Natural Born Celebrities

Natural Born Celebrities PDF Author: David Schmid
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226738701
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Jeffrey Dahmer. Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Over the past thirty years, serial killers have become iconic figures in America, the subject of made-for-TV movies and mass-market paperbacks alike. But why do we find such luridly transgressive and horrific individuals so fascinating? What compels us to look more closely at these figures when we really want to look away? Natural Born Celebrities considers how serial killers have become lionized in American culture and explores the consequences of their fame. David Schmid provides a historical account of how serial killers became famous and how that fame has been used in popular media and the corridors of the FBI alike. Ranging from H. H. Holmes, whose killing spree during the 1893 Chicago World's Fair inspired The Devil in the White City, right up to Aileen Wuornos, the lesbian prostitute whose vicious murder of seven men would serve as the basis for the hit film Monster, Schmid unveils a new understanding of serial killers by emphasizing both the social dimensions of their crimes and their susceptibility to multiple interpretations and uses. He also explores why serial killers have become endemic in popular culture, from their depiction in The Silence of the Lambs and The X-Files to their becoming the stuff of trading cards and even Web sites where you can buy their hair and nail clippings. Bringing his fascinating history right up to the present, Schmid ultimately argues that America needs the perversely familiar figure of the serial killer now more than ever to manage the fear posed by Osama bin Laden since September 11. "This is a persuasively argued, meticulously researched, and compelling examination of the media phenomenon of the 'celebrity criminal' in American culture. It is highly readable as well."—Joyce Carol Oates

Natural Born Celebrities

Natural Born Celebrities PDF Author: David Schmid
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226738701
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book

Book Description
Jeffrey Dahmer. Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Over the past thirty years, serial killers have become iconic figures in America, the subject of made-for-TV movies and mass-market paperbacks alike. But why do we find such luridly transgressive and horrific individuals so fascinating? What compels us to look more closely at these figures when we really want to look away? Natural Born Celebrities considers how serial killers have become lionized in American culture and explores the consequences of their fame. David Schmid provides a historical account of how serial killers became famous and how that fame has been used in popular media and the corridors of the FBI alike. Ranging from H. H. Holmes, whose killing spree during the 1893 Chicago World's Fair inspired The Devil in the White City, right up to Aileen Wuornos, the lesbian prostitute whose vicious murder of seven men would serve as the basis for the hit film Monster, Schmid unveils a new understanding of serial killers by emphasizing both the social dimensions of their crimes and their susceptibility to multiple interpretations and uses. He also explores why serial killers have become endemic in popular culture, from their depiction in The Silence of the Lambs and The X-Files to their becoming the stuff of trading cards and even Web sites where you can buy their hair and nail clippings. Bringing his fascinating history right up to the present, Schmid ultimately argues that America needs the perversely familiar figure of the serial killer now more than ever to manage the fear posed by Osama bin Laden since September 11. "This is a persuasively argued, meticulously researched, and compelling examination of the media phenomenon of the 'celebrity criminal' in American culture. It is highly readable as well."—Joyce Carol Oates

Natural Born Killers

Natural Born Killers PDF Author: Quentin Tarantino
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802134486
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
This original screenplay offers fans and film buffs the opportunity to compare Tarantino's original vision with Oliver Stone's version of the story of Mickey and Mallory, outlaw lovers on the run.

Natural Born Angel

Natural Born Angel PDF Author: Scott Speer
Publisher: Scholastic UK
ISBN: 1407135244
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
In a world where guardian angels are celebrities who save people for money, Maddy's life was transformed when she became the girlfriend of the hottest Angel around. But she never imagined that she'd become even more famous than Jackson. Unfortunately for Maddy, she's an irresistible PR opportunity - and soon her popularity soars higher than any Angel. Her relationship is cracking under the pressure. And as tension starts to mount between Angels and humans, she finds herself an ambassador for humankind. With Jackson at the helm of the Immortals, the two ex-lovers must become sworn enemies. It's Angels in one corner, humans on the other - until an evil force, greater than anything on Earth, forces them to stand united if they want to survive.

The Rise of True Crime

The Rise of True Crime PDF Author: Jean Murley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1573567728
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
During the 1950s and 1960s True Detective magazine developed a new way of narrating and understanding murder. It was more sensitive to context, gave more psychologically sophisticated accounts, and was more willing to make conjectures about the unknown thoughts and motivations of killers than others had been before. This turned out to be the start of a revolution, and, after a century of escalating accounts, we have now become a nation of experts, with many ordinary people able to speak intelligently about blood-spatter patterns and organized vs. disorganized serial killers. The Rise of True Crime examines the various genres of true crime using the most popular and well-known examples. And despite its examination of some of the potentially negative effects of the genre, it is written for people who read and enjoy true crime, and wish to learn more about it. With skyrocketing crime rates and the appearance of a frightening trend toward social chaos in the 1970s, books, documentaries, and fiction films in the true crime genre tried to make sense of the Charles Manson crimes and the Gary Gilmore execution events. And in the 1980s and 1990s, true crime taught pop culture consumers about forensics, profiling, and highly technical aspects of criminology. We have thus now become a nation of experts, with many ordinary people able to speak intelligently about blood-spatter patterns and organized vs. disorganized serial killers. Through the suggestion that certain kinds of killers are monstrous or outside the realm of human morality, and through the perpetuation of the stranger-danger idea, the true crime aesthetic has both responded to and fostered our culture's fears. True crime is also the site of a dramatic confrontation with the concept of evil, and one of the few places in American public discourse where moral terms are used without any irony, and notions and definitions of evil are presented without ambiguity. When seen within its historical context, true crime emerges as a vibrant and meaningful strand of popular culture, one that is unfortunately devalued as lurid and meaningless pulp.

True Crime

True Crime PDF Author: Mark Seltzer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135867399
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
True crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction. It is one of the most popular genres of our pathological public sphere, and an integral part of our contemporary wound culture-a culture, or at least cult, of commiseration. If we cannot gather in the face of anything other than crime, violence, terror, trauma, and the wound, we can at least commiserate. That is, as novelist Chuck Palahniuk writes, we can at least "all [be] miserable together." The "murder leisure industry," its media, and its public: these modern styles of violence and intimacy, sociality and belief, are the subjects of True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. True Crime draws on and makes available to American readers—and tests out—work on systems theory and media theory (for instance, the transformative work of Niklas Luhmann on social systems and of Friedrich Kittler on the media apriori—work yet to make its impact on the American scene). True Crime is at once a study of a minor genre that is a scale model of modern society and a critical introduction to these forms of social and media history and theory. With examples, factual and fictional, of the scene of the crime ranging from Poe to CSI, from the true crime writing of the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami to versions of "the violence-media complex" in the work of the American novelist Patricia Highsmith and the Argentinian author Juan José Saer, True Crime is a penetrating look at modern violence and the modern media and the ties that bind them in contemporary life.

Immortal City

Immortal City PDF Author: Scott Speer
Publisher: Scholastic UK
ISBN: 1407135236
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
What if angels not only walked among us - but were our celebrities? What if they saved people for money? That's the reality in Angel City, where hot young Jackson Godspeed is the angel everyone's dying to date. Everyone except for Madison Montgomery, that is. She's too busy studying and waitressing to pay attention to the gossip blogs. Then Jackson tumbles into the diner where she works, and they forge an instant, unforgettable connection. But as Maddy is reluctantly drawn into Jackson's glamorous world, Jackson fears he's exposing her to more than just the paparazzi. A serial killer is murdering one angel at a time. Not only could Jackson be next - but it seems the killer's got sights set on Maddy...

Natural Born Killaz

Natural Born Killaz PDF Author: Terry L. Wroten
Publisher: Black Dawn Publishing
ISBN: 9780982492024
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Beneath the bright lights and the looming Capitol Records building there lays a different Los Angeles than the one depicted in films and on television. On the streets of South Central disputes are settled over gun smoke and the greatest love comes from your homeys. Welcome to the “Set.” Ever since they were kids John and Kevin had always lived in their brothers Killa and Crip Van's shadows and when tragedy strikes their families they would have to walk a mile in their shoes. Almost over night they go from fun loving teenagers to soldiers on the front line of the war between red and blue. During their rise they learn the harsh reality of the lifestyle they've chosen as friends become enemies and lovers executioners. John and Kevin quickly learn that there was only one law in the jungle they had chosen to roam… Crip or Die!

Celebrity and the Environment

Celebrity and the Environment PDF Author: Dan Brockington
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848136242
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
The battle to save the world is being joined by a powerful new group of warriors. Celebrities are lending their name to conservation causes, and conservation itself is growing its own stars to fight and speak for nature. In this timely and essential book, Dan Brockington argues that this alliance grows from the mutually supportive publicity celebrity and conservation causes provide for each other, and more fundamentally, that the flourishing of celebrity and charismatic conservation is part of an ever-closer intertwining of conservation and corporate capitalism. Celebrity promotions, the investments of rich executives, and the wealthy social networks of charismatic conservationists are producing more commodified and commercial conservation strategies; conservation becomes an ever more important means of generating profit. Celebrity and the Environment provides vital critical analysis of this new phenomena and argues that, ironically, there may be a hidden cost to celebrity power to individual's relationships with the wild. The author argues that whilst wildlife television documentaries flourish, there is a significant decline in visits to national parks in many countries around the world and this is evidence that t a time when conservationists are calling for us to restore our relationships with the wild, many people are doing so simply by following the exploits of celebrity conservationists.

Ultraviolent Movies

Ultraviolent Movies PDF Author: Laurent Bouzereau
Publisher: Citadel Press
ISBN: 9780806520452
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
A history of extreme violence in movies analyzes the public response to this ever-growing phenomenon, tracing its beginnings in films such as Bonnie and Clyde and discussing how it fits into the artistic vision of filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorcese. Original.

Natural Born Charmer

Natural Born Charmer PDF Author: Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061795313
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Chicago Stars quarterback Dean Robillard is the luckiest man in the world: a bona-fide sports superstar and the pride of the NFL with a profitable side career as a buff billboard model for End Zone underwear. But life in the glory lane has started to pale, and Dean has set off on a cross-country trip to figure out what's gone wrong. When he hits a lonely stretch of Colorado highway, he spies something that will shake up his gilded life in ways he can't imagine. A young woman . . . dressed in a beaver suit. Blue Bailey is on a mission to murder her ex. Or at least inflict serious damage. As for the beaver suit she's wearing . . . Is it her fault that life keeps throwing her curveballs? Witness the expensive black sports car pulling up next to her on the highway and the Greek god stepping out of it. Blue's career as a portrait painter is the perfect job for someone who refuses to stay in one place for very long. She needs a ride, and America's most famous football player has an imposing set of wheels. Now, all she has to do is keep him entertained, off guard, and fully clothed before he figures out exactly how desperate she is. But Dean isn't the brainless jock she imagines, and Blue—despite her petite stature—is just about the toughest woman Dean has ever met. They're soon heading for his summer home where their already complicated lives and inconvenient attraction to each other will become entangled with a charismatic but aging rock star; a beautiful fifty-two-year-old woman trying to make peace with her rock and roll past; an eleven-year-old who desperately needs a family; and a bitter old woman who hates them all. As the summer progresses, the wandering portrait artist and the charming football star play a high-stakes game, fighting themselves and each other for a chance to have it all. Natural Born Charmer is for everyone who's ever thought about leaving their old life in the dust and never looking back. New York Times bestselling author Susan Elizabeth Phillips takes us home again . . . and shows us where love truly lives