Years ago, I visited a school for the deaf to see how the children learn to read. It opened my eyes: It is exceedingly difficult to learn to read a language you cannot hear. I am a linguist and a writer for children. So this experience lit a fire under me – I wanted to learn about the deaf experience, sign languages, and what sorts of ways I might be able to support the effort to learn to read. I now analyze sign languages, work with a team to advocate for deaf children’s language rights, and am co-director of the RISE project, producing videobooks for deaf children and their families.
This book gives the British side of things, focusing on the division between viewing deafness as a medical condition (a deficiency) and viewing it as a cultural condition (which leads to the birth of sign languages). This book asks what a culture is, truly, and shows how cultures grow up around deaf signing communities.
This book presents a 'Traveller's Guide' to Deaf Culture, starting from the premise that Deaf cultures have an important contribution to make to other academic disciplines, and human lives in general. Within and outside Deaf communities, there is a need for an account of the new concept of Deaf culture, which enables readers to assess its place alongside work on other minority cultures and multilingual discourses. The book aims to assess the concepts of culture, on their own terms and in their many guises and to apply these to Deaf communities. The author illustrates the pitfalls which have been created…
In the 1980s I was bullied for playing Dungeons and Dragons. Kids like to bully each other, but this was different: The bullies felt they had been given a moral license to pick on D&D players because pastors, talk-show hosts, and politicians were all claiming it was a Satanic, anti-Christian game. Those claims were my first inkling that adults did not know what they are talking about. After getting a PhD in the sociology of religion, I was finally able analyze and articulate why religious authorities felt threatened by a simple game of imagination.
If you want to know about the origins of Dungeons and Dragons but are intimidated by Jon Peterson’s massive tome, this is a good alternative.
Ewart’s writing is fun and enjoyable to read. This book also came out right before the release of 5th edition D&D. Readers who first learned that edition may be interested in Ewart’s coverage of playtesting and design.
The Hobbit meets Moneyball in this definitive book on Dungeons & Dragons—from its origins and rise to cultural prominence to the continued effects on popular culture today.
HERE, THERE BE DRAGONS.
Ancient red dragons with 527 hit points, +44 to attack, and a 20d10 breath weapon, to be specific. In the world of fantasy role-playing, those numbers describe a winged serpent with immense strength and the ability to spit fire. There are few beasts more powerful—just like there are few games more important than Dungeons & Dragons.
Even if you’ve never played Dungeons & Dragons, you probably know someone who…
I’ve always been fascinated by the American counter-culture and its promise to change society, be it with radical lifestyles, drugs, or creating new cultural settings. I was going to study this from a more sociological approach until I discovered the history of the psychedelic movement and its promise to create a new society by reforming American individuals from within. Although I wound up becoming more interested in what the counter-culture actually achieved rather than dwelling on its excesses, I am currently working on a new book project that will shed light on an organization that managed to achieve both.
This is a collection I have constantly gone back to over the years and is probably my all-time favorite in the history of the counter-culture. I love the blend of rigorous research and easy reading, as well as the breadth of topics and diversity of approaches.
It is replete with thoughtful analyses and eloquent descriptions of the counter-culture, without ever giving in to the nostalgia of era or condemning it for that has gone wrong since. A great starting point if you want a good overview of the history of the American counter-culture.
Amidst the recent flourishing of Sixties scholarship, Imagine Nation is the first collection to focus solely on the counterculture. Its fourteen provocative essays seek to unearth the complexity and rediscover the society-changing power of significant movements and figures.
Almost all of my books have been historical novels, but this one is the one most dear to me, an attempt to understand the fault line that the Vietnam War laid across American society, leaving almost every man of my generation with scars physical or psychic. My picks are all books that illuminate the multiple upheavals of that time.
This is a classic account of the rebellious souls of the counterculture who attempted to disentangle themselves from a society they found stifling and parasitic.
Coyote’s memoir is sometimes bleak, sometimes funny, almost always endearing even through the worst of unintended consequences.
A brutally and beautifully written picture of a time that sought to remake America for the better.
In his energetic, funny, and intelligent memoir, Peter Coyote relives his fifteen-year ride through the heart of the counterculture—a journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege as the son of an East Coast stockbroker to the riotous life of political street theater and the self-imposed poverty of the West Coast communal movement known as The Diggers. With this innovative collective of artist-anarchists who had assumed as their task nothing less than the re-creation of the nation’s political and social soul, Coyote and his companions soon became power players.
In prose both graphic and unsentimental, Coyote reveals the…
I’ve always been fascinated by the stories of outsiders. I’m probably attracted to the topic because I come from a couple of misfits who reared me in a small town in the deeply conservative South. My mom is an irreverent, Socialist, Croatian immigrant with half a dozen kids, and my dad a curmudgeonly polyglot who loves books more than people. First as a journalist, then as a historian, I’ve long studied the economies and cultures created by those systematically marginalized or merely with a healthy disdain for the mainstream—enslaved people, queers, disenfranchised women, downtrodden artists, poor immigrants. The books here all capture things that make our society beautifully textured, diverse, and resilient.
Thanks to this book, I know that a great biography can also serve as a penetrating lens into an era. Yes, this is a book about Janis Joplin, but I do not value it because I care particularly much about the tragic specifics of her life, as much as I respect her music.
I love this book because it serves as a deep dive into the links between the often tritely-considered 1960s triumvirate: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Echols does not lightly throw around the word “counterculture”—that’s a big pet peeve of mine—but takes the reader on a tour of the making of a clear and specific cultural divide that’s still very much with us today.
No mistake, though; it is also an empathetic tale of a sensitive and era-defining musician.
The undisputed queen of sex, drugs and rock n' roll was also the voice of a generation who, when she overdosed on heroin at the age of twenty-seven in October 1970; became the posthumous icon of bad girl femininity for millions around the world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews Echols renders Joplin in all her complexity, revealing how this sweet-voiced girl from Texas recreated herself, first as a gravely-voiced bluesy folksinger, and then as rock n' roll's first female superstar. Echols examines the roots of her musicianship and her efforts to probe the outer limits of life; declaring herself the…
I’m a science fiction writer and academic who is interested in the big themes that challenge us as individuals and as a civilisation. My recent writing explores the representation of disability in science fiction. I want to create characters who readers can identify with and who provide different perspectives on the fictional future I am writing about. These characters are not trying to overcome any limitations, they live and accept who and what they are as we all do. The writers and stories I have chosen in this list do the same, showing us something about the human condition that we may not have thought about before.
This brilliant collection of interlinked urban fantasy short stories makes use of a variety of magical devices to change the lives of the featured characters. Each story is from a different character viewpoint, each character connected with the others in some way, and each story moves the narrative forwards to its heartfelt and dramatic conclusion.
Turner brings together a group of young, and young-at-heart, individuals all attempting to find themselves, and struggling with the circumstances they are in. Gradually, as the narrative progresses, they discover each other and help each other towards a powerful and profound intervention that showcases the best of human kindness, community, and acceptance.
This book moved me. After going through the different character stories building towards the end, the finale with an assemble moment of courage between many of the characters is such an empowering and cathartic moment. When I read it, I was listening in…
The Janus Cycle can best be described as gritty, surreal, urban fantasy. The over-arching story revolves around a nightclub called Janus, which is not merely a location but virtually a character in its own right. On the surface it appears to be a subcultural hub where the strange and disillusioned who feel alienated and oppressed by society escape to be free from convention; but underneath that facade is a surreal space in time where the very foundations of reality are twisted and distorted. But the special unique vibe of Janus is hijacked by a bandwagon of people who choose to…
When I think of who I am, as a writer and a human being, I remember the words of prolific Portland poet Dan Rapheal, who wrote the foreword to my book of poetry, Blue Reverie in Smoke: “...the reader must look carefully to get a full picture of the poet herself—tender, no nonsense, quietly observing and juggernauting to make things as she thinks they should be.” I’ve never forgotten Dan’s astute appraisal of me, and it surprised me. It seems that's how I’ve always been—someone who quietly observes, never unmoved by what I see, just trying to make sense of it, sometimes successful in that endeavor, and oftentimes, not successful at all.
American Junkie is a brutally honest tour de force you will never forget! The life of a young and intelligent musician with the promise of success in the 1990s Seattle Grunge scene slowly morphs into the sad reality of a man slipping into addiction and melancholy. In this memoir, Hansen struggles, but does find that his humanity is tied up in more than just addiction. Hansen was a gentleman heroin dealer, not a thug or bully.He mixed with celebrities and those unseen ghosts of the street that end up unnamed and forgotten. He had a code of ethics he lived by. Cleverly written in intimate second-person narrative voice, I loved this book because as you read, you are at once a part of Hansen’s story and in the end, you feel moved by his honesty and the unsparing way he shares the details of his life. When his final…
A non-stop trip into one man's land of desperate addicts, failed punk bands, and brushes with sad fame, as he sells drugs during the Seattle grunge years.
In American Junkie, Tom Hansen maps his heroin addiction, from the promise of a young life to the prison of a mattress, from budding musician to broken down junkie, drowning in syringes and cigarette butts, shooting heroin into wounds the size of softballs, and ultimately, a ride to a hospital for a six-month stay and a painful self-discovery that cuts down to the bone. Through it all he never really loses his step,…
I became obsessed with motorcycles at an early age, taking a six hundred mile cross-country tour to Cornwall as soon as I’d bought a moped at sixteen, working as a London dispatch rider, and then building my first chopper in my (upstairs) university bedroom and have been fascinated by what I’ve seen over the years of the ‘club life.’ Whatever you think about outlaw biker clubs, there’s no denying it’s a serious lifestyle choice involving real commitment and having serious consequences, but it wasn’t a subject being addressed with serious fiction. So I set out to explore this world and what it would mean to be involved.
The books I’m recommending have all been key sources of insight in differing ways into the realities of the club worlds and cultures. This is a definite recommendation as one of the best “informed outsider’s” overviews I found.
It’s something of a rarity in the outlaw book world being a book by what seems to be a very well-informed and connected outsider (although I understand there has also been criticism of the content) which strives and manages to present a view that seems both balanced and nuanced. I like it because it doesn’t whitewash, nor does it condemn, instead it tries to show and explain.
Australia has a strong bikie culture that draws on a long tradition of ‘mateship’ and this book gives a glimpse behind the scenes of the rules and rituals of club membership, as well as the history of clubs in Australia.
"If it's a good ride, there's nothing like it...you and the machine become one...It gets to the point on the edge of a hard ride where there is a balance between taking your machine further and a fear of dying. Managing that space is real freedom". Riding like there's no tomorrow on the open road, the wind in your face, handling a powerful and responsive machine - you can't get that sort of freedom in a car. Bikies consider themselves "the last free people in society", unconstrained by the regulations that rule ordinary citizens. And they guard their privacy jealously.…
PoppyHarp has at its heart the mystery of a forgotten children’s TV show from the 70s, so I wanted to share books that explore a similar idea–the fiction in fiction–be it an invented book, movie, or TV show that drives the narrative in some way. These five books all feature the enigmatic quality of something lost or some kind of age-old mystery waiting to be unraveled by its protagonists. They are also five books that I absolutely adore.
I absolutely fell for and into this seductive and sublimely entertaining book about a journalist investigating the enigma of Stanislas Cordova, an infamous and reclusive horror movie director. Nobody knows where he is or even if he’s still alive.
The invention of Cordova’s legend in the book is inspired; I love how Pessl builds layers of fake pop culture references and internet rabbit holes that feel so real you can almost hear the flicker of celluloid of one of Cordova’s movies playing out in your head. Even years after reading this book, I still recall it vividly in my mind’s eye.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Cosmopolitan • Kirkus Reviews • BookPage
A page-turning thriller for readers of Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, and Stieg Larsson, Night Film tells the haunting story of a journalist who becomes obsessed with the mysterious death of a troubled prodigy—the daughter of an iconic, reclusive filmmaker.
On a damp October night, beautiful young Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances…
I have lived in Japan for the last 30 years but my love for manga, anime, and games is much older and dates back to when UFO Robot Grendizer was first shown on Italian TV a fateful summer evening in 1978. Many years later, I was able to turn my passion for all things Japanese into a job and now I regularly write about politics, society, sports, travel, and culture in all its forms. However, I often go back to my first love and combine walking, urban exploration, and my otaku cravings into looking for new stores and visiting manga and anime locations in and around Tokyo.
Patrick Galbraith is arguably one of the leading experts on all things otaku. He has written dozens of article and essays and a few books on the subject, and choosing one to showcase here was not easy. The Moe Manifestois not an entry-level work; it’s for hardcore fans who want to dive headfirst into the otaku rabbit hole. Even I often consult it for inspiration when I write about Japanese subcultures.
The book’s main selling point – especially if you can’t read Japanese – is that Galbraith has assembled a unique lineup of experts (university professors, social and cultural critics, writers, illustrators and other assorted creatives) that he has extensively interviewed about different aspects of otaku culture. There’s a lot of serious food for thought here.
Moe is a huge cultural phenomenon and one of the driving forces behind the enormous success of Japanese anime and manga--not just in Japan but now throughout the world.
In Japan, avid fans of manga comics, anime films and video games use the term Moe to refer to the strong sense of emotional attachment they feel for their favorite characters. These fans have a powerful desire to protect and nurture the youthful, beautiful and innocent characters they adore--like Sagisawa Moe in Dinosaur Planet and Tomoe Hotaru in Sailor Moon. They create their own websites, characters, stories, discussion groups, toys and…
