Linda Williams – författare

“A splendiferous Halloween story.” —The Horn Book

“A great purchase for Halloween or any time of year.” —School Library Journal (starred review)

Once upon a time, there was a little old lady who was not afraid of anything! But one autumn night, while walking in the woods, the little old lady heard . . . clomp, clomp, shake, shake, clap, clap.

And the little old lady who was not afraid of anything had the scare of her life! With bouncy refrains, this is a fun and timeless Halloween story.

Because it will take an overall introductory view of nanoscience and nanotechnology, it is ideal as a supplemental textbook, or as a general reference for policy makers, engineers, and research technicians, among others.

The tried and true Demystified format will be employed, along with wonderful icons to help point out particularly interesting and important ideas.

Key features

A PROVEN formula for mastering CHEMISTRY

Trying to understand chemistry but feel like the information's just not bonding with your brain? Here's your solution. Chemistry Demystified, Second Edition, helps you grasp both fundamental and complex concepts with ease.

Written in a step-by-step format, this practical guide first covers atomic theory, elements, symbols, and the Periodic Table of the Elements. The book then delves into solids, liquids, gases, solutions, orbitals, chemical bonds, acids, and bases. Electrochemistry, thermodynamics, biochemistry, and organic, environmental, and nuclear chemistry are discussed. In-depth examples, detailed illustrations, and worked-out problems make it easy to understand the material, and end-of-chapter quizzes and a final exam help reinforce learning.

It's a no-brainer! You'll learn about:

Simple enough for a beginner, but challenging enough for an advanced student, Chemistry Demystified, Second Edition, helps you master this fascinating subject.

How new media and visual artists provide alternative ways for understanding and visualizing the entanglements of media and the environment in the Asia-Pacific.

Images of environmental disaster and degradation have become part of our everyday media diet. This visual culture focusing on environmental deterioration represents a wider recognition of the political, economic, and cultural forces that are responsible for our ongoing environmental crisis. And yet efforts to raise awareness about environmental issues through digital and visual media are riddled with irony, because the resource extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and waste associated with digital devices contribute to environmental damage and climate change. Screen Ecologies examines the relationship of media, art, and climate change in the Asia-Pacific region—a key site of both environmental degradation and the production and consumption of climate-aware screen art and media.

Screen Ecologies shows how new media and visual artists provide alternative ways for understanding the entanglements of media and the environment in the Asia-Pacific. It investigates such topics as artists'' exploration of alternative ways to represent the environment; regional stories of media innovation and climate change; the tensions between amateur and professional art; the emergence of biennials, triennials, and new arts organizations; the theme of water in regional art; new models for networked collaboration; and social media''s move from private to public realms. A generous selection of illustrations shows a range of artist''s projects.

“Contemporary American Cinema offers a fresh and sometimes revisionist look at developments in the American film industry from the 1960s to the present … Readers will find it lively and provocative.”Chuck Maland, University of Tennessee, USA.

“Contemporary American Cinema is the book on the subject that undergraduate classes have been waiting for … Comprehensive, detailed, and intelligently organized [and] written in accessible and compelling prose … Contemporary American Cinema will be embraced by instructors and students alike.”Charlie Keil, Director, Cinema Studies Program, University of Toronto, Canada.

“Contemporary American Cinema usefully gathers together a range of materials that provide a valuable resource for students and scholars. It is also a pleasure to read.” Hilary Radner, University of Otago, New Zealand.

“Contemporary American Cinema deepens our knowledge of American cinema since the 1960s. … This is an important collection that will be widely used in university classrooms.”Lee Grieveson, University College London, UK.

“Contemporary American Cinema is a clear-sighted and tremendously readable anthology, mapping the terrain of post-sixties US cinema with breadth and critical verve.” Paul Grainge, University of Nottingham, UK.

“This collection of freshly written essays by leading specialists in the field will most likely be one of the most important works of reference for students and film scholars for years to come.”Liv Hausken, University of Oslo, Norway.

Contemporary American Cinema is the first comprehensive introduction to American cinema since 1960. The book is unique in its treatment of both Hollywood, alternative and non-mainstream cinema. Critical essays from leading film scholars are supplemented by boxed profiles of key directors, producers and actors; key films and key genres; and statistics from the cinema industry.

Illustrated in colour and black and white with film stills, posters and production images, the book has two tables of contents allowing students to use the book chronologically, decade-by-decade, or thematically by subject. Designed especially for courses in cinema studies and film studies, cultural studies and American studies, Contemporary American Cinema features a glossary of key terms, fully referenced resources and suggestions for further reading, questions for class discussion, and a comprehensive filmography.

Individual chapters include:

The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the American conscience through popular entertainment, and today they exert a powerful and disturbing influence on Americans'' understanding of race. So argues Linda Williams in this boldly inquisitive book, where she probes the bitterly divisive racial sentiments aroused by such recent events as O. J. Simpson''s criminal trial. Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization. The racial sympathies and hostilities that surfaced during the trial of the police in the beating of Rodney King and in the O. J. Simpson murder trial are grounded in the melodramatic forms of Uncle Tom''s Cabin and The Birth of a Nation. Williams finds that Stowe''s beaten black man and Griffith''s endangered white woman appear repeatedly throughout popular entertainment, promoting interracial understanding at one moment, interracial hate at another. The black and white racial melodrama has galvanized emotions and fueled the importance of new media forms, such as serious, "integrated" musicals of stage and film, including The Jazz Singer and Show Boat. It also helped create a major event out of the movie Gone With the Wind, while enabling television to assume new moral purpose with the broadcast of Roots. Williams demonstrates how such developments converged to make the televised race trial a form of national entertainment. When prosecutor Christopher Darden accused Simpson''s defense team of "playing the race card," which ultimately trumped his own team''s gender card, he feared that the jury''s sympathy for a targeted black man would be at the expense of the abused white wife. The jury''s verdict, Williams concludes, was determined not so much by facts as by the cultural forces of racial melodrama long in the making. Revealing melodrama to be a key element in American culture, Williams argues that the race images it has promoted are deeply ingrained in our minds and that there can be no honest discussion about race until Americans recognize this predicament.

The essays in this volume move beyond feminist debates and distinctions between a “good” erotica and a “bad” hard core. Contributors examine varieties of pornography from the tradition of the soft-core pin-up through the contemporary hard-core tradition of straight, gay, and lesbian videos and dvds to the burgeoning phenomenon of pornography on the Internet. They explore, as examples of the genre, individual works as divergent as The Starr Report, the pirated Tommy Lee/Pamela Anderson honeymoon video, and explicit Japanese “ladies’ comics” consumed by women. They also probe difficult issues such as the sexualization of race and class and the relationship of pornography to the avant-garde. To take pornography seriously as an object of analysis also means teaching it. Porn Studies thus includes a useful annotated bibliography of readings and archival sources important to the study of pornography as a cultural form.

Contributors. Heather Butler, Rich Cante, Jake Gerli, Minette Hillyer, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Despina Kakoudaki, Franklin Melendez, Ara Osterweil, Zabet Patterson, Constance Penley, Angelo Restivo, Eric Schaefer, Michael Sicinski, Deborah Shamoon, Maria St. John, Tom Waugh, Linda Williams

Combining stories of her own coming of age as a moviegoer with film history, cultural history, and readings of significant films, Williams presents a fascinating history of the on-screen kiss, a look at the shift from adolescent kisses to more grown-up displays of sex, and a comparison of the “tasteful” Hollywood sexual interlude with sexuality as represented in sexploitation, Blaxploitation, and avant-garde films. She considers Last Tango in Paris and Deep Throat, two 1972 films unapologetically all about sex; In the Realm of the Senses, the only work of 1970s international cinema that combined hard-core sex with erotic art; and the sexual provocations of the mainstream movies Blue Velvet and Brokeback Mountain. She describes art films since the 1990s, in which the sex is aggressive, loveless, or alienated. Finally, Williams reflects on the experience of screening sex on small screens at home rather than on large screens in public. By understanding screening sex as both revelation and concealment, Williams has written the definitive study of sex at the movies.

Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Porn Studies, also published by Duke University Press; Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson; Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film; and Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.”

A John Hope Franklin Center Book

November

424 pages129 illustrations6x9 trim sizeISBN 0-8223-0-8223-4285-5paper, $24.95ISBN 0-8223-0-8223-4263-4library cloth edition, $89.95ISBN 978-0-8223-4285-4paper, $24.95ISBN 978-0-8223-4263-2library cloth edition, $89.95