San Antonio College Library

"For the past few years, Jake Halpern has reported on fame for NPR. This book chronicles his journey through the underbelly of Hollywood and launches a broad investigation of America's fascination with the lives of celebrities. Why are sales of magazines like US Weekly skyrocketing while news magazines are down? Why do seemingly normal, educated people pay attention to whom Paris Hilton is currently dating? Halpern visits those most stricken with...

In this work of social journalism, a spotlight is cast on a population we find it easy, or convenient, to overlook. "While the national economy has been growing, the economic prospects of most Americans have been dimming," William Finnegan writes. "A new American class structure is being born - one that is harsher, in many ways, than the one it is replacing. Some people are thriving in it, of course. This book is about some families who are not. More...

"In this work, Abigail Kohn immerses herself in the world of "shooters." Emphasizing that not all owners are necessarily enthusiasts, Kohn travels directly to the heart of American gun culture. Frequenting gun shops and shooting ranges, and devoting particular attention to those whose interest in weaponry extends beyond the casual, she captures in detail how gun owners actually think and feel about their guns. Through her conversations - with cowboy...

An exploration of the Goth subculture that addresses gender and sexual politics and discusses media, fashion, identity, and other related topics.

For the first time in the history of America, an entire group of people has been told that there is no hope for them, that society has so oppressed them that they are unable to climb the ladder of economic success and are so irretrievably mired in poverty that the state must and should support them. This group is today's underclass, overwhelmingly urban, dismayingly minority. Such a view has been imposed upon it by a mainstream culture whose reinterpretation...

"Walking on the Wild Side traces the stories of forty-six men and women who, for their own personal reasons, set out to hike America's most well-known, and arguably most social, long-distance hiking trail. Once on the Appalachian Trail, long-distance hikers live mostly in isolation, with their own way of acting, talking, and thinking; their own vocabulary; their own activities and interests; their own conception of what is significant in life; and...

Can't Find My Way Home is a history of illicit drug use in America in the second half of the twentieth century and a personal journey through the drug experience. It's the remarkable story of how America got high, the epic tale of how the American century transformed into the great stoned age. Martin Torgoff begins with the avant-garde worlds of bebop jazz and the emerging beat writers, who embraced the consciousness-altering properties of marijuana...

In The ABC-CLIO Companion to the 1960s Counterculture in America, author Neil A. Hamilton systematically illuminates the social, cultural, and political revolution with entries covering groups such as the hippies, Diggers, Yippies, and Weathermen; individuals including Abbie Hoffman, Andy Warhol, Russell Means, and Stokely Carmichael; and events such as Watts, the Tripps festival, Woodstock, and various "be-ins." Broadly defining the counterculture...

In A Fiction of the Past, Dominick Cavallo pushes past the contemporary fog of myth, cold disdain and warm nostalgia that shrouds the radical youth culture of the sixties. He explores how the furiously chaotic sixties sprang from the comparatively placid forties and fifties. The book also digs beyond the post-World War II decades and seeks the historical sources of the youth culture in the distant American past. What were the historical precedents...