100 books like Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind

Much of this book by two psychologists covers familiar ground and some may find their explanation for what they found unpersuasive, but get this: When they brought white male undergraduates into the laboratory on a pretext and called them "asshole," Northern subjects laughed it off or ignored it, but Southern ones bristled. Subsequent tests showed that the Southerners had heightened blood levels of stress-related hormones and testosterone, but the Northerners did not. Moving the study of the South’s “culture of violence” to the physiological level was a remarkable achievement, but hardly anyone seems to have noticed.

This atlas, a beautiful but money-losing coffee table book from the book-publishing arm of Southern Living, appeared just as a new CEO ordered the company’s book people to think of themselves “more in the direct-marketing business, as opposed to being a book publisher.” (This strategy led eventually to How to Cook for Your Man and Still Want to Look at Him Naked.) It was probably treated as a write-off from the beginning and not marketed at all, which is a shame, because it is much more than a handsome ornament for your living room. Three geographers and a historian, all from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, produced a solidly-researched and profoundly informative work of cartographic excellence, one that repays both casual browsing and close study. (Some used book sites incorrectly show a different cover, but don’t worry about that.)

This magnificent history of the South’s landscape, an unexpected one-off from a historian of military medicine, looks at how humans have shaped the Southern land and vice versa. It debunks the romantic view of pre-Columbian Indians as “natural ecologists” living in harmony with nature, showing how they radically altered their environment by hunting and burning. Europeans were even more exploitative and brought with them diseases that loved their new home. Later developments like flood control, wildlife protection, and anti-pollution measures have had profound and sometimes unanticipated consequences. The book is richly detailed and unusually well-written—not surprising, since Cowdrey has also written award-winning science fiction and fantasy. 

My grandfather hunted squirrels to put in the stew pot, raised turnips and mustard greens, and shared all that he had with family and neighbors. Joe Gray Taylor’s book takes us back to the beginnings of the cuisine and hospitality of the American South where folks made the most of the natural environment and its riches. This book also describes the way people “visited” in the South, sometimes staying with relatives or friends for weeks or months on end, the hosts accepting them naturally, adding places at the table. Taylor covers Southern hospitality from the days of the frontier through the antebellum and Civil War years and Reconstruction, including the richest and the most impoverished populations, reminding me that I myself am just one generation removed from living off the land.

If you’ve ever wondered if people today are dumber than people in the past, you should watch Idiocracy. And then read this book. It shows how we’ve devolved into people who look at lists of the best five books and never actually read those books. In 2008, for a column for the L.A. Times, I had her take a quiz from the author of the book How Dumb Are You?: The Great American Stupidity Quiz and she got two wrong. I got 11 wrong. The point is: Read her book instead of mine.

The best true crime books are similar to any good biography, in that they are crafted, powerfully-researched lives of unusual people. With true crime, the life of the subject usually goes awry, however, by degrees from childhood, culminating in disaster, which affects others. Crime takes different forms. This gripping book charts the downfall of the brilliant but unscrupulous media baron Robert Maxwell, ending in his mysterious death in 1991. Had he lived, he may well have gone to jail, like his daughter, Ghislaine. Author John Peston has an eye for grotesques and a nice sense of humour. 

Published in 1985 partly to explain how a mediocre but persuasive Hollywood actor could become president of the United States, this influential book posits that television, by its very nature, debases civic discourse by replacing education with simplistic, misleading, and often violent entertainment.

It is the theoretical analog of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and proposes that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was a more accurate predictor of today than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four because pleasure is a more effective means of mass control than force.

Like Mumford, Postman was critical of many of the uses of technology that were eagerly adopted by most. Dying in 2003, he did not live to see universal addiction to hand-held screens, but he accurately predicted the political and social consequences.

This book is a must for those who want to explore the social phenomenon of media scandal.

What I liked about the book was that it is not only about theory – the authors discuss scandals and controversies revolving around Kurt Cobain to Michael Jackson, and from O.J. Simpson to Magic Johnson. In this volume, I personally loved John B. Thompson’s chapter “Scandal and Social Theory”, which was an eye-opener to me, and later it contributed to building my own theoretical framework.

The book taught me a lot about what happens when personal desire goes beyond moral boundaries in the lives of social elites worldwide. The book was written in 1997, but it still stimulates much discussion about this fascinating subject.         

The author of this book, John B. Thompson, is one of my favorites.

I love his 1995 masterpiece Media and Modernity which offers a general social theory of the media. In 1997, Thompson published a chapter on the social theory of scandal, and finally in 2000, he published the book I am now recommending here.

What I love about Political Scandal is that the book is both incisive and disturbing, and that the author succeeds in showing us how scandal unlocks essential secrets about power and politics today. This book is a very useful source for the students in media, political, and critical discourse analysis.    

For me, every book by Clifford (Cliff) Christians is always a celebration. I met Cliff in 1996 and we kept in touch ever since then. Christians has contributed to the field of media ethics more than any other scholar I know. In this book, Christians explores the fundamentals of ethics and justice in moral theory. In addition to “the usual suspects,” i.e., Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, and Max Weber, Christians explores modern liberal philosophy, feminist philosophy, African philosophy, Latin American liberation theology, Confucianism, and Islam. He does this in his usual dazzling and most comprehensive style, exhibiting wide knowledge of the literature and brilliant analysis that adds layers upon layers of sharp insights. As in his previous books, Christians invokes an ethics of care and humanity in order to alleviate poverty, homelessness, and unemployment, issues that trouble Western and non-Western societies, albeit in different… show more.