New Communications Books: March 2023

This book provides nuanced analysis of the broadcasts and sheds light on the multifaceted role the radios played during the Cold War, ranging from instruments of U.S. Cold War policy to repositories of independent Russian culture, literature, philosophy, religion, and the arts.

The changes taking place in this one Pennsylvania community are being repeated across the United States as hundreds of local newspapers close, creating news deserts and leaving citizens with little access to reliable local journalism. The obituary for local news, however, does not have to read all bad: Even in the bleakest places, citizens are discovering what happens in their communities and becoming gatekeepers to information for the people around them

This book reveals how innovative advertising techniques and seductive, state-of-the-art packaging made radium a routine part of American life, shaping scientific knowledge about it and the identities of those who consumed it.

This collection explores the processes through which film stars/actors become associated with the cult label, from Bill Murray to Ruth Gordon and Ingrid Pitt.

This book offers the first real look at this grassroots movement, including exclusive interviews with #AltGov members as they struggled to work with others who had a spectrum of goals and motivations. The #AltGov movement shows us that social media is more than a megaphone--it's a way for everyday people to live out the democratic ideals that shaped their country.

Layered with moments of tenderness and humor, this book is a masterful chronicle of war and murder; extreme poverty and suffering alongside repellent wealth and indulgence; wholesale larceny and ruling-class corruption--much of which escaped the scrutiny of other journalists. Readers who appreciate real-life historic drama will be enthralled.

Drawing on a multiyear project that surveyed more than 3,500 teens, this book explains that young people need empathy, not exasperated eye-rolling. Adults should understand the complicated nature of teens' online life rather than issue commands, and they should normalize--let teens know that their challenges are shared by others--without minimizing or dismissing.

This book investigates the dynamic interplay between local Hungarian organizations, international humanitarian donors, and the child relief recipients. In tracing transnational relief encounters, Budapest's Children reveals how intertwined postwar internationalism and nationalism were and how child relief reinforced revisionist claims and global inequalities that still reverberate today.

This book describes in detail the various tools and tactics used by mercenaries to exploit the uncertainties, fears, and biases of their targets including bots, deep-fake images, fake news, provocation, deception and trolling. It also also shows how they weaponize conspiracy theories and disinformation to manipulate people's beliefs and perceptions. 

This book tells the story of rap's emergence on New York City's airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hop's performance culture to radio. Initially, artists and DJs brought their live practice to radio by buying time on low-bandwidth community stations and building new communities around their shows.

This book explores snapshots of people posing in front of their television sets in the 1950s through the early 1970s. Like today's selfies, TV snapshots were a popular photographic practice through which people visualized their lives in an increasingly mediated culture.

This book presents over two dozen candid dialogues with black jazz critics and journalists who: discuss the obstacles to access for black jazz journalists, outline how they contend with the world of jazz writing dominated by white men, and point out that these racial disparities are not confined to jazz but hamper their efforts at writing about other music genres as well.

This book details the blueprint Nixon set for using television to achieve political goals. Presidents have often used innovative media as strategic methods of communication and public relations. The author argues that Nixon pioneered television media, using it consistently to connect with the American public.

Using Amish Mafiaas a window into the interplay between the real and the imagined, this book dissects the peculiar appeals and potential dangers of deception in reality TV and popular entertainment.

This book traces the histories of middle-class women--rural and urban, white and Black, married and unmarried--who used public and private institutions of print to tell their stories, expand their horizons, and further their ambitions. Drawing from a diverse range of examples, it introduces readers to women who ran branch libraries and library schools in Chicago and Madison, built radio empires from their midwestern farms, formed reading clubs, and published newsletters.

Transcending the constraints of newsprint while facing competition from other media, Sunday editions borrowed forms from and eventually partnered with magazines, film, and radio, inviting people to not only read but watch and listen. This drive for mass circulation transformed metropolitan news reading into a national pastime, a change that encouraged newspapers to bundle Sunday supplements into a panorama of popular culture that offered something for everyone.