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Unbuttoning America: A Biography of "Peyton Place"
by Ardis CameronPublished in 1956, Peyton Place became a bestseller and a literary phenomenon. A lurid and gripping story of murder, incest, female desire, and social injustice, it was consumed as avidly by readers as it was condemned by critics and the clergy. Its author, Grace Metalious, a housewife who grew up in poverty in a New Hampshire mill town and had aspired to be a writer from childhood, loosely based the novel's setting, characters, and incidents on real-life places, people, and events. The novel sold more than 30 million copies in hardcover and paperback, and it was adapted into a hit Hollywood film in 1957 and a popular television series that aired from 1964 to 1969. More than half a century later, the term "Peyton Place" is still in circulation as a code for a community harboring sordid secrets.In Unbuttoning America, Ardis Cameron mines extensive interviews, fan letters, and archival materials including contemporary cartoons and cover images from film posters and foreign editions to tell how the story of a patricide in a small New England village circulated over time and became a cultural phenomenon. She argues that Peyton Place, with its frank discussions of poverty, sexuality, class and ethnic discrimination, and small-town hypocrisy, was more than a tawdry potboiler. Metalious's depiction of how her three central female characters come to terms with their identity as women and sexual beings anticipated second-wave feminism. More broadly, Cameron asserts, the novel was also part of a larger postwar struggle over belonging and recognition. Fictionalizing contemporary realities, Metalious pushed to the surface the hidden talk and secret rebellions of a generation no longer willing to ignore the disparities and domestic constraints of Cold War America.
Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability (Graphic Medicine #18)
by Scott T. Smith José AlanizSuperhero comics reckon with issues of corporeal control. And while they commonly deal in characters of exceptional or superhuman ability, they have also shown an increasing attention and sensitivity to diverse forms of disability, both physical and cognitive. The essays in this collection reveal how the superhero genre, in fusing fantasy with realism, provides a visual forum for engaging with issues of disability and intersectional identity (race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality) and helps to imagine different ways of being in the world.Working from the premise that the theoretical mode of the uncanny, with its interest in what is simultaneously known and unknown, ordinary and extraordinary, opens new ways to think about categories and markers of identity, Uncanny Bodies explores how continuums of ability in superhero comics can reflect, resist, or reevaluate broader cultural conceptions about disability. The chapters focus on lesser-known characters—such as Echo, Omega the Unknown, and the Silver Scorpion—as well as the famous Barbara Gordon and the protagonist of the acclaimed series Hawkeye, whose superheroic uncanniness provides a counterpoint to constructs of normalcy. Several essays explore how superhero comics can provide a vocabulary and discourse for conceptualizing disability more broadly. Thoughtful and challenging, this eye-opening examination of superhero comics breaks new ground in disability studies and scholarship in popular culture.In addition to the editors, the contributors are Sarah Bowden, Charlie Christie, Sarah Gibbons, Andrew Godfrey-Meers, Marit Hanson, Charles Hatfield, Naja Later, Lauren O’Connor, Daniel J. O'Rourke, Daniel Pinti, Lauranne Poharec, and Deleasa Randall-Griffiths.
Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability (Graphic Medicine)
by Scott T. Smith José AlanizSuperhero comics reckon with issues of corporeal control. And while they commonly deal in characters of exceptional or superhuman ability, they have also shown an increasing attention and sensitivity to diverse forms of disability, both physical and cognitive. The essays in this collection reveal how the superhero genre, in fusing fantasy with realism, provides a visual forum for engaging with issues of disability and intersectional identity (race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality) and helps to imagine different ways of being in the world.Working from the premise that the theoretical mode of the uncanny, with its interest in what is simultaneously known and unknown, ordinary and extraordinary, opens new ways to think about categories and markers of identity, Uncanny Bodies explores how continuums of ability in superhero comics can reflect, resist, or reevaluate broader cultural conceptions about disability. The chapters focus on lesser-known characters—such as Echo, Omega the Unknown, and the Silver Scorpion—as well as the famous Barbara Gordon and the protagonist of the acclaimed series Hawkeye, whose superheroic uncanniness provides a counterpoint to constructs of normalcy. Several essays explore how superhero comics can provide a vocabulary and discourse for conceptualizing disability more broadly. Thoughtful and challenging, this eye-opening examination of superhero comics breaks new ground in disability studies and scholarship in popular culture.In addition to the editors, the contributors are Sarah Bowden, Charlie Christie, Sarah Gibbons, Andrew Godfrey-Meers, Marit Hanson, Charles Hatfield, Naja Later, Lauren O’Connor, Daniel J. O'Rourke, Daniel Pinti, Lauranne Poharec, and Deleasa Randall-Griffiths.
Uncanny Fairy Tales: Hybrid Wonders in the Mirror (Among the Victorians and Modernists)
by Francesca ArnavasThere are fairy tales that surprise, destabilise, or even shock us: these are uncanny fairy tales that manipulate familiar stories in creative and bewildering ways in order to express new meanings. This work analyses these tales, basing its approach on a reformulation of Freud’s concept of the uncanny. Through a cognitive outlook the employed theoretical framework provides new perspectives on the study of experimental literary fairy tales. Considering English-language literature, complex and unsettling reinterpretations of the fairy-tale discourse began to appear during the Victorian Age, later resurfacing as a postmodern trend. This research individuates uncanny-related narrative techniques and cognitive responses as means to decodify and explore these tales, and as ways to discover unseen connections between Victorian and postmodern texts. The new theorisation of the uncanny is linked with three subconcepts: mirror, hybridity, and wonder, which function as tools to describe and investigate the cognitive and emotional entanglements characterising enigmatic and disorienting fairy tales.
Uncanny Rest: For Antiphilosophy
by Alberto MoreirasIn Uncanny Rest Alberto Moreiras offers a meditation on intellectual life under the suspension of time and conditions of isolation. Focusing on his personal day-to-day experiences of the “shelter-in-place” period during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Moreiras engages with the limits and possibilities of critical thought in the realm of the infrapolitical—the conditions of existence that exceed average understandings of politics and philosophy. In each dated entry he works through the process of formulating a life’s worth of thought and writing while attempting to locate the nature of thought once the coordinates of everyday life have changed. Offering nothing less than a phenomenology of thinking, Moreiras shows how thought happens in and out of a life, at a certain crossroads where memories collide, where conversations with interlocutors both living and dead evolve and thinking during a suspended state becomes provisional and uncertain.
Uncensored: Views & (Re)views
by Joyce Carol OatesUncensored: Views & (Re)views is Joyce Carol Oates's most candid gathering of prose pieces since (Woman) Writer: Occasions & Opportunities. Her ninth book of nonfiction, it brings together thirty-eight diverse and provocative pieces from the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times Book Review.Oates states in her preface, "In the essay or review, the dynamic of storytelling is hidden but not absent," and indeed, the voice of these "conversations" echoes the voice of her fiction in its dramatic directness, ethical perspective, and willingness to engage the reader in making critical judgments. Under the heading "Not a Nice Person," such controversial figures as Sylvia Plath, Patricia Highsmith, and Muriel Spark are considered without sentimentality or hyperbole; under "Our Contemporaries, Ourselves," such diversely talented figures as William Trevor, E. L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Connelly, Alice Sebold, Mary Karr, Anne Tyler, and Ann Patchett are examined. In sections of "homages" and "revisits," Oates writes with enthusiasm and clarity of such cultural icons as Emily Brontë, Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Robert Lowell, Balthus, and Muhammad Ali ("The Greatest"); after a lapse of decades, she (re)considers the first film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Americana, Don DeLillo's first novel, as well as the morality of selling private letters and the nostalgic significance of making a pilgrimage to Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond.Through these balanced and illuminating essays we see Oates at the top of her form, engaged with forebears and contemporaries, providing clues to her own creative process: "For prose is a kind of music: music creates 'mood.' What is argued on the surface may be but ripples rising from a deeper, subtextual urgency."
Uncertain Futures: Communication and Culture in Childhood Cancer Treatment (Wiley Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture)
by Ignasi ClementeThis book examines children and young people’s attempts to participate in conversations about their own treatment throughout uncertain cancer trajectories, including the events leading up to diagnosis, treatment, remission, relapse, and cure or death. Clearly and compellingly written, Clemente relies on a new multi-layered method to identify six cancer communication strategies Illustrates that communication is central to how children, parents, and healthcare professionals constitute, influence, and make sense of the social worlds they inhabit—or that they want to inhabit Provides ethnographic case studies of childhood cancer patients in Spain, using children's own words Examines the challenges of how to talk to and how to encourage patients' involvement in reatment discussions In his critique of the “telling” versus “not telling” debates, Clemente argues that communication should be adjusted to the children’s own needs, and that children's own questions can indicate how much or little they want to be involved Uncertain Futures is the winner of the 15th Annual Modest Reixach Prize.
Uncertain Refuge: Sanctuary in the Literature of Medieval England (The Middle Ages Series)
by Elizabeth AllenTo seek sanctuary from persecution by entering a sacred space is an act of desperation, but also a symbolic endeavor: fugitives invoke divine presence to reach a precarious safe haven that imbues their lives with religious, social, or political significance. In medieval England, sanctuary was upheld under both canon and common law, and up to five hundred people sought sanctuary every year. What they found, however, was not so much a static refuge as a temporary respite from further action—confession and exile—or from further violence—jurisdictional conflict, harrying or starvation, a breaching of the sanctuary.While sanctuary has usually been analyzed as part of legal history, in Uncertain Refuge Elizabeth Allen explores the symbolic consequences of sanctuary seeking in English literary works—miracle collections, chronicles, romances, and drama. She ponders the miracle of a stag's escape from the hunt into a churchyard as well as the account of a fallen political favorite who gains a sort of charisma as he takes sanctuary three times in succession; the figure of Sir Gawain, seeking refuge in a stark land far from the court and Robin Hood, hiding in his local forest refuge among his Merry Men. Her consideration of medieval sanctuary extends to its resonances in a seventeenth-century play about the early Tudor usurper Perkin Warbeck and even into modern America, with the case of a breach of sanctuary in southwest Georgia in 1963, when sheriffs took over a voter registration meeting in a local church.Uncertain Refuge illuminates a fantasy of protection and its impermanence that animated late medieval literary culture, and one that remains poignantly alive, if no longer written into law, in today's troubled political world.
Uncertainty and Undecidability in Twentieth-Century Literature and Literary Theory (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)
by Mette Leonard HøegUndecidability is a fundamental quality of literature and constitutive of what renders some works appealing and engaging across time and in different contexts. This book explores the essential literary notion and its role, function and effect in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and literary theory. The book traces the notion historically, providing a map of central theories addressing interpretative challenges and recalcitrance in literature and showing ‘theory of uncertainty’ to be an essential strand of literary theory. While uncertainty is present in all literature, and indeed a prerequisite for any stabilisation of meaning, the Modernist period is characterised by a particularly strong awareness of uncertainty and its subforms of undecidability, ambiguity, indeterminacy, etc. With examples from seminal Modernist works by Woolf, Proust, Ford, Kafka and Musil, the book sheds light on undecidability as a central structuring principle and guiding philosophical idea in twentieth-century literature and demonstrates the analytical value of undecidability as a critical concept and reading-strategy. Defining undecidability as a specific ‘sustained’ and ‘productive’ kind of uncertainty and distinguishing it from related forms, such as ambiguity, indeterminacy and indistinction, the book develops a systematic but flexible theory of undecidability and outlines a productive reading-strategy based on the recognition of textual and interpretive undecidability.
Uncertainty, Information Management, and Disclosure Decisions: Theories and Applications
by Walid Afifi Tamara AfifiThis volume integrates scholarly work on disclosure and uncertainty with the most up-to-date, cutting edge research, theories, and applications. Uncertainty is an ever-present part of human relationships, and the ways in which people reduce and/or manage uncertainty involves regulating their communication with others through revealing and concealing information. This collection is devoted to collating knowledge in these areas, advancing theory and presenting work that is socially meaningful. This work includes contributions from renowned scholars in interpersonal uncertainty and information regulation, focusing on processes that bridge boundaries within and across disciplines, while maintaining emphasis on interpersonal contexts. Disciplines represented here include interpersonal, family, and health communication, as well as relational and social psychology. Key features of the volume include: comprehensive coverage integrating the latest research on disclosure, information seeking, and uncertainty, a highly theoretical content, socially meaningful in nature (applied to real-world contexts), an interdisciplinary approach that crosses sub-fields within communication. This volume is a unique and timely resource for advanced study in interpersonal, health, or family communication. With its emphasis on theory, the book is an excellent resource for graduate courses addressing theory and/or theory construction, and it will also appeal to scholars interested in applied research.
Uncharted Depths: Descent Narratives in English and French Children's Literature
by Kiera Vaclavik"The descent to the underworld is one of our oldest stories. It recurs in the most influential texts of early European literature - the Odyssey , the Aeneid , the Inferno - and no less so in the classics of children's literature. Vaclavik shows that retellings for young readers certainly shift emphases, working the legend through transformations of all kinds, but also that much of the traditional katabasis story remains firmly in place. The critical study of children's literature remains a relatively new field, in which such fundamental presences have gone largely unnoticed. As Vaclavik demonstrates, many novels which remain lively and resonant for adult readers richly repay critical attention. And if the incomparable explorer's tales of Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Hector Malot and even Lewis Carroll have proved durable beyond all expectations, one reason may be that there is no lure like that of the underworld, and none harder to escape. Kiera Vaclavik is Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London."
Uncharted Territory: A High School Reader
by Jim BurkeUncharted Territory is a unique first-edition reader keyed to the challenges, uncertainties, and decisions that all high school students face. Created by Jim Burke, a master teacher with over twenty years of high school teaching experience and bestselling author of numerous professional books, this reader helps students envision identities and possibilities outside of the classroom while balancing new freedoms with new responsibilities after graduation. Its eight units engage students in discussions and activities about education, credo, power, relationships, identity, freedom, decisions, and success. Designed to be used alone or in conjunction with longer works of fiction and nonfiction, Uncharted Territory features opportunities throughout the book and teaching package to link to popular and canonical texts, such as Walden, Hamlet, and Frankenstein.
Uncharted Territory: A Reader and Guide (Second Edition)
by Jim BurkeA thematic reader and writing guide built for today's high school students Curated by Jim Burke, an active high school teacher with more than twenty years of teaching experience, this reader—comprised of nonfiction and interspersed with poems and stories—helps students examine questions that are important to them both in and outside of the classroom. Six new writing chapters offer instruction on the entire writing process, while approachable readings, organized thematically, engage students in thoughtful classroom discussion and activities. Designed to be used alone or in conjunction with longer works, Uncharted Territory can easily be incorporated into the classroom, or assigned alongside independent reading. This purchase offers access to the digital ebook only.
Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism & Romanticism
by Adrian Daub“What a strange invention marriage is!” wrote Kierkegaard. “Is it the expression of that inexplicable erotic sentiment, that concordant elective affinity of souls, or is it a duty or a partnership . . . or is it a little of all that?”Like Kierkegaard a few decades later, many of Germany’s most influential thinkers at the turn of the eighteenth century wondered about the nature of marriage but rejected the easy answers provided by biology and theology. In Uncivil Unions, Adrian Daub presents a truly interdisciplinary look at the story of a generation of philosophers, poets, and intellectuals who turned away from theology, reason, common sense, and empirical observation to provide a purely metaphysical justification of marriage.Through close readings of philosophers like Fichte and Schlegel, and novelists like Sophie Mereau and Jean Paul, Daub charts the development of this new concept of marriage with an insightful blend of philosophy, cultural studies, and theory. The author delves deeply into the lives and work of the romantic and idealist poets and thinkers whose beliefs about marriage continue to shape ideas about gender, marriage, and sex to the present day.
Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism
by Adrian Daub“What a strange invention marriage is!” wrote Kierkegaard. “Is it the expression of that inexplicable erotic sentiment, that concordant elective affinity of souls, or is it a duty or a partnership . . . or is it a little of all that?” Like Kierkegaard a few decades later, many of Germany’s most influential thinkers at the turn of the eighteenth century wondered about the nature of marriage but rejected the easy answers provided by biology and theology. In Uncivil Unions, Adrian Daub presents a truly interdisciplinary look at the story of a generation of philosophers, poets, and intellectuals who turned away from theology, reason, common sense, and empirical observation to provide a purely metaphysical justification of marriage. Through close readings of philosophers like Fichte and Schlegel, and novelists like Sophie Mereau and Jean Paul, Daub charts the development of this new concept of marriage with an insightful blend of philosophy, cultural studies, and theory. The author delves deeply into the lives and work of the romantic and idealist poets and thinkers whose beliefs about marriage continue to shape ideas about gender, marriage, and sex to the present day.
Uncivil Wars: Elena Garro, Octavio Paz, and the Battle for Cultural Memory
by Sandra Messinger CypessThe first English-language book to place the works of Elena Garro (1916–1998) and Octavio Paz (1914–1998) in dialogue with each other, Uncivil Wars evokes the lives of two celebrated literary figures who wrote about many of the same experiences and contributed to the formation of Mexican national identity but were judged quite differently, primarily because of gender. While Paz’s privileged, prize-winning legacy has endured worldwide, Garro’s literary gifts garnered no international prizes and received less attention in Latin American literary circles. Restoring a dual perspective on these two dynamic writers and their world, Uncivil Wars chronicles a collective memory of wars that shaped Mexico, and in turn shaped Garro and Paz, from the Conquest period to the Mexican Revolution; the Spanish Civil War, which the couple witnessed while traveling abroad; and the student massacre at Tlatelolco Plaza in 1968, which brought about social and political changes and further tensions in the battle of the sexes. The cultural contexts of machismo and ethnicity provide an equally rich ground for Sandra Cypess’s exploration of the tandem between the writers’ personal lives and their literary production. Uncivil Wars illuminates the complexities of Mexican society as seen through a tense marriage of two talented, often oppositional writers. The result is an alternative interpretation of the myths and realities that have shaped Mexican identity, and its literary soul, well into the twenty-first century.
Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
by Cathy CaruthThe pathbreaking work that founded the field of trauma studies.In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth proposes that in the widespread and bewildering experience of trauma in our century—both in its occurrence and in our attempt to understand it—we can recognize the possibility of a history no longer based on simple models of straightforward experience and reference. Through the notion of trauma, she contends, we come to a new understanding that permits history to arise where immediate understanding may not. Caruth explores the ways in which the texts of psychoanalysis, literature, and literary theory both speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience. Rather than straightforwardly describing actual case studies of trauma survivors, or attempting to elucidate directly the psychiatry of trauma, she examines the complex ways that knowing and not knowing are entangled in the language of trauma and in the stories associated with it. Caruth’s wide-ranging discussion touches on Freud’s theory of trauma as outlined in Moses and Monotheism and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. She traces the notion of reference and the figure of the falling body in de Man, Kleist, and Kant; the narratives of personal catastrophe in Hiroshima mon amour; and the traumatic address in Lecompte’s reinterpretation of Freud’s narrative of the dream of the burning child. In this twentieth-anniversary edition of her now classic text, a substantial new afterword addresses major questions and controversies surrounding trauma theory that have arisen over the past two decades. Caruth offers innovative insights into the inherent connection between individual and collective trauma, on the importance of the political and ethical dimensions of the theory of trauma, and on the crucial place of literature in the theoretical articulation of the very concept of trauma. Her afterword serves as a decisive intervention in the ongoing discussions in and about the field.
Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Annual)
by Bathroom Readers' InstituteIt’s an actual fact—Uncle John is the most entertaining thing in the bathroom!Uncle John and his team of devoted researchers are back again with an all-new collection of weird news stories, odd historical events, dubious “scientific” theories, jaw-dropping lists, and more. This entertaining 31st anniversary edition contains 512 pages of all-new articles that will appeal to readers everywhere. Pop culture, history, dumb crooks, and other actual and factual tidbits are packed onto every page of this book. Inside, you’ll find . . .Dogs and cats who ran for political officeThe bizarre method people in Victorian England used to resuscitate drowning victimsThe man who met his future pet—a stray dog—while running across the Gobi DesertSearching for Planet X—the last unknown planet in our solar systemTwantrums—strange Twitter rants that had disastrous effectsThe true story of Boaty McBoatfaceAnd much more!
Uncle John's Awesome 35th Anniversary Bathroom Reader: Facts, don't fail me now! (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Annual #35)
by Bathroom Readers' InstituteThe 35th annual edition of Uncle John&’s compendium features entertaining, informative, and amusing real-life stories from around the world.This 35th anniversary edition of Uncle John&’s Bathroom Reader is bursting with everything you could possibly want to read in the throne room, including short articles for a quick trip and lengthier page-turners for an extended visit. Uncle John and his team at the Bathroom Readers&’ Institute have once again gathered the most entertaining and amusing stories from the realms of pop culture, history, science, and sports (not to mention accounts of even more dumb crooks!) for your reading pleasure. In addition, there are plenty of laugh-out-loud lists, amusing quotes, and odd factoids that will delight the most ardent of trivia fans.
Uncle John's Facts to Go Attack of the Foodies (Facts to Go #12)
by Bathroom Readers' InstitutePizza, chocolate, potatoes, grubs, coffee, croissants...grubs? Yes, grubs! In Attack of the Foodies, no food or beverage is safe from the culinary clutches of Uncle John. From around the world to your dinner table, this tasty e-book heaps a hefty helping of the BRI's all-time most filling food and drink articles, along with a few brand new creations we've been concocting in our kitchen. (Think of this e-book as sort of a "prequel" to our Bathroom Lore e-book. Get it?) So lick your chops, put on your bib, let out a big burp to create same space, and sink your fork into...-Diner lingo-Cheesy poetry-Kitchen science in the 21st century-Terrible foods invented on TV-The Americanization of the Italian pizza pie-Between the bleeps: the wisdom of Chef Gordon Ramsay-When good food turns bad: foods that have tried to kill us-Buffalo Sweat, Smoker's Cough, and other gross (but real) cocktails-And speaking of gross, a do-it-yourself recipe for Jell-O (it isn't pretty)And much, much more!
Uncle John's Facts to Go Bathroom Lore (Facts to Go #11)
by Bathroom Readers' InstituteSome of the best bathroom reading we've ever squeezed out has been about the bathroom itself. And in this e-book, the hallowed throne gets its moment in the spotlight! Starting from prehistoric times, you'll learn the vital role that pee and poo have played in the course of human events. You'll also visit Uncle John's "Stall of Shame" and look at some of the cool (and bizarre) gadgets so you can spruce up your own throne room! Plus you'll get a hefty helping of bathroom quotes, graffiti, tips, and jokes! So flush away your troubles as you read about...-That '70s Bathroom-How to "go" abroad, on the Moon, and in ancient Rome-World leaders who perfected the fine art of "toilet diplomacy"-Mahatma Gandhi-saving the world, one bathroom at a time-Bathroom games (for when you don't feel like reading)-11 movies that Tom Hanks peed in-Lucky Finds-the privy edition-One story-20 bathroom puns. Can Uncle John do it? Pick up a copy of Bathroom Lore to find out!
Uncle John's Facts to Go Call of the Wild (Facts to Go #14)
by Bathroom Readers' InstituteLions and tigers and bears, oh my! And plenty of other wild beasts (including wildebeests)! Whether you find it under a rock, in the sea, or up in the sky, if it has fangs, venom, horns, or an electric tail that really stings, you'll be much safer reading about it from the confines of this entertaining e-book. So let Uncle John be your safari guide as you sink your canines into...*Australia's deadliest...roos*What happens when a ten-ton whale leaps onto a 40-foot sailboat*Uncle John's Stall of Fame: Wild Edition*The gruesome fish that eats other fish...from the inside out*Behind the scenes: real animals that inspired books, music, and movies*The war between invasive and native species*How fire ants saved the life of a fallen skydiver*Which animal sayings are all wrong...and why*How fire ants saved the life of a fallen skydiver ...And much, much more!
Uncle John's Facts to Go Fads & Flops (Facts to Go #8)
by Bathroom Readers' InstituteUncle John takes the nation by storm in this hip new e-book of Bathroom Reader classics and some brand-new articles! Fads & Flops is overflowing with stories of unlikely successes and colossal failures. So whether you were weaned on bell bottoms, parachute pants, baggy pants, or skinny jeans, you'll find the one thing that never goes out of style: great bathroom reading! Read about...-The world's stupidest business decisions-Playing real-life Pac-Man on the streets of New York City-From flop to fad: The Rocky Horror Picture Show-The ups and downs of the trampoline-Le Car and other le-mons-Turtles, Transformers, and Power Rangers-Shaky Etch-A-Sketch moments-What the backward messages in rock songs really mean-Dot BombsAnd much, much more!
Uncle John's Facts to Go Life is Strange (Facts to Go #6)
by Bathroom Readers' InstituteUncle John donned his snorkel, dove head-first into the bottomless Bathroom Reader archives, and emerged with this one-of-a-kind e-book: Life Is Strange. Readers will be both delighted and dumbfounded as they scroll through the most peculiar articles that have ever graced our pages. And just make it even weirder, we've added several all-new tidbits to this strangest of brews. So we welcome you into a world of weird featuring...-The harrowing tale of piggybacking planes-The odd cult of The Big Lebowski-The Romance of Proctology and other strange-but-true book titles-The world's kookiest conspiracy theories (Example: "Smurfs are Commies.")-Christopher Walken speaks: weird events occur-The strangest TV shows ever made-How to cook a shrunken head-The Ethel Merman Disco Album, by Ethel Merman, who hated discoAnd much, much more!
Uncle John's Facts to Go Modern Mythology (Facts to Go #7)
by Bathroom Readers' InstituteThe ancient Greeks had Zeus; today we have the Burger King...king. In Modern Mythology, you'll meet the world's most fascinating heroes, villains, and corporate spokesthingies. Featuring Bathroom Reader classics plus a few new treasures, you'll discover truths and untruths, and learn the real stories behind some of today's tallest tales. So sit back and let Uncle John take you on an epic journey of modern make-believe! Immerse yourself in...-Gnomes in the gnews-The Whopperknocker, Whirling Whumpus, and other cousins of Sasquatch-Ronald McDonald's relentless rise to the top-On tour with Paul Bunyan-5 Movies that mythed the point-Who was Kilroy, and why was he here?-Common misconceptions that refuse to go away-Urban Legends that turned out to be true-The secret of the Loch Ness Monster finally explained...and much, much more!