The Sky Is Falling by Peter Biskind

The Sky Is Falling by Peter Biskind

A Sunday Times (London), Best Book of 2018

A thoughtful, entertaining, and occasionally profound critical study of the texts that entertain, move and, sometimes, shape us.
--The Spectator (London)

A bold, witty, and brilliantly argued analysis of the role pop culture has played in the rise of American extremism.
--Ruth Reichl

You'll never look at your favorite movies and TV shows the same way again. And you shouldn't.
--Steven Soderbergh

A bestselling cultural journalist shows how pop culture prepared Americans to embrace extreme politics

Almost everything has been invoked to account for Trump's victory and the rise of the alt-right, from job loss to racism to demography--everything, that is, except popular culture. In The Sky Is Falling bestselling cultural journalist Peter Biskind dives headlong into two decades of popular culture--from superhero franchises such as the Dark Knight, X-Men, and the Avengers and series like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones to thrillers like Homeland and 24--and emerges to argue that these shows are saturated with the values that are currently animating our extreme politics.

Where once centrist institutions and their agents--cops and docs, soldiers and scientists, as well as educators, politicians, and experts of every stripe--were glorified by mainstream Hollywood, the heroes of today's movies and TV, whether far right or far left, have overthrown this quaint ideological consensus. Many of our shows dramatize extreme circumstances--an apocalypse of one sort or another--that require extreme behavior to deal with, behavior such as revenge, torture, lying, and even the vigilante violence traditionally discouraged in mainstream entertainment.

In this bold, provocative, and witty investigation, Biskind shows how extreme culture now calls the shots. It has become, in effect, the new mainstream.

Biskind, Peter: - Peter Biskind edited the bestselling My Lunches with Orson, a collection of conversations with Orson Welles, and is author of numerous bestsellers, including Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures, as well as his seminal work on films of the fifties, Seeing is Believing. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. He lives in upstate New York.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781620974292
ISBN 10	1620974290
Title	The Sky Is Falling
Author	Peter Biskind
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	The New Press
Year published	2018-10-25
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable