{"title":"Object Lessons","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the fascinating Object Lessons series, where everyday items become portals to unexpected histories and cultural insights. Perfect for curious minds seeking unique perspectives.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"ocean-book-steve-mentz-9781501348631","title":"Ocean","description":"Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.   The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the natural environment. Our engagement with the world's oceans can be destructive, as with today’s deluge of plastic trash and acidification, but the mismatch between small bodies and vast seas also emphasizes the frailty and resilience of human experience.   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Humans have been replacing and improving upon the real thing for millennia – from wooden toes found on Egyptian mummies to the Luxor pyramid in Las Vegas. So why do people have such disdain for so-called “fakes”?   Kati Stevens's Fake discusses the strange history of imitations, as well as our ever-changing psychological and socioeconomic relationships with them. After all, fakes aren't going anywhere; they seem to be going everywhere.   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A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver’s license has long  symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car  travel and whose vastness rivals continents. It is youth’s pass to  regulated vice—cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints,  music venues, guns. In its more recent history, the license has become  increasingly associated with freedom’s flipside: screening. The  airport’s heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws.  Federally mandated, anti-terrorist driver’s license re-designs. The  driver’s license encapsulates the contradictory values and practices of  contemporary American culture—freedom and security, mobility and  checkpoints, self-definition and standardization, democracy and  exclusion, superficiality and intimacy, the stable self and the self in  flux.  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We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, laborers, anarchists, rappers, babies in onesies, and anyone who’s ever grabbed a hoodie on a chilly day. Alison Kinney’s Hood explores the material and symbolic vibrancy of this everyday garment and political semaphore, which often protects the powerful at the expense of the powerless—with deadly results. Kinney considers medieval clerics and the Klan, anti-hoodie campaigns and the Hooded Man of Abu Ghraib, the Inquisition and the murder of Trayvon Martin, uncovering both the hooded perpetrators of violence and the hooded victims in their sights.  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You can’t think about travel without thinking about luggage. And baggage has baggage. Susan Harlan takes readers on a journey with the suitcases that support, accessorize, and accompany our lives. Along the way, she shows how the materials of travel — the carry-ons, totes, trunks, and train cases of the past and present — have stories to tell about displacement, home, gender, class, consumption, and labor.   Luggage considers bags as carefully curated microcosms of our domestic and professional selves, charting the evolution of travel across literature, film, and art.  A simple suitcase, it turns out, contains more than you might think.    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Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the  networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything from toys  to weapons. And yet, as broadly defined as they are, the word “drone”  fills many of us with a sense of technological dread. Adam Rothstein cuts  through the mystery, the unknown, and the political posturing, and talks  about what drones really are: what technologies are out there, and  what’s coming next; how drones are talked about, and how they are  represented in popular culture.  It turns out that drones are not as  scary as they appear—but they are more complicated than you might  expect. Drones reveal the strange relationships that humans are forming  with their new technologies.  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For as long as people have traveled to distant lands, they have brought home objects to certify the journey. More than mere merchandise, these travel souvenirs take on a personal and cultural meaning that goes beyond the object itself. Drawing on several millennia of examples—from the relic-driven quests of early Christians, to the mass-produced tchotchkes that line the shelves of a Disney gift shop—travel writer Rolf Potts delves into a complicated history that explores issues of authenticity, cultural obligation, market forces, human suffering, and self-presentation. Souvenirs are shown for what they really are: not just objects, but personalized forms of folk storytelling that enable people to make sense of the world and their place in it.'  Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.  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And why aren’t there as many examples of people of color in whiteface? This book explains what blackface is, why it occurred, and what its legacies are in the 21st century. There is a filthy and vile thread—sometimes it’s tied into a noose—that connects the first performances of Blackness on English stages, the birth of blackface minstrelsy, contemporary performances of Blackness, and anti-Black racism. Blackface examines that history and provides hope for a future with new performance paradigms.   Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49739075748113,"sku":"NGR9781501374012","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50119045677329,"sku":"GOR011553645","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50386296766737,"sku":"CIN150137401XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51417117196561,"sku":"CIN150137401XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/150137401X.jpg?v=1751180336"},{"product_id":"glitter-book-nicole-seymour-9781501373763","title":"Glitter","description":"Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.  Glitter reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Nicole Seymour describes how glitter’s consumption and status have shifted across centuries—from ancient cosmetic to queer activist tool, environmental pollutant to biodegradable accessory—along with its composition, which has variously included insects, glass, rocks, salt, sugar, plastic, and cellulose. Through a variety of examples, from glitterbombing to glitter beer, Seymour shows how this substance reflects the entanglements of consumerism, emotion, environmentalism, and gender\/sexual identity.   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In this postmodern age where everything seems to be constantly shifting, truth is regularly questioned. One might refer to Plato's Allegory of the Cave to explain shifting baseline syndrome. Space Craft attempts to describe the moment and to reassure Homo sapiens by responding to Peter Sloterdijk's essay Deep Observation in his book What Happened in the Twentieth Century? In that essay, Sloterdijk states, The creation of space stations represents a dramatic break in the history of human self-relations. . . . To have a conscience means to know that one is observed from a deep off-center position and pervaded by it. Rich Murphy's poems take the idea of seeing Earth as a space station or spaceship and stretch the metaphor to imagine a possible future with a lens for time and space. The idea is one in which space and time, the environment on the spaceship Earth, need crafting. His poems name, and in that embrace they find a way for poetry. They also attempt to embrace a way for a person, for Homo sapiens, without corporate capitalism and without Harari's Homo Deus threats. The poems imagine the problems with things as they are and imagine possible solutions. The poetics and resulting poetry are what Blake called firm persuasion.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49740784632081,"sku":"NGR9781501375804","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50470103843089,"sku":"GOR013073280","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51031166451985,"sku":"NIN9781501375804","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51612538667281,"sku":"CIN1501375806G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1501375806.jpg?v=1751243364"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-ie\/collections\/object-lessons-book-series.oembed?page=6","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}