Beyond the Neon Lights

Author: Hanchao Lu
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052093167X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Book Description
How did ordinary people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? How did the citizens of Shanghai cope with the epic upheavals—revolution, war, and again revolution—that shook their lives? Even after decades of scholarship devoted to modern Chinese history, our understanding of the daily lives of the common people of China remains sketchy and incomplete. In this carefully researched study, Hanchao Lu weaves rich documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in China's largest and most complex city in the first half of this century.

Beyond the Neon Lights

Author: Hanchao Lu
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520215641
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Book Description
"Today, in the post-Mao, post-Deng era, China faces a vigorous resurgence of paradoxes similar to those that surfaced at the end of the imperial era. At the same time, the pragmatism of the Chinese people endures, suggesting that the lessons of the past have broad implications for urban China and urban-rural relations in China at the beginning of the third millennium."--BOOK JACKET.

Beneath the Neon

Author: Matthew O'Brien
Publisher: Huntington Press Inc
ISBN: 0929712390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas chronicles O’Brien’s adventures in subterranean Las Vegas. He follows the footsteps of a psycho killer. He braces against a raging flood. He parties with naked crackheads. He learns how to make meth, that art is most beautiful where it’s least expected, that in many ways, he prefers underground Las Vegas to aboveground Las Vegas, and that there are no pots of gold under the neon rainbow.

My Week at the Blue Angel

Author: Matthew O'Brien
Publisher: Huntington Press Inc
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
A savage journey into the heart of Hunter S. Thompson's Las Vegas with the Good Doctor as tour guide. A Lord-of-the-Rings-like adventure in the city's underground flood channels. A seven-day stay at a seedy motel on East Fremont Street. The stories in My Week at the Blue Angel aren't about Steve Wynn, Cirque du Soleil, or how to play poker, and they aren't set in Caesars Palace, XS Nightclub, or a 2,000-seat showroom. They're about prostitutes, ex-cons, and the homeless, and they're set under Caesars Palace and in trailer parks and weekly motels. In this creative nonfiction collection, Matthew O'Brien--author of Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas--and veteran photographer Bill Hughes show a side of the city rarely seen. A side beyond the neon lights, themed facades, and motel-room doors. A side beyond the barbwire fences, No Trespassing signs, and midnight shadows.

Agatha of Little Neon

Author: Claire Luchette
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721300
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree “An enchanting, sparkling book about the many meanings of sisterhood.” —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29 Claire Luchette's debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don’t), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life. But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. They take over the care of a halfway house, where they live alongside their charges, such as the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill. Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she has to reckon all on her own with what she sees and feels. Who will she be if she isn’t with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home. Or has she just been hiding? Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette’s Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make.

Color and Light

Author: James Gurney
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 0740797719
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
Unlike many other art books only give recipes for mixing colors or describe step-by-step painting techniques, *Color and Light* answers the questions that realist painters continually ask, such as: "What happens with sky colors at sunset?", "How do colors change with distance?", and "What makes a form look three-dimensional?" Author James Gurney draws on his experience as a plain-air painter and science illustrator to share a wealth of information about the realist painter's most fundamental tools: color and light. He bridges the gap between abstract theory and practical knowledge for traditional and digital artists of all levels of experience.

Dangerous Pleasures

Author: Gail Hershatter
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520204386
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 640

Book Description
In the past decade, as prostitution once again has become a recognized feature of Chinese society, it has been incorporated into a larger public discussion about what kind of modernity China should seek and what kind of sex and gender arrangements should characterize that modernity. Prostitutes, like every other non-elite group, did not record their own lives.

Shanghai Modern

Author: Leo Ou-fan Lee
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674805518
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Book Description
In the midst of ChinaÕs wild rush to modernize, a surprising note of reality arises: Shanghai, it seems, was once modern indeed, a pulsing center of commerce and art in the heart of the twentieth century. This book immerses us in the golden age of Shanghai urban culture, a modernity at once intrinsically Chinese and profoundly anomalous, blending new and indigenous ideas with those flooding into this Òtreaty portÓ from the Western world. A preeminent specialist in Chinese studies, Leo Ou-fan Lee gives us a rare wide-angle view of Shanghai culture in the making. He shows us the architecture and urban spaces in which the new commercial culture flourished, then guides us through the publishing and filmmaking industries that nurtured a whole generation of artists and established a bold new style in urban life known as modeng. In the work of six writers of the time, particularly Shi Zhecun, Mu Shiying, and Eileen Chang, Lee discloses the reflection of ShanghaiÕs urban landscapeÑforeign and familiar, oppressive and seductive, traditional and innovative. This work acquires a broader historical and cosmopolitan context with a look at the cultural links between Shanghai and Hong Kong, a virtual genealogy of Chinese modernity from the 1930s to the present day.

Shanghai Homes

Author: Jie Li
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538170
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories, artifacts, and gossip—Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century. First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former "International Settlement." Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai's labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city's population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.

Neon Gods

Author: Katee Robert
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
ISBN: 9781728231730
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
Society darling Persephone Dimitriou wants nothing to do with her mother's ambitions. She's biding her time until she's able to leave the ultra-modern city of Olympus and start her doctorate degree. The one thing she never planned on? Her mother ambushing her with an engagement to Zeus--a man with more than a few dead wives in his past. Persephone will do anything to escape that fate...even flee the sparkling upper city and make a devil's bargain with a man she once believed was a myth. Hades has spent his life in the shadows, and he has no intention of stepping into the light. Not even for the woman who flees into his territory as if the very hounds of hell are on her heels. But when he finds that Persephone can offer a little slice of the revenge he's spent his entire life craving? It's all the excuse he needs to agree to help her--for a price. She'll be his for the summer, and then he'll see her safely out of Olympus and away from her mother and Zeus. Hades and Persephone's deal might seem simple enough, but they both quickly realize it's anything but. With every breathless night spent with Hades, Persephone wonders at her ability to leave him behind. And Hades? Now that he has a taste for Persephone, he's willing to go to war with Olympus itself to keep her...