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TV

Series: Object Lessons
3.75 goodreads logo

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( 32 ratings, 17 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
In TV, Susan Bordo explores the evolution of television over 75 years, weaving personal memoir with social and political history. The book examines how TV has become a constant cultural companion, shaping society from the era of black-and-white news broadcasts and idyllic sitcoms to the rise of reality TV and influential series like Mad Men and Killing Eve. It reveals how television has reflected and influenced political discourse, social norms, and our understanding of reality.
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Format: Paperback / softback
$2199
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

Ideal for readers interested in media studies, cultural history, and the arts, as well as those curious about television's societal impact and evolution. Suitable for both scholars and general audiences fascinated by the intersection of politics, culture, and entertainment.

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"Personal memoir meets television history in a look back at how TV has changed, and how it has also changed us, over the past seven decades"--

Personal memoir meets television history in a look back at how TV has changed, and how it has also changed us, over the past seven decades.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Once upon a time, the news was only 15 minutes long and middle-class families huddled around a tiny black-and-white screen, TV dinners on their laps, awaiting weekly sitcoms that depicted an all-white world in which mum wore pearls and heels as she baked endless pies. If this seems a distant past, thatโ€™s a measure of just how much TV has changedโ€”and changed us.

Weaving together personal memoir, social and political history, and reflecting on key moments in the history of news broadcasting and prime time entertainment, Susan Bordo opens up the 75-year-old time-capsule that is TV and illustrates what a constant companion and dominant cultural force television has been, for good and for bad. From the McCarthy hearings and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet to Mad Men, Killing Eve, and the emergence of our first reality TV president, television has carried us through transformative times.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Series: Object Lessons

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  • Bicycle
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. These days the bicycle often appears as an interloper in a world constructed for cars. An almost miraculous 19th-century contraption, the bicycle promises to transform our lives and the world we live in, yet its time seems always yet-to-come or long-gone-by. Bicycle by...
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  • Rust
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Itโ€™s happening all the time, all around us. We cover it up. We ignore it. Rust takes on the many meanings of this oxidised substance, showing how technology bleeds into biology and ecology. Jean-Michel Rabatรฉ combines art, science, and autobiography to share his...
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  • Bookshelf
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Every shelf is different, and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop, while another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Bookshelf by writer and historian Lydia Pyne explores these differences...
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  • Burger
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The burger, long the All-American meal, is undergoing an identity crisis. From its shifting place in popular culture to efforts by investors such as Bill Gates to create the non-animal burger that can feed the world, the burgerโ€™s identity has become as malleable...
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  • Cigarette Lighter
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Smokers, survivalists, teenagers, collectorsโ€ฆ The cigarette lighter is a charged, complex, yet often entirely disposable object that moves across these various groups of people, acquiring and emitting different meanings while always supplying its primary function, that of ignition. While the lighter may seem...
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  • Earth
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In Earth, a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a โ€œblue marble,โ€ โ€œa blue pale dot,โ€ or, as Chaucer described it, โ€œthis litel spot of erthe,โ€ the...
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  • Egg
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. This book is about a strange objectโ€”strange in part because it is something that we all have been, and that many of us eat. Nicole Walker's Egg relishes in sharp juxtapositions of seemingly fanciful or repellent topics, so that reproductive science and gustatory...
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  • Eye Chart
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Desert nomads tested their vision by distinguishing a pair of stars. But we have since created more disquieting ways to test the strength of the eyes. Reading the eye chart is an exercise in failure, since it only gets interesting when you cannot...
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  • High Heel
    Best Fifteen Books of March 2019, Refinery29Best Nonfiction Books of 2019, Paste Magazine Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Fetishized, demonized, celebrated, and outlawed, the high heel is central to the iconography of modern womanhood. But are high heels good? Are they feminist? What does it mean for a...
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  • Hood
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, labourers, anarchists, rappers, babies in onesies, and anyone whoโ€™s ever grabbed a hoodie on a chilly day. Alison Kinneyโ€™s Hood explores the material and symbolic vibrancy of...
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  • Jet Lag
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Jet lag is a momentary condition resulting from the human body and its inner clock being pitched against the time-leaping effects of modern aviation. But more than that, it is a situation that explains time, technology, and the human body. Jet lag epitomises...
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  • Mushroom
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. They are the things we step on without noticing and the largest organisms on Earth. They are symbols of inexplicable growth and excruciating misery. They are grouped with plants, but they behave more like animals. In their inscrutability, mushrooms are wondrous organisms. The...
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Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Critics praise Bordo's engaging and insightful tribute to television as a cultural force. Jeff Jarvis highlights her wise and charming reflection on TV's impact on generations, while Katha Pollitt praises the book as a knowledgeable and entertaining analysis of TV's role in shaping politics, truth, and reality. Irish Tech News describes the book as entertaining, thought-provoking, and interesting.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781501362521

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 11 March 2021

Country: United States

Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 16.0mm

Width: 120.0mm

Height: 162.0mm

Weight: 180g

Pages: 192

About the Author

Susan Bordo is Professor Emerita at the University of Kentucky, USA, where she held the Otis A. Singletary Chair in Humanities. She has published many influential books, on subjects that range from femininity, masculinity, and the body (Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body and The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private) to Anne Boleyn (The Creation of Anne Boleyn) and, most recently, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, a play-by-play account of the gendered double-standards and stereotypes, political forces and media culture that contributed to Clinton's loss in the 2016 election (2017), and Imagine Bernie Sanders as a Woman and Other Writing on Politics and the Media 2016-2019 (2020.) Her widely cited books and articles are considered paradigms of accessible, interdisciplinary scholarship.

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