| Rhetorical Contents |
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xvi | (5) |
| Preface |
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xxi | |
| Introduction: How to Read Critically |
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1 | (2) |
| Why Read Critically |
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2 | (1) |
| How to Read Critically |
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3 | (1) |
| Sample Essay for Analysis |
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3 | (1) |
| A No-Fault Holocaust |
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3 | (19) |
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| Keeping a Journal on What You Read |
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5 | (1) |
| Annotate What You Read |
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6 | (3) |
| Outline What You Read |
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9 | (2) |
| Summarize What You Read |
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11 | (1) |
| Question What You Read |
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12 | (2) |
| Analyze What You Read |
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14 | (8) |
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1 Fashion and Flesh: The Images We Project |
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22 | (47) |
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The Beefcaking of America A "seismic shift" in gender roles is turning men into objects of desire, a role traditionally held by women. |
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24 | (9) |
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Three for the Stripes "People from the inner city as I know it, myself included, have made fashion more than a fashion statement. In our isolation from the mainstream, we've made it a statement of identity, of who we are." |
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33 | (6) |
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Michael Fitzpatrick (student essay) |
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Baggy Clothes Don't Make the Man "If you see a young man in a thug suit, might a person not fairly take that man to be a thug?" |
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39 | (2) |
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The Body Myth Do images of superthin fashion models lead to eating disorders? Some feminists say Yes! But, Not so! declares this Vogue magazine editor. |
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41 | (6) |
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Letters to Editor of Vogue in Response to "The Body Myth" |
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47 | (4) |
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Natasza and Karolina Holowatinc |
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Burning Desire to Be Slimmer Is a Slow Suicide "Peer under the rock of young white women's infatuation with cigarettes, and guess what crawls out? Social pressure to be thin." |
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51 | (3) |
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The Eye of the Beholder This young Asian-American woman learns the price of conforming to Western standards of beauty by paying the vanity fare. |
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54 | (5) |
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The Other Body: Reflections on Difference, Disability and Identity Politics "Of all the ways of becoming `other' in our society, disability is the only one that can happen to anyone, in an instant, transforming that person's life and identity forever. |
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59 | (6) |
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Believers in Search of Piercing Insight As more of today's teens and twenty-somethings are having their bodies pierced, one wonders if the trend is an expression of individuality, or just another follow the-crowd phenomenon. |
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65 | (4) |
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2 Advertising: Feeding Our Fantasies |
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69 | (79) |
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Spend and Save "We get two sets of messages coming at us every day. One says, buy, spend, get it now, indulge yourself. The other says, work hard, save, defer gratification, curb your impulses." |
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72 | (4) |
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But First, a Word from Our Sponsor Advertising, the author argues, has become the single most important manufacturer of meaning in America today. |
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76 | (6) |
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Hey Kids, Buy This! Is Madison Avenue taking "Get 'em while they're young" too far? |
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82 | (8) |
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Mr. Clean A whiff of today's man says he's sweet, sexy, and antiseptic. |
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90 | (4) |
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Choking on Hype "I love the smell of cigars. It reminds me of my grandpa just before he died." |
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94 | (3) |
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Snuggle Bear Must Die! "A lot of you really hate certain ads, to the point where you fantasize about violence." |
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97 | (3) |
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PRO/CON: LANGUAGE OF ADVERTISING-TWISTING THE TRUTH? |
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100 | (48) |
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With These Words I Can Sell You Anything "Advertisers use weasel words to appear to be making a claim for a product when in fact they are making no claim at all." |
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100 | (14) |
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The Language of Advertising "The language of advertising is... a language of finely engineered, ruthlessly purposeful messages." |
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114 | (13) |
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Sample Ads and Study Questions |
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127 | (21) |
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3 Television: Friend or Foe? |
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148 | (52) |
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Sex and Today's Single-Minded Sitcoms Since 1970, television has lost its innocence in a big, and often boring, way. Can't anyone look elsewhere for laughs? |
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151 | (6) |
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TV Talk Shows: Freak Parades Daytime talk shows bring the carnival sideshow to America's living rooms. |
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157 | (5) |
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Watching the Eyewitless News "When you turn on the news, whether at home or in an airport or Holiday Inn in some totally strange locale, you see a predictable, comforting spectacle." |
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162 | (6) |
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The Problem with Black T.V. "Blacks are increasingly pigeonholed in simpleminded comedies." |
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168 | (6) |
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Frederick L. McKissack Jr. |
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Gays, Lesbians, and the Media: The Slow Road to Acceptance "Why, when there are gay characters in movies, sitcoms, talk shows, and soap operas, are there not openly gay and lesbian TV anchorpeople and news reporters?" |
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174 | (8) |
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In Defense of Prime Time Television's best shows give us morality plays of everyday life. |
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182 | (3) |
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Into the Heart of Darkness The X-Files and Millennium are tapping into our collective unconscious-and forcing us to confront our greatest fears. |
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185 | (8) |
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PRO/CON: KILL YOUR TELEVISION |
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193 | (7) |
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Turn Off the TV Before It Ruins Us "TV is an open sewer running into the minds of the impressionable, and progressively desensitized, young." |
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193 | (3) |
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Remote Control: How to Raise a Media Skeptic "Studies show that the simple act of... talking to your child about what's on television and why it's on there... is one of the most important factors in helping children understand and distance themselves from some of the box's more repugnant imagery." |
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196 | (4) |
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4 Gender Battles on the Big Screen |
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200 | (64) |
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Women on the Big Screen "For all the understandable clamor for `positive' role models and representations, the movies in which female virtue and talent were rewarded... ran the gamut from forgettable to annoying to inane." |
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202 | (7) |
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Hostages to Sexism "We like our damsels in distress. Not out of sweet chivalry so much as out of habit..." |
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209 | (3) |
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Hasta la Vista, Arnold After decades of being damsels in distress, women in the movies are finally getting a piece of the action. |
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212 | (6) |
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The Masculine Mystique-An Interview of Sylvester Stallone Playing the movie action hero "is a painful kind of empty experience... You are a piece of celebrity machinery." So says this contemporary cinematic man-god who confesses to being a creature in gender crisis. |
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218 | (14) |
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Redesigning Pocahontas "Pocahontas thus reinforces another resilient stereotype that the main purpose of a Disney heroine is to further the interests in love...." |
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232 | (14) |
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Silencing of the Feminine Although it was celebrated as a feminist triumph, the Academy Award-winning film Silence of the Lambs, upon closer examination of its visual elements, reveals "some disturbing gender constructions." |
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246 | (5) |
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Lynn Dornink (student essay) |
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PRO/CON: REVIEWS OF WAITING TO EXHALE |
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251 | (13) |
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Breathing Easier with a Rare Film One reason for the popularity of the movie Waiting to Exhale "is that black women are starved to see themselves portrayed in motion pictures as real people, with the whole range of human emotions." |
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251 | (4) |
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Mock Feminism "The film Waiting to Exhale took the novelistic images of professional black women concerned with issues of racial uplift and gender equality and turned them into a progression of racist, sexist stereotypes...." |
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255 | (9) |
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264 | (45) |
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Where Are the Heroes? "Sports is one of the last places where those myths [of the hero] can be experienced." |
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267 | (4) |
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Heroine Worship: The Age of the Female Icon "In the spirit of post-modernism, we piece our selves together, assembling the examples of several women in a single personality-a process that makes for some unprecedented combinations, like Madonna: the siren who lifts weights and becomes a mother." |
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271 | (5) |
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Princess Diana: Her True Face "There have been other modern legends, of course-Marilyn Monroe, Princess Grace, Jacqueline Onassis. But no other woman so captured the Zeitgeist of this particular age than Diana." |
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276 | (4) |
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Selena: A Legend Grows and So Does an Industry Selena, killed at 23, is becoming as much an icon to her fans as Elvis Presley has become to his. |
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280 | (5) |
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Amelia Earhart: The Lady Vanishes "Amelia Earhart symbolizes modern woman's invasion of the male world of daring adventure." |
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285 | (2) |
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Rare Jordan "When this country looks at [Michael] Jordan, it sees its dreams, obsessions-even its fears." |
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287 | (4) |
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John Wayne: America's Favorite Icon "The strength of Wayne was that he embodied our deepest myth-that of the frontier." |
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291 | (9) |
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Xena: She's Big, Tall, Strong-and Popular "Many feminists have been dreaming of mass-culture moments like this since feminism came into being." |
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300 | (6) |
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Barbie Doll More than a simple plastic doll, Barbie has been an icon to young girls for 40 years. But as this poem powerfully reveals, she also embodies subtle social forces that forge one's self-image. |
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306 | (3) |
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6 America's Many Cultures |
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309 | (40) |
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The Revolt of the Black Bourgeoisie "Imagine being told by your peers, the records you hear, the programs you watch,...classmates, prospective employers...that in order to be your true self you must be ignorant and poor." |
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311 | (5) |
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Crimes Against Humanity "Understand that the treatment of Indians in American popular culture is not `cute' or `amusing' or just `good clean fun.'" |
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316 | (9) |
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Getting to Know About You and Me "Nobody was deliberately rude or anti-Semitic, but I got the feeling that I was representing the entire Jewish people through my actions." |
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325 | (4) |
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Chana Schoenberger (student essay) |
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Innocent and Presumed Ethnic "My father's parents were born in Italy, my mother is of German-French descent. The family name was modestly changed at Ellis Island: Y instead of I. Go figure." |
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329 | (3) |
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A Puerto Rican Stew To Mami, the trip north made her "American." But she found her own recipe for identity. |
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332 | (4) |
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Secrets and Anger The author wonders what his daughter will face growing up a Japanese American in a predominantly white culture. |
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336 | (8) |
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Cultural Baggage Perhaps the ideal cultural heritage is not one based on ethnicity or religion, but one made up of attributes like "skepticism, curiosity, and wide-eyed ecumenical tolerance." |
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344 | (5) |
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7 Is English-Only Spoken Here? |
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349 | (23) |
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One Nation, One Language, One Ballot "The federal mandate for bilingual ballots represents a dangerous experiment in deconstructing our American identity." |
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351 | (3) |
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What's So American About English? "Making English our national language suggests that we are Americans only to the extent to which we know English." |
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354 | (3) |
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Seeking Unity in Diversity "To claim that every citizen has a right to communicate with the institutions of the state in his native language would only lead us back to the Tower of Babel." |
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357 | (4) |
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English Only-For the Kids' Sake The explosive growth and mobility of nonnative-speaking children demands one approach. |
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361 | (3) |
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Mute in an English-Only World "Having been raised in a Korean immigrant family, I saw every day the exacting price and power of language, especially with my mother, who was an outsider in an English-only world." |
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364 | (4) |
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English Plus, Not English Only The Canadian experience teaches that English-only is not the right solution to America's growing problem. |
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368 | (4) |
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8 Democracy, Community, and Cyberspace |
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372 | (35) |
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The Virtual Community Computer networking can help bring community back to the center of modern life. |
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374 | (6) |
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The Web: Infotopia or Marketplace? Advertisements are proliferating in the Webzines. "Cyberstores" offer CDs, both musical and financial. New technologies are fostering direct transactions. |
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380 | (5) |
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Cyberspace: If You Don't Love it, Leave it "What makes cyberspace so alluring is precisely the way in which it's different from shopping malls, television, highways and other terrestrial jurisdictions." |
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385 | (5) |
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The Haves and the Have-Nots "Like it or not, America is a land of inequities. And technology, despite its potential to level the social landscape, is not yet blind to race, wealth and age." |
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390 | (5) |
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Children in the Digital Age Access isn't the only challenge; the quality of the new media culture for children also raises concern. |
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395 | (8) |
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The Digital Scapegoat Television coverage that's obsessed with Internet scare stories really puts this author "over the top." |
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403 | (4) |
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407 | (46) |
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Oh, Those Family Values "Only with the occasional celebrity crime do we allow ourselves to think the nearly unthinkable: that the family may not be the ideal and perfect living arrangement after all--that it can be a nest of pathology and a cradle of of gruesome violence." |
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409 | (4) |
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Relatively Speaking The author and her husband, each remarried, have 13 children between them. The upcoming wedding of their divorced daughter and mother of two leads the author to rethink the concept of family. |
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413 | (4) |
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Rethinking Divorce The widespread incidence of divorce in U.S. society needs to be stemmed because of the negative impact of divorce upon children particularly and upon the overall fabric of the culture generally. |
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417 | (5) |
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The New Nostalgia "We are already raising a generation of children in two-earner families; if we really want them to be stressed, let's tell them that what we are doing is all wrong, that what we should be doing was what their grandparents did in the 1950s...." |
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422 | (9) |
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Single Mothers: A Menace to Society? First the Republicans, now the Democrats. Everyone's blaming society's ills on single moms. The author is one, and she's tired of taking the heat. |
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431 | (6) |
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On Black Fathering "For black men to reach that level of maturity and understanding is almost miraculous given the dehumanizing context for black men, and yet millions and millions have done it." |
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437 | (8) |
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PRO/CON: SHOULD SAME-SEX MARRIAGES BE LEGALIZED? |
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445 | (8) |
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Let Gays Marry "It seeks merely to promote monogamy...and the disciplines of family life among people who have long been cast to the margins of society." |
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445 | (3) |
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Leave Marriage Alone "Marriage is not an arbitrary construct which can be redefined simply by those who lay claim to it." |
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448 | (5) |
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453 | (36) |
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The Culture of Violence "[L]ike many warrior societies, we have a long tradition of raising our boys to be tough, emotionally detached, deeply competitive, and concerned with dominance." |
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455 | (7) |
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Giving Up on the Young "Society wants to kill these kids.... The death penalty. Shooting them in the street. If it can't do that, then killing their spirit." |
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462 | (6) |
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Putting the Brakes on Juvenile Crime "Support of prevention programs combined with stiff sanctions for the most resistant juvenile offenders is the most effective crime fighting approach." |
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468 | (4) |
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Peace in the Streets Want a safer world for our kids? Here are some practical suggestions from Harlem. |
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472 | (5) |
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Johnny, Take Your Drug Test! "The irony is that kids in deepest trouble are least likely to volunteer the evidence into their parents' plastic vial." |
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477 | (4) |
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PRO/CON: PUNISH JUVENILE OFFENDERS AS ADULTS |
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481 | (8) |
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Youth Crime Has Changed--And So Must the Juvenile Justice System "[J]uveniles are committing brutal crimes with such numbing regularity that it takes the most shocking failures of the juvenile justice system to respond to dramatize the out-of-touch mentality underlying it." |
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481 | (3) |
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Cruel Punishment for Juveniles "The truth is that the get-tough approach is being driven by a few highly publicized cases that do not reflect the reality of most juvenile crime." |
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484 | (5) |
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11 Work: What's in It for Me? |
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489 | (36) |
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Getting Started "Not only must today's young endure a larger-than-usual share of the uncertainties of starting out, but they must contemplate a future that seems truncated and unpromising." |
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491 | (7) |
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Having It All "Working harder just to climb the corporate ladder and acquire more economics sources no longer seems as appealing as it once did." |
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498 | (9) |
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Generation Xers and Their American Dream Shunning 70-hour work weeks, Generation Xers are defining their own American Dream. |
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507 | (4) |
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Measuring Success Our notions of what it means to be successful change over time, often in unexpected ways. |
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511 | (3) |
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There's No Place Like Work Americans say they want more time with their families. The truth is, they'd rather be at the office. |
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514 | (11) |
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12 Into the Future: America in the Twenty-First Century |
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525 | (40) |
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Welcome to the Millennium While not everything old will be new again, many aspects of the past will be dusted off for the twenty-first century. |
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527 | (7) |
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America Remains No. 1 No other country will have the power to play the role of "benevolent hegemon." |
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534 | (4) |
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Big Brother Is Us Our privacy is disappearing, but not by force. We're selling it, even giving it away. |
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538 | (6) |
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Junior Comes Out Perfect Genetic screening will give privileged parents heightened capacity to shape the destinies of their children. What about the other parents? |
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544 | (6) |
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Race Is Over "In the future, definition by racial, ethnic and sexual groups will most probably have ceased to be the foundation of special-interest power." |
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550 | (4) |
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Mystery Date A fictional view of romance in the twenty-first century. |
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554 | (4) |
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Where Have All the Causes Gone? Young people today face a history gap. With no common enemies, it's not clear how they will react when the inevitable crisis comes. |
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558 | (3) |
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Back to the Future The science and technology of the 21st century will be different, but we won't. |
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561 | (4) |
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Sequencing Assignments: Making New Connections |
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565 | (9) |
| Photo and Text Credits |
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574 | (2) |
| Index of Authors and Titles |
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576 | |
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