Here are 100 books that Visual and Other Pleasures fans have personally recommended if you like
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I'm a London-based critic, author, and host whose love affair with film began after seeing The Lion King in the cinema as a kid. I trained as a journalist because I wanted to talk about the world. Since then I’ve been covering film and culture for the likes of Empire Magazine, Time Out, and IGN. I co-host MTV Movies and the weekly film reviews podcast Fade to Black; co-founder of The First Film Club event series and podcast, and am a member of London's Critics' Circle. I'm a voice for gender equality, diversity, and inclusion in the entertainment industry and an advocate for MENA representation as a writer of Tunisian heritage.
We, female film critics, are still underrepresented in the critical world but Pauline Kael found success and respect at a time when our numbers were even fewer.
This collection showcases her talent for writing and her keen eye for what makes a movie or a performance great or terrible.
From Bonnie and Clyde to Last Tango in Paris, Kael’s compelling cinematic observations make you want to rewatch these films while also highlighting how even the best of critics can fall foul to unconscious biases (just check out her Othello review!).
We can learn much further we’ve come when it comes to checking those blinkered perspectives.
A master film critic is at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best in this career-spanning collection featuring pieces on Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, and other modern movie classics
“Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply,” Pauline Kael once observed, “just because you must use everything you are and everything you know.” Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker, Kael used those formidable tools to shape the tastes of a generation. She had a gift for capturing, with force and fluency, the essence of an actor’s gesture or the full…
I'm a London-based critic, author, and host whose love affair with film began after seeing The Lion King in the cinema as a kid. I trained as a journalist because I wanted to talk about the world. Since then I’ve been covering film and culture for the likes of Empire Magazine, Time Out, and IGN. I co-host MTV Movies and the weekly film reviews podcast Fade to Black; co-founder of The First Film Club event series and podcast, and am a member of London's Critics' Circle. I'm a voice for gender equality, diversity, and inclusion in the entertainment industry and an advocate for MENA representation as a writer of Tunisian heritage.
Carrie Fisher is a phenomenal writer whose Hollywood upbringing and career makes her insightful voice when it comes to the experience of women in film.
Turning the diaries she kept while shooting Star Wars – playing the iconic Strong Female Character, Princess Leila – into a memoir offers and eye-opening perspective about life as an actress working in a male-dominated world.
It’s full of humour, self-deprecation, and real vulnerability, as well as juicy tidbits about the production.
When Carrie Fisher discovered the journals she kept during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she was astonished to see what they had preserved - plaintive love poems, unbridled musings with youthful naivete, and a vulnerability that she barely recognized. Now her fame as an author, actress, and pop-culture icon is indisputable, but in 1977, Carrie Fisher was just a teenager with an all-consuming crush on her co-star, Harrison Ford. With these excerpts from her handwritten notebooks, The Princess Diarist is Fisher's intimate and revealing recollection of what happened on one of the most famous film sets of…
I'm a London-based critic, author, and host whose love affair with film began after seeing The Lion King in the cinema as a kid. I trained as a journalist because I wanted to talk about the world. Since then I’ve been covering film and culture for the likes of Empire Magazine, Time Out, and IGN. I co-host MTV Movies and the weekly film reviews podcast Fade to Black; co-founder of The First Film Club event series and podcast, and am a member of London's Critics' Circle. I'm a voice for gender equality, diversity, and inclusion in the entertainment industry and an advocate for MENA representation as a writer of Tunisian heritage.
Helen is a fantastic film journalist and professional peer who has put her sharp writing to excellent use with this short history of female contributions to cinema as well as their erasure.
From the original pioneers to the experience of female film critics today, this is an accessible and educational gateway into the marginalised struggle for women to be taken seriously as filmmakers and creatives on the silver screen.
'A fascinating polemic' Sunday Times 'A powerful, sobering and vital work' The Mail on Sunday 'A page-turning read, peppered with humour' Sight & Sound 'A must read' Edgar Wright
A call to arms from Empire magazine's 'geek queen', Helen O'Hara, that explores women's roles - both in front of and behind the camera - since the birth of Hollywood, how those roles are reflected within wider society and what we can do to level the playing field.
Hollywood was born just over a century ago, at a time of huge forward motion for women's rights. With no rules in place…
I'm a London-based critic, author, and host whose love affair with film began after seeing The Lion King in the cinema as a kid. I trained as a journalist because I wanted to talk about the world. Since then I’ve been covering film and culture for the likes of Empire Magazine, Time Out, and IGN. I co-host MTV Movies and the weekly film reviews podcast Fade to Black; co-founder of The First Film Club event series and podcast, and am a member of London's Critics' Circle. I'm a voice for gender equality, diversity, and inclusion in the entertainment industry and an advocate for MENA representation as a writer of Tunisian heritage.
A massive influence on my own cultural approach to understanding cinema and intersectional representation, hooks offers acute analyses of the way films can affect us on a personal, political, and communal level, for better and for worse.
Hooks is smart, sharp, and switched on to how misogyny and racism can adversely affect the treatment of female characters of colour, especially.
Movies matter - that is the message of Reel to Real, bell hooks' classic collection of essays on film. They matter on a personal level, providing us with unforgettable moments, even life-changing experiences and they can confront us, too, with the most profound social issues of race, sex and class. Here bell hooks - one of America's most celebrated and thrilling cultural critics - talks back to films that have moved and provoked her, from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction to the work of Spike Lee. Including also her conversations with master filmmakers such as Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, Reel…
I am an academic who writes about gender and media culture. At the start of my career, I often wrote about silent and classical-era Hollywood, and I still teach these periods, but most of my research now focuses on the contemporary era and the complexities of gender, class, and consumer culture. My current project is a study of the broken customer service culture and the anti-social effects of technologization called I’m Sorry You Feel That Way:’ Affect, Authority and Antagonism in the Cultures of Customer Service.
Written long before J.D. Vance made single women an open political target, Anthea Taylor’s book propounds skepticism in regard to the frequent cliche that they are now a privileged and celebrated class.
In fact, as she shows, this truism is part of the cultural construction of single women as a problematic population subject to evolving modes of cultural criticism and denigration. This book astutely analyzes their depiction in “chick lit,” reality tv, blogs and self-help modes. It’s smart and scholarly as well as highly readable.
Single Women in Popular Culture demonstrates how single women continue to be figures of profound cultural anxiety. Examining a wide range of popular media forms, this is a timely, insightful and politically engaged book, exploring the ways in which postfeminism limits the representation of single women in popular culture.
I’m fascinated by systems of thought and very interested in understanding how we can improve our ability to create a better society for all. I think the past makes a good laboratory for investigating these kinds of questions. I got interested in early modern economic theory while researching the English East India Company for my dissertation in the sociology department of Columbia University, which was a great place for historical and computational sociology. I now teach economic sociology and theory as a professor at Yale University, another institution with amazing strengths in history, data science, and computational methods.
This is a serious scholarly investigation of the origin and eventual triumph of the efficient market hypothesis. Polillo is very smart and the theoretical sophistication high. It combines a thorough history with some extremely interesting ideas about thought, culture, and social processes fleshed out with several different methods of analysis and interpretation.
The Ascent of Market Efficiency weaves together historical narrative and quantitative bibliometric data to detail the path financial economists took in order to form one of the central theories of financial economics-the influential efficient-market hypothesis-which states that the behavior of financial markets is unpredictable.
As the notorious quip goes, a blindfolded monkey would do better than a group of experts in selecting a portfolio of securities, simply by throwing darts at the financial pages of a newspaper. How did such a hypothesis come to be so influential in the field of financial economics? How did financial economists turn a lack…
We are law professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Eyal Zamir is interested in the intersections of law, economics, ethics, and psychology. In addition to theoretical studies of these issues, he engages in experimental legal studies, as well. Barak Medina studies constitutional law, human rights, and economic analysis of law. He is interested in constitutional interpretation and the interaction between common-sense morality, public opinion and adjudication.
One of the world’s leading microeconomic scholars presents in this fascinating book brilliant insights about economic theory and its role in public policy.
Rubinstein challenges several central tenets of game theory, and sheds light on the role economics can and should play in society at large. The book presents economic theory through a series of fables.
The stories provide the basic insights of economics, but also enables us to critically evaluate the effect of implicit assumptions on the predictive power of economic theory and its moral implications.
"I had the good fortune to grow up in a wonderful area of Jerusalem, surrounded by a diverse range of people: Rabbi Meizel, the communist Sala Marcel, my widowed Aunt Hannah, and the intellectual Yaacovson. As far as I'm concerned, the opinion of such people is just as authoritative for making social and economic decisions as the opinion of an expert using a model." Part memoir, part crash-course in economic theory, this deeply engaging book by one of the world's foremost economists looks at economic ideas through a personal lens. Together with an introduction to some of the central concepts…
My passion is using field experiments to explore economic questions. Since the early 1990s I have generated more than 200 papers published in academic journals using the world as my lab. That’s what we do as academics. The problem is that locked away in these journals is an enormous amount of wisdom and insights that can not only help the realm of academia, but also change the world as we know it. The brilliant authors of these books unlock the ideas and knowledge found in the academic papers that are full of jargon and math, aimed towards a narrow audience, and put them in language aimed towards the masses where real change can be implemented.
We all loved Freakonomics. The incredible Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt did it again in their second book Super Freakonomics.
Thinking like an economist is a powerful tool. What might surprise you are the motley assortment of questions that you can think about from the perspective of an economist.
This book is bold, funny, and insightful. And what’s the underlying theme? Well, it’s one thing all economists can agree on – incentives matter. Dubner and Levitt are masterful storytellers and teachers.
Even if you aren’t interested in thinking like an economist, their perspective on topics covered is worth the read.
The international bestselling Freakquel to Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics, this book sees them looking deeper, questioning harder and uncovering even more hidden truths about our world, from global cooling to patriotic prostitutes, drunk walking to why suicide bombers should buy life insurance.
'Mind-blowing' Wall Street Journal
'Page-turning, politically incorrect and ever-so-slightly intoxicating, like a large swig of tequila' The Times
'Like Freakonomics but better ... you are guaranteed a good time' Financial Times
'Great fun ... Levitt is a master at drawing counter-intuitive conclusions' Sunday Times
'Studded with intriguing examples' Daily Telegraph
After finishing my secondary education in Athens I got a degree in business administration at the University of Genova. The idea was to return to Greece to work in my father’s business. But I soon realized that I was neither interested in business theory nor going back to Greece to work in my father's organization. I decided to continue my studies in England focusing on the social sciences – first at Leicester University and then at the London School of Economics. After retiring I continued to write books and articles in Greek, English, and French. I have passion for reading and writing. It helps me psychologically as well to survive in a postmodern chaotic world.
Marshall provides a very interesting analysis of the development of human rights.
He identifies three developmental stages: First the rights referring to property, freedom of speech, and freedom to religious beliefs and practices. Second the rights to vote and be elected in parliament and third the development of social rights (decent education, health care, and social welfare for old age). His analysis is focused in England.
But as a general overview is very useful for the study of citizenship.
Reprint of the 1964 edition published by Doubleday under title "Sociology at the Crossroads". Contents: Introduction by Seymour Martin Lipset; Preface; Part One: Sociology Today and Tomorrow [Sociology at the Crossroads; Sociology: The Road Ahead; International Comprehension in and through Social Science]; Part Two: Social Class [Citizenship and Social Class; Changes in Social Stratification in the Twentieth Century; Recent History of Professionalism in Relation to Social Structure and Social Policy; Nature of Class Conflict; Nature and Determinants of Social Status; A Note on 'Status'; Work and Wealth; Property and Possessiveness]; Part Three: Social Welfare [Social Selection in the Welfare State;…
After finishing my secondary education in Athens I got a degree in business administration at the University of Genova. The idea was to return to Greece to work in my father’s business. But I soon realized that I was neither interested in business theory nor going back to Greece to work in my father's organization. I decided to continue my studies in England focusing on the social sciences – first at Leicester University and then at the London School of Economics. After retiring I continued to write books and articles in Greek, English, and French. I have passion for reading and writing. It helps me psychologically as well to survive in a postmodern chaotic world.
Professor Mann is the best macrohistorical social theorist I know.
The book is a clearly written analysis of the development of social formations from primitive societies, to the more developed societies in many parts of the world. As it combines a sophisticated conceptual homework with extensive empirical research the book will help the reader to grasp from where we are coming and where we are going.
I personally recommend the book. It is extremely valuable.
Distinguishing four sources of power in human societies - ideological, economic, military and political - The Sources of Social Power traces their interrelations throughout human history. In this first volume, Michael Mann examines interrelations between these elements from neolithic times, through ancient Near Eastern civilizations, the classical Mediterranean age and medieval Europe, up to just before the Industrial Revolution in England. It offers explanations of the emergence of the state and social stratification; of city-states, militaristic empires and the persistent interaction between them; of the world salvation religions; and of the particular dynamism of medieval and early modern Europe. It…
