Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J.

By Susan Bordo

Book Overview

Considering everything from Nike ads, emaciated models, and surgically altered breasts to the culture wars and the O.J. Simpson trial, Susan Bordo deciphers the hidden life of cultural images and the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520211014
• ISBN13: 9780520211018
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 1.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Twilight Zones

I find Bordo's work, as always, resonant and timely. It is a strange experience reading the negative reviews on this site - every time I read Bordo I feel I have happened upon a gem.

I'm the author, and I've never done this before....

That is, publicly comment on other people's evaluations of my work. I'm usually happy to let others decide the value of my writing...which is why I'm writing this--to encourage readers to judge "Twilight Zones" for themselves rather than on the impression created by the Kirkus Review and the second customer comment on this page. I don't care about the "stars" (I only rated myself because I was asked to.) But I do care about the misleading prominence of comments written by people whom I believe are not in touch with current cultural trends or their impact on our lives. Essays from "Twilight Zones" are being reprinted in first-year textbooks for undergraduate students. Yet the perception that this is an obscure, irrelevant, self-indulgent tome dominates this page. I think that's an extreme misrepresentation....

The critical implications of everyday life

Bordo's Twilight Zones continues the powerful critical trajectory set up by her award-winning Unbearable Weight, showing how media impacts our daily lives in the most intricate ways. More than any other public intellectual writing today, Bordo's writing is a compelling and passionate analysis that clears up many forms of mystification, academic and cultural. This book provides new and complicated ways of understanding contemporary events and how they are created/represented in the mass media, and how these creations in turn work to shape our lives.