Author: Daniel Worden With the ascendancy of neoliberalism in American culture beginning in the 1960s, the political structures governing private lives became more opaque and obscure. Neoliberal Nonfictions argues that a new style of documentary art emerged to articulate the fissures between individual experience and reality in the era of finance capitalism. In this wide-ranging study, Daniel Worden touches on issues ranging from urban poverty and criminal justice to environmental collapse and international politics. He examines the impact of local struggles and global markets on music, from D. A. Pennebakers infamous Dylan documentary Dont Look Back to Kendrick Lamars breakthrough album Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City. He details the emergence of the hustler as an icon of neoliberal individualism in Jay-Zs autobiography Decoded, Alex Haleys Autobiography of Malcom X, and Hunter S. Thompsons gonzo journalism. He looks at how contemporary works such as Maggie Nelsons memoir The Red Parts and Taryn Simons photography series The Innocents challenge the moral simplifications of traditional true crime writing. In his conclusion, he explores the dominance of memoir as a literary mode in the neoliberal era, particularly focusing on works by Joan Didion and Dave Eggers.Documentary has become the aesthetic of our age, harnessing the irreconcilable distance between individual and society as a site for aesthetic experimentation across media, from journalism and photography to memoir, music, and film. Both a symptom of and a response to the emergence of economic neoliberalism, the documentary aesthetic is central to how we understand ourselves and our world today.

Author: Erwin H. Ackerknecht foreword and concluding essay by Charles E. Rosenberg bibliographic essay by Lisa Haushofer Humans have always become sick, suffered pain and disability, sought care and meaning; designated healers have always done their best with the time-bound intellectual tools at their disposal; one could only see what one was prepared to see. What professors professed was not the same as the everyday practice acted out at bedsides, whether in homes or, more recently, in hospitals. By reminding us of these stubborn realities, Ackerknecht offered a way of thinking about medicine that complicated but did not displace the standard history of Western medicine. It is this inclusive point of view that distinguished this Short History. While foregounding the intellectual and related clinical development of Western medicine, Ackerknecht sought, at the same time, to place it within a larger cultural, historicaland by implication, moralframework.Charles E. Rosenberg, Harvard University, author of Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now Erwin H. Ackerknechts A Short History of Medicine is a concise narrative, long appreciated by students in the history of medicine, medical students, historians, and medical professionals as well as all those seeking to understand the history of medicine. Covering the broad sweep of discoveries from parasitic worms to bacilli and x-rays, and highlighting physicians and scientists from Hippocrates and Galen to Pasteur, Koch, and Roentgen, Ackerknecht narrates Western and Eastern civilizations work at identifying and curing disease. He follows these discoveries from the library to the bedside, hospital, and laboratory, illuminating how basic biological sciences interacted with clinical practice over time. But his story is more than one of laudable scientific and therapeutic achievement. Ackerknecht also points toward the social, ecological, economic, and political conditions that shape the incidence of disease. Improvements in health, Ackerknecht argues, depend on more than laboratory knowledge: they also require that we improve the lives of ordinary men and women by altering social conditions such as poverty and hunger. This revised and expanded edition includes a new foreword and concluding biographical essay by Charles E. Rosenberg, Ackerknechts former student and a distinguished historian of medicine. A new bibliographic essay by Lisa Haushofer explores recent scholarship in the history of medicine.