick shares insights he gained through decades of experience in education and research.Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and television & radio commentator.  Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

This week we take a break from fun and games to talk about business and consumerism–which, to be sure, is for some people also fun and games.As Vicki Howard reminds us in her new book, From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), it used to be that America was filled with department stores. Congenital nostalgics remember places like Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia; they even print books about the big-city department stores of Days Gone By. But that ignores the important place that department stores held in small towns all around the country.Vicki Howard has already written on the history of the wedding industry. Now she and Al Zambone talk about the department store, how they began, what they offered people that hadn’t existed before, and how they were undone by the same forces that created them. Zambone gets a little autobiographical, too, but please forgive him. Enjoy.Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

How and when did Russia become a country of smokers? Why did makhorka and papirosy become ubiquitous products of tobacco consumption? Tricia Starks explores these themes as well as the connections between tobacco, gender, and empire in her latest monograph, Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2018). Starks illustrates how tobacco influenced facets of life, politics, morality, and culture in the 19th century from the perspectives of tobacco users, producers, and objectors. The book includes full-color ads for tobacco and papirosy cigarettes that add to the book’s rich prose. From Tolstoy’s anti-tobacco screed to the “Tobacco Queens” of St. Petersburg, Starks uses primary sources to craft an edifying narrative of the history of tobacco and tobacco consumption in the imperial period.Tricia Starks is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include Russian and Soviet history, public health and the history of medicine, as well as culture and gender.Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In her new book, This Is Really War: The Incredible True Story of a Navy Nurse POW in the Occupied Philippines (Chicago Review Press, 2019), Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi presents the largely unknown story of the US Navy nurses captured by the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II. Focusing on what she calls the “twelve anchors,” Lucchesi examines the lives of these women as they lived in prison camps throughout the Philippines, while at the same time continuing to work as nurses, and often the only medical professionals, in each camp. Focusing on the story of navy nurse Dorothy Still, Lucchesi starts at the attack on Pearl Harbor, chronicling the Japanese attack on the Philippines and the capture of thousands of Americans, including Dorothy. The narrative follows Dorothy, Chief Nurse Laura Cobb, and ten other navy nurses who continued to work in a makeshift hospital in the civilian prison camp they were sent to. Recounting their experiences with death, disease, malnutrition, starvation, and overcrowded conditions, This is Really War, follows these “twelve anchors” during the over two years that they spent imprisoned until the prison camps were liberated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (Dey St. Books, HarperCollins, 2017), Ann Powers explores the rich and, at times, unexpected intersections of love, sex, race, gender, sexuality, and American popular music. This heavily-researched book features colorful stories about sex, eroticism, and American music, while engaging source material in the realms of African American and American history, black feminist and womanist theory, American dance, and more. Good Booty begins in the 19th century in New Orleans’ Congo Square, and it ends with a discussion of Britney Spears and Beyoncé as cyborg and avatar, respectively. In other chapters, Powers engages early 20th-century American music and dance, eroticism in gospel music, sexuality and teen-girl rock and roll fandom, rock groupie culture, popular music in the early years of the AIDS crisis, and more.Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. Her book, Fade to Black: Blues Music and the Art of Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press. She is also a music journalist who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

As my first guest, I’d would like to introduce Susan Brownell, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri – St Louis, one of the authors of The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics (University of California Press, 2018). During the course of the interview, we covered the subfield of sport anthropology, the marginalization of traditional games, the recent Caster Semenya case, and the contemporary transnationalism of sport.In The Anthropology of Sport, understandably, the authors enlighten us about what the subfield entails, how anthropology is well suited to dissect the nature of sport, and provide us with ample anecdotes and observations of the world of sport through an ‘anthropological gaze.’ The chapters are structured in a way that cover all the relevant aspects in the study of sport, including history, class, race/ethnicity, sex/gender, nationalism, and globalization. Two important additions to the field of sport studies include a chapter on sport, health, and the environment (3), as well as sport as a cultural performance (6). In the former, which can be taken as a foundational text on the subject, the history of sport medicine and non-Western perspectives on sport and the body are enlightening, with anecdotes about the history of yoga and the Falun Gong movement. In the latter, the performative turn and ritual theory are used to dissect the contemporary global sport mega-event infrastructure. In conclusion, the authors point out that “more than any other form of human activity, sport embodies some of the fundamental questions that anthropology poses” (258), and this book lives up to its lofty title.Brownell, Besnier, and Carter’s work is a new text in a yet undefined field – it may be the start of something new. If interested in the global nature of sport today, The Anthropology of Sport is a necessary read.Tom Fabian is a PhD candidate at the University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario, Canada) and an assistant professor of sport management at St. Francis Xavier University (Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada). His field, broadly, is the sociocultural history of sport, and he focuses on the globalization of folk games. Specifically, he is interested in the safeguarding of folk games through the UNESCO heritagization process, as well as the trend of adopting traditional games as national sports. Secondary research interests include the histories of the Universiade, volleyball, and Hungarian water polo. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at tfabian@uwo.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture