Zane Grey was a disappointed aspirant to major league baseball and an unhappy dentist when he belatedly decided to take up writing at the age of thirty. He went on to become the most successful American author of the 1920s, a significant figure in the early development of the film industry, and a central player in the early popularity of the Western.

    

Thomas H. Pauly's work is the first full-length biography of Grey to appear in over thirty years. Using a hitherto unknown trove of letters and journals, including never-before-seen photographs of his adventures--both natural and amorous--Zane Grey has greatly enlarged and radically altered the current understanding of the superstar author, whose fifty-seven novels and one hundred and thirty movies heavily influenced the world's perception of the Old West.

Once a wildly popular form of Spanish entertainment, the zarzuela boasts a long history of bridging classical and popular art. Yet its contradictions make it a theatrical chameleon. Neither opera nor serious drama, the staging still requires trained singers and good actors. Neither purely folkloric nor high art, the music is too popular for some and too classical for others. 

Janet L. Sturman traces the zarzuela's colorful history from its origins as a Spanish court entertainment to Cuba's pivotal role in transmitting it to Latin America and the Caribbean. Ranging from Argentina, Mexico, and Puerto Rico to El Paso, Miami, and New York, Sturman draws distinctions among the ways various Spanish-speaking communities have reformulated zarzuela by combining the traditional model with local characters, music, dances, and politics. She also explores two theaters in New York, Repertorio Español and the Thalia Spanish Theatre, that have fostered the zarzuela by mounting innovative productions that cultivate both audiences and a network of donors. 

Vivid and revealing, Zarzuela recognizes the enduring cultural and social relevance of a genre at once resilient, adaptable, and temptingly elusive.

The inability of American society to tolerate the peculiar institutions embraced by Mormons was one of the major events in the religious history of nineteenth-century America. Zion in the Courts explores one aspect of this collision between the Mormons and the mainstream: the Mormons' efforts to establish their own court system--one appropriate to the distinctive political, social, and economic practices they envisioned as Zion--and the pressures applied by the federal legal system to bring them to heel.
 
This first paperback edition includes two new introductory pieces in which the authors discuss the Mormon emphasis on settling disputes outside the court, a practice that foreshadows current trends toward arbitration and mediation.
 

The alarm and anxiety unleashed by the Great Recession found fascinating expression across popular culture. Harried survivors negotiated societal collapse in The Walking Dead. Middle-class whites crossed the literal and metaphorical Mexican border on Breaking Bad or coped with a lack of freedom among the marginalized on Orange Is the New Black. Camilla Fojas uses representations of people of color, the incarcerated, and trans/queers--vulnerable populations all--to work through the contradictions created by the economic crisis and its freefalling aftermath. Television, film, advertising, and media coverage of the crisis created a distinct kind of story about capitalism and the violence that supports it. Fojas shows how these pop culture moments reshaped social dynamics and people's economic sensibilities and connects the ways pop culture reflected economic devastation. She also examines how these artifacts illuminated parts of society usually kept off-screen or on the margins even as they defaulted to stories of white protagonists.

   Why do people go to zoos? Is the role of zoos to entertain or to educate?
        In this provocative book, the authors demonstrate that zoos tell us as
        much about humans as they do about animals and suggest that while animals
        may not need zoos, urban societies seem to.
      A new introduction takes note of dramatic changes in the perceived role
        of zoos that have occurred since the book's original publication.
      "Bob Mullan and Garry Marvin delve into the assumptions about animals
        that are embedded in our culture. . . . A thought-provoking glimpse of
        our own ideas about the exotic, the foreign." -- Tess Lemmon, BBC
        Wildlife Magazine
      "A thoughtful and entertaining guided tour." -- David White,
        New Society
      "[An] unusual and intriguing combination of historical survey, psychological
        enquiry, and compendium of fascinating facts." -- Evening Standard
 

Using patents, published and unpublished documents, and interviews with television pioneers including Zworykin himself, Abramson reconstructs the inventor's life from his early years in Russia, through his stay as RCA's technical guru under David Sarnoff, to his death in 1982. More than fifty photographs show highlights of Zworykin's work. Abramson notes the contributions of other scientists--particularly Zworykin's biggest rival, Philo T. Farnsworth--to the advancement of television. However, he argues, it was Zworykin's inventions that made modern, all-electronic television possible, causing many to award him the title "father of television".

"His achievements rank him with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell," states Albert Abramson in this discerning, often dramatic biography of Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, the Russian-born scientist who "did more to create our present system of cathode-ray television than any other person."