Author: By Daniel Horowitz How is it that American intellectuals, who had for 150 years worried about the deleterious effects of affluence, more recently began to emphasize pleasure, playfulness, and symbolic exchange as the essence of a vibrant consumer culture? The New York intellectuals of the 1930s rejected any serious or analytical discussion, let alone appreciation, of popular culture, which they viewed as morally questionable. Beginning in the 1950s, however, new perspectives emerged outside and within the United States that challenged this dominant thinking. Consuming Pleasures reveals how a group of writers shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate.Historian Daniel Horowitz traces the emergence of these new perspectives through a series of intellectual biographies. With writers and readers from the United States at the center, the story begins in Western Europe in the early 1950s and ends in the early 1970s, when American intellectuals increasingly appreciated the rich inventiveness of popular culture. Drawing on sources both familiar and newly discovered, this transnational intellectual history plays familiar works off each other in fresh ways. Among those whose work is featured are Jurgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Walter Benjamin, C. L. R. James, David Riesman and Marshall McLuhan, Richard Hoggart, members of London's Independent Group, Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannel, Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans, Susan Sontag, Reyner Banham, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Author: Michael S. Bryant The scholarship devoted to the complicity of German physicians in the Holocaust is rich and detailed, but there remains, as Michael Bryant demonstrates, still more to learn. It is well established that the techniques employed by the Nazis to exterminate Jews and others in concentration camps were first applied to people in state hospitals who were deemed mentally disabled or terminally ill. What has been less thoroughly investigated is the postwar response of both the Allies and the Germans to these atrocities. Bryant fills the gap with a systematic account of the judicial proceedings against those charged with killing the disabled. New England Journal of Medicine

Author: John Wesley Masland The book description for Soldiers and Scholars is currently unavailable.

Author: Babcock, John B. By mid-1944, the U.S. Army was facing a critical shortage of the most important commodity in any war, the common foot soldier. Higher-than-expected casualties during the liberation of France had forced the Army to comb its ranks for replacement infantrymen. Plucked in 1944 from the safety and privilege of the Army Specialized Training Program (the World War II version of the college deferment of the Vietnam years), twenty-two-year-old John Babcock suddenly found himself an infantry private headed to Europe. Raised in an upper-middle-class family, this sensitive and literate youth was thrust into a group of coarse, uneducated, and sometimes brutal draftees who were headed to the 78th Infantry Division as replacements. Babcock demonstrates that the ogreatest generationo was not always that. Instead, it was like any other cohortufull of liars, cowards, and ordinary men who simply wanted to stay alive and go home. Babcock lets us see the war through his eyesujust over the rim of the foxhole. Undergoing his baptism of fire in the Battle of the Bulge, he endures the trials of combat, advancing through attrition to become the senior sergeant in the company. This ordinary enlisted infantryman in ojust another combat divisiono takes the reader from infantry basic training and seven months of combat to postwar occupation duty in Germany and back home. It is one infantry riflemans story rather than an account of how his division fit into the grander scheme of the war in Europeuthough the author relates to that by providing the reader with a roadmap of dates and locations taken. Babcock offers an intimate taste of combat, casualties, how he fought, and with which weapons (in clear ociviliano language), and both the heroism and cowardice of his fellow soldiers. Published in cooperation with the Association of the United States Army, it is a gripping account of how an ordinary American boy felt and experienced the so-called good war.