Reading Magazines Research Articles

Glimpses of the Other before Orientalism: The Muslim World in Early American Periodicals, 1785–1800

Americans did not have the luxury of merely contemplating the Muslim world between 1785 and 1800. Over a hundred American sailors were captive in Algiers in this period. The escalation and temporary resolution of this dispute informed the imagery of Muslims in hundreds of articles published in American magazines. These Muslim people and places ranged across centuries of time, thousands of miles, and multiple ethnicities, and the images did not conform to one or even a few models. American magazine readers learned that Muslims were as diverse and complex as they themselves. This study considers much of the magazine archive from this period and finds clear patterns that parallel the historical experience of America with Algiers. Though the non-Barbary regions (Persia, Arabia, and Turkey) remained objects of fascination and even delight, the Barbary Coast (generally, the northern African coast) emerged as a pragmatic political concern by the mid-1790s. These magazines are a significant source about a crucial moment in American nation-formation. Muslims were an ethnic, religious, and cultural Other by which Americans began to imagine themselves. Though nineteenth-century Americans learned to think of Muslims through the familiar Orientalist categories, this periodical archive reveals an anxious, uncertain dance before the eventual swagger.

O conteúdo intelectual do lazer no processo do aprender a envelhecer

This qualitative study aimed to investigate the resonances of the intellectual content of leisure for older adults. A mixed questionnaire containing ten questions was applied to a sample of fifty older adults people of both genders. Data were descriptively analyzed by thematic content analysis technique and showed that such experiences encourage reflection and the exercise of citizenship. Among the intellectual contents to qualitatively fulfill free time availability were elected by the sample: watching news on TV (70%), videos on health and aging (55%), reading newspapers, magazines and books (54%), playing strategic games (35%) and visiting museums (8%). It can be concluded that the experiences sharpen the critical and intellectual creativity and subsidize better understanding of aging, involving the construction of knowledge and expanding the opportunities of learning to learn, to be, and to live.

More Than Just Anorexia and Steroid Abuse: Effects of Media Exposure on Attitudes Toward Body Image and Self-Efficacy

Body image research mainly focuses on disordered eating attitudes and behaviors. This current study sought to explore the potential positive effects resulting from exposure to a variety of media outlets and to provide a mediation analysis on how media exposure shaped individuals' intentions to perform a target behavior. Results show that female college students' attitudes toward attractive body image and physical activity self-efficacy were influenced by their (a) fashion and entertainment and (b) sports and health magazine reading, whereas male college students' attitudes and self-efficacy were influenced by their sports and health magazine reading. Neither group's attitudes nor self-efficacy were influenced by their viewing of popular television shows. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

"The Hand of Mysticism": Ethiopianist Writing in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood and the Colored American Magazine

"The Hand of Mysticism":Ethiopianist Writing in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood and the Colored American Magazine Nadia Nurhussein (bio) Under Pauline Hopkins's editorship, the Colored American Magazine published a significant serialized novel about Ethiopia that could be called a historical fiction, although, as a result of the mysticism at its heart, the text becomes somewhat generically indeterminate or even "generically radical," as Elizabeth Ammons describes it (81). The novel is Hopkins's Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self, published between 1902 and 1903, notably only a few years after the remarkable Italian defeat at the 1896 Battle of Adwa. Ethiopia has long held synecdochic significance for African American writers-alternately referring specifically to the nation, generally to the continent of Africa or to the black race, and abstractly to an imaginary locus of nostalgia, biblical or otherwise-but the Colored American, self-described as "the only first-class illustrated monthly published in America exclusively in the interests of the Colored Race," promoted a documentary interpretation of Ethiopianism in their histories and biographies. Mentions of Ethiopia surfaced frequently in the magazine. In fact, the May-June 1903 installment of Of One Blood, during which the protagonist first meets the inhabitants of a hidden Ethiopian city, was immediately followed by the first installment in a series titled "Ethiopians of the Twentieth Century" (using "Ethiopian" in accordance with the general definition, as the subtitle announces that the piece addresses "Questions Affecting the Natives and Colored People Resident in British South Africa").1 The Colored American's content regarding Ethiopia, including illustrations, biographies, and fictions, conformed with the magazine's general "pedagogic function" (Carby xxxv) and shaped how the community of readers created and fostered by the magazine conceived of a black pride that could be based in modernity. Although the biblical Ethiopia that would "soon stretch forth her hands" would have been familiar to most African Americans, the Colored American presented a more grounded Ethiopia, one of secular contemporary events. If, as C. K. Doreski writes, the Colored American "offered a product-intense, textual world in which even biography and history might become marketable commodities" (72), then this version of Ethiopianism was effectively being sold to the magazine's readers especially through nonfictional narratives. However, where history collided with fiction, producing imaginative histories and historical fictions, the magazine fell back upon a partly imagined Ethiopia. Hazel Carby finds that a "network of relationships between Of One Blood and other, nonfictional articles in the journal indicates . . . the extent of an intertextual coherence achieved under Hopkins's editorship" (xlvii), but I would argue that the confusion produced in the clashing of genres dismantled that seeming coherence, resulting in some [End Page 278] conflicting messages about Ethiopia and its symbolic or exemplary value. Just like Emperor Menelik's claims that he descended from King Solomon, the magazine's collective claims about Ethiopia in these hybrid genres could be entertained by readers precisely because they seemed factual but receded into a mythic, unfocused point in a distant past that was comfortably familiar. The simultaneous specificity and generality conjured a source of pride that didn't need to be-and could not be-absolutely pinpointed and yet was manifest and potent enough to be used in service of racial uplift. I use the word "conjure" here deliberately, as the amorphousness of the idea of Ethiopia inevitably led back to a sort of inventive mythic Ethiopianism. Myth-making was already intrinsic to the ideology of Ethiopianism that was developing as early as the eighteenth century, which, according to Wilson Jeremiah Moses's definition, "involved a good deal more than mere allusions to Ethiopia in the songs, sermons, and folklore of the African peoples. It was a historical mythology, presenting an exalted view of the black race and its cosmic messianic mission" (113). In the Colored American's documentary myth-making, the editors produced a paradoxical condition in which the idea of Ethiopia was presented to their readers as both familial and alien. The alien aspects of Ethiopianness often acquired an air of mysticism which the nonfictional texts in the magazine attempted to rein in. Of One Blood is a good example of a fictional text...

The Second Sex in the Fourth Estate

In the United States, estate commonly refers to the press--particularly to the periodical press and its journalistic function--as a de facto fourth branch of government, and the historical and popular uses of the phrase associate it with the power of public opinion as a necessary component of more formal governance. thematic cluster of essays presented in this issue of Legacy considers how women have functioned as members of the fourth estate. Our chronological range here is broad, comprising essays that begin with a study of one of the earliest women to write for the American periodical press, Judith Sargent Murray, and concluding with a review essay that surveys the work of women who wrote as professional journalists into the mid-twentieth century. Such a thematic focus is appropriate for a journal such as Legacy, for the very word suggests an interest in the daily, the contingent, and the historical (journal stems from the Latin journalis, meaning daily). Like magazines, journals' near cousins, Legacy has a heterogeneous content; in its pages, readers can find an olio of writings loosely related to American women writers and gleaned--to borrow Murray's metaphor--from the ideas shared by colleagues with similar interests. Such gleanings, brought together in the columns of a newspaper or on the pages of a journal, frequently produce fortuitous--albeit unintended and unpredicted--mutual illuminations, insights that are less the property of a single author's contribution than the result of their convergence in a shared conceptual space. JOURNALISM AND OUR OBJECT(S) OF STUDY Journalism as we have loosely defined it here (as multiply authored collections of texts that appear at regular intervals) differs from our traditional objects of study in several key ways. A book, as Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway note, has traditionally been considered to be a unique object and has been marketed as a discrete product (11-12). Books--of necessity, perhaps--have a more limited and class-stratified circulation. As Radway and Kaestle point out, The distribution of book readers ... is not random; book reading in the United States tends to correlate with education and wealth. In fact, there were far more readers of newspapers and magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than there were readers of books (19-20). Concomitantly, it seems logical to assume that there were far more women who wrote for newspapers and magazines in these periods than there were women who wrote and published books. Most of these women journalists have not yet been fully or even briefly studied. How would thoughtful studies of such writers modify our present understandings of women as cultural producers? We might take Jane Cazneau and Margaret Fuller as a comparative case in point, as Megan Griffin suggests in her Profile of Cazneau. Why has the recovery of Fuller succeeded so notably, while knowledge about Cazneau remains relatively incomplete? two knew and associated with each other and with other women journalists. Both were advocates of women's rights who nevertheless did not affiliate with feminist organizations; both published more frequently in nonfictional and journalistic genres than in individual books; both were intimately involved with international diplomatic and political issues; both were war correspondents. Cazneau, however, unlike Fuller, was not aligned with and supported by the literary establishment of Transcendental Boston and Cambridge, nor did she cultivate ties with European intelligentsia. Rather, she often wrote from contested borderland locations--the Southwest, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. feminist literary recovery of Fuller was a logical outfall of an American Renaissance-centered field imaginary, and Cazneau, by contrast, was embroiled in expansionist projects that have only recently begun to force a revision of that field. Moreover, Cazneau's political alignments were not those with which traditional women's histories have been comfortable. …

IEEE A&E Systems Magazine Reader Survey followed by Proposed Changes to the Constitution & Bylaws of the Society

IEEE A&E Systems Magazine Reader Survey followed by Proposed Changes to the Constitution & Bylaws of the Society

Film-fiction: fan magazines, narrative, and spectatorship in American cinema of the 1910s

The presentation of film texts as short stories in early motion picture fan magazines has long been treated as a sort of antiquarian curio, and has usually been discussed as simple synopsis of the films in question. In fact, close examination of these ‘fictionalizations’ and comparison across magazines and between fictionalized and film text suggests that these stories do not simply re-present or expand on the films – they transform them into an aesthetic distinct from that of the transitional film era and more in line with classical Hollywood norms. In doing so, they suggest that films were not treated by readers as ‘master texts’ from which other forms merely derived, but as contingent incarnations of a story world presumed to be behind the films. In doing so, they suggest that readers of early fan magazines may have had a similar relationship to filmic and literary texts, and a similar understanding of fandom, as has been found in studies of more contemporary fan cultures.

The Second Immutable Law of Security Administration

If security measures are too strict, users will find ways to circumvent them in order to do their jobs. Hence, systems can be lesssecure with stringent administrative policies than without them. IT Professional's editor in chief, Arnold W. Bragg, describes this conundrum in his final address to the magazine's readers.

Response to Linn and Showalter

Response to Linn and Showalter Robert M. Citino (bio) Back in 2005 the American Historical Review approached me and, to my astonishment, asked me to write an article for the journal on the current state of military history. In the course of the next few months, when my colleagues found out about my assignment, there was no lack of advice about how to proceed. This was the time to “let them have it,” to tell “our story,” to rescue military history from the obscurity to which the academy had exiled it. I tried to resist that approach, explaining to my friends that I felt like a man who had finally been invited to a very exclusive party and who did not want to complain about the ambience or the silverware the first moment that he walked into the room. I simply tried to put our best foot forward, arguing that military history is serious history, and that military historians are serious scholars who are doing work as important as those in any other historical subfield. The resulting article may have lacked fireworks, but I thought—and still think—that the approach had merit. Click for larger view View full resolution West Point, ca. 1889. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-62092]. That is why the analyses and recommendations of my friends Dennis Showalter and Brian Linn had me nodding in agreement. Neither one is especially disgruntled. Neither spent a great deal of time whining about the plight of military history, grinding axes about the leftward lean of the profession, or asking “Why do they hate us?” Neither fired salvoes in the culture wars or complained about their colleagues’ politics. Best of all, both seem to view the current situation in military history more in terms of opportunity than of crisis. Showalter, for example, argues that military historians who are marginalized within the academy need to reach out to different constituencies. His tour d’horizon takes us to readers of popular magazines like those published by the Weider Group, to “nontraditional students” whom he describes as the “occupationally retired but intellectually alert,” and finally to the “thousands of students enrolled in online MA programs in military history,” especially those at the American Military University (AMU) and Norwich University. Indeed, it is hard to argue with this. Showalter’s own impressive publishing career has followed a trajectory from the strictly scholarly (Railroads and Rifles) to the increasingly [End Page 14] popular (Patton and Rommel), all without the sacrifice of a single jot of scholarly rigor. Indeed, as one who has followed his writings passionately and obsessively, I can say that there is no difference at all between the “early Dennis” and the “later.” He has proved that there is an enormous appetite among the general reading population for hard thinking and good writing about war. Likewise, there is no arguing with the success of AMU—seventy on-line programs, 40,000 students—or Norwich’s impressive reconception of the traditional MA for the digital age. Nor does Linn see this as a time for tears. Despite the relegation of military history to the margins of academe—a marginalization he is not all that unhappy about, given the current state of the profession!—he notes that opportunities abound, opportunities far greater than those found in any other historical subfield. There are fellowships, grants, and programs funded by military and civilian institutes, from the Guggenheim and Verville Fellowships to the West Point Summer Seminar to the Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professorship at the U.S. Army War College; there are real possibilities of wielding influence on government policy (with the “surge” in Iraq being the best example and with military historians Eliot Cohen and Fred Kagan as the exemplars); there are the fellowship and networking that come with membership in the Society for Military History, perhaps the best specialized organization of professional historians in the world; and finally, there is a huge number of job opportunities for civilian historians within the military itself. In evaluating the truth of what Showalter and Linn have written, I need only look to my own career. I’ve written the usual scholarly books...

Reading Sources and Reading Spaces in Honduras

Though literacy is often presented as a universal and monolithic achievement, it is in fact context-dependent, and largely dependent upon the kinds of texts available in a particular community. This paper presents an observer’s study of reading in Honduras, focusing particularly on the availability of reading materials and spaces dedicated to reading and literacy practices. Environments studied included bookstores, libraries, schools, and Internet cafés, as well as streets and shops. Reading books was observed to be relatively uncommon and primarily done in an educational context. Other reading materials, including newspapers, magazines, and text messages, were far more commonly used and far better integrated into the Honduran society. My observations suggest that libraries could play an important supporting role in Honduras’ efforts to establish universal literacy.

How broadband changes online and offline behaviors

Using longitudinal panel data on Internet subscriptions and online and offline activities, I assess how broadband adoption affects behavior. Consistent with previous research, this study finds that broadband adopters increase their overall Internet usage. However, broadband adoption is associated with an increase in relatively few specific applications, like downloading music and online purchasing. Among “socially desirable” activities that governments seek to increase by encouraging broadband adoption, only researching health information rises among broadband adopters. Usage of job and career websites and usage of government sites does not rise as people move from dial-up to broadband. Among offline activities, broadband adoption lowers time spent playing video games but has no statistically significant effect on other activities like reading magazines and watching TV. OLS with person-level fixed effects and the difference-in-differences matching estimator yield similar findings. The results are somewhat sensitive to the time period studied, which could indicate that adopters at different stages of the technology’s diffusion respond differently to broadband adoption; it could also reflect the rapid changes in online activities and broadband technology.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Social Psychology and Media: Critical Consideration

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Social Psychology and Media: Critical Consideration

"You Are Invited to Participate": Interactive Fandom in the Age of the Movie Magazine

THERE EXISTS A SIGNIFICANT CRITICAL LIT- ERATURE about motion picture marketing and advertisement, especially concerning the re- lated subject of American movie fan magazines. Much of this scholarship revolves around the gendering of discourse aimed at the fan maga- zine reader, especially over the course of the 1910s and 20s, and the degree to which these magazines increasingly spoke to women who were confronted with a range of entertainment options and related forms of consumerism.2 However, there have been few attempts by scholars to account for the ways that the read- ers of movie magazines both were encouraged to behave and, indeed, responded to this insti- tutionalizing of fan culture. Jane Gaines makes a point akin to this in her 1985 essay War, Women, and Lipstick: Our most sophisticated tools of structural analysis can't tell us who read fan magazines, In what spirit or mood, or in what social context. Were they read on maga- zine stands next to bus stops, in waiting rooms, or under the dryers at beauty parlors? Or maybe they were never read at all, but purchased only for images, to cut up, tack on walls, or paste into scrapbooks (46). Where Gaines abandons this quest, casting it aside as an ancillary and perhaps even futile pursuit, I want to investigate one relatively unexplored avenue for understanding how fans both read and responded to movie magazines and the culture they created. Although this article begins somewhat conventionally with a discussion of how fan magazines from Hollywood's heyday (the 1910s through the 40s) were encoded, its ultimate aim is to assess how the magazines shaped their readers' understanding of their own relation to star culture. I argue here that one way to discern how the fan magazines motivated certain aspects of fan behavior is by looking to fan letters. This strikes me as an especially important task given the reluctance of many scholars to venture into this admittedly difficult territory. tendency to abandon fans' reactions at the theoretical level leaves us at a critical impasse that is not, I think, entirely insurmountable. By looking at fan magazines and the ways in which they constructed and trained a particular kind of ideal reader, and then by turning to written evidence in the form of fan mail for substantiation of the ways that at least some movie fans represented themselves, we emerge with a sense of the interactive culture that was being generated in the magazines' pages.3 1 cannot hope to answer Gaines's particular lines of inquiry; however, I can suggest some very concrete ways that the fan magazine reader was spoken to and then spoke with regard to the cultures of celebrity and fandom. In her work on celebrity, Adrienne McLean notes, The relationship of the fan magazine itself to advertising, product tie-ins, and consumerism is clear, but that women experienced fan magazine discourse only or predominantly as consumers is [Being Rita Hayworth 74). Indeed, I hope to both affirm and extend McLean's formulation here by analyzing at least one way that fans acted beyond, but not outside of, the commercial paradigm laid out in the magazines. Fan mail reveals the ways that fans were led not just to an ongoing cycle of consumption, but also to aspirations of a social nature involving both star qualities and the stars themselves. These ambitions often exceeded the boundaries of interaction offered in the magazines' pages. As the following analysis demonstrates, the magazines sought to train their readers to take an active role in their spectatorial and consuming lives, but this training also led fans elsewhere, particularly to the stars themselves. Fan magazines are, as Anne Morey writes in an essay about the fiction published in their pages, readily available reservoirs of information about how viewers might have used films (334). I would add that this reservoir of information can lead us to other, even more personal sources of knowledge about how viewers interacted with the motion picture industry. …

Complementing consumer magazine brands with internet extensions?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the effects of web site extension on the parent‐magazine brand in the context of experiential goods, and to identify factors that are related to success.Design/methodology/approachThe paper focuses on the relationship between consumers' experiences on magazine web sites and their loyalty towards the print magazine.FindingsThere are different ways in which the web site can complement the print version. The first mechanism is related to engaging in more frequent communication with the magazine's readers, and the second is related to consumer‐initiated interaction between other readers. In both cases something is offered that cannot be obtained from the print magazine, but is assumed to complement it.Originality/valueThe paper increases understanding of brand extensions with regard to experiential goods, but more research is needed on the factors that are related to extension success.

Time, the body and the reversibility of ageing: commodifying the decade

ABSTRACTContemporary popular culture proposes new ideological associations between time, ageing, the body and personal identity projects. In a range of magazine texts, television shows and associated websites, several commercialised discourses equate ageing, and women's ageing in particular, with the ‘look’ of ageing. They project a version of personal ageing that is reversible and repairable, on the presumption that looking younger is universally a desirable goal and one that can be reached through regimes of control operating on skin, body shape and weight, hair and clothing. Different moral stances are established in these discourses. One set offers magazine readers putative control over acknowledged risks and threats deemed inherent to ageing. Such texts invoke personal responsibility for maintaining and indeed for re-claiming a youthful appearance in middle and old age. Another set shames and vilifies people who ‘look older than they should’. In those cases, visible ageing needs to be urgently dealt with, on the gerontophobic assumption that the look of ageing renders the individual progressively less socially desirable or even less acceptable. Different frames of mediation, such as the keying of personal censure and humiliation as play, complicate the moral critique of these discourses, even though their ageist orientations are often stark. The decade is constructed as an important unit of bodily ageing, when the target is to look or in some ways to be ‘ten years younger’.

A Parent's Perspective on the Importance of Braille for Success in Life

When my daughter, Cara, was 3-1/2 years old, she had some remaining vision in one of her eyes. However, her vision was unstable due to a partial retinal detachment and various treatments she had received for retinal cancer. Her prognosis for improved sight was poor. Despite continual monitoring and medical treatment, her useful vision was decreasing. Cara attended a preschool program in the neighborhood, at a school where I taught half days. The program she was enrolled in provided social opportunities for her with non-disabled children her own age. These social experiences were very important for her. However, I became aware of a need for a different school setting for Cara. The schoolwork was causing her increased frustration due to her limited vision. Some of the skills she had developed were decreasing. She could no longer identify colors, numbers, and letters with accuracy. Also, Cara would stumble over toys and objects during playtime, and often bumped into other children or objects in the room. It was obvious she needed some classroom accommodations and modifications that she could not get in a private neighborhood preschool. I looked for a school program that would best meet her needs, spent some time talking to various doctors, and called the school for blind students in my state and the local school district to find out what programs were available for a child who was rapidly losing vision. After comprehensive educational evaluations, and considerable investigation on my part, I enrolled my daughter in a preschool program at a public school that had a full-time teacher of students who are visually impaired in a resource room. Cara's resource classroom had five preschool students with one teacher and a classroom aide (now known as a paraeducator). Almost immediately, Cara began to learn tactile discrimination skills and the fine motor skills that would prove to be very helpful for future braille reading. She also began to learn about protective extension used in travel and other techniques, such as trailing walls. The orientation and mobility (O&M) specialist offered me some basic O&M instruction and showed me the techniques Cara was learning. I was very excited to have these specialized teachers work with me and increase my understanding on how to teach Cara some very specific activities and techniques designed for children with visual impairments. INTRODUCING BRAILLE Cara loved time, and every night I would read a book to her before bedtime. I realized her vision was failing and soon she would not be able to identify the pictures and letters in her favorite books. This realization made me very sad, knowing how much she valued books. I could see her frustration as her sight diminished to the point that she could not see the print or pictures very well anymore. Her resource room teacher explained that it would be a good idea to introduce Cara to braille even though we would still encourage her to use her remaining vision to identify letters and numbers. I followed the recommendations of the teacher of students with visual impairments and worked on prebraille skills with Cara. We explored tactile discrimination skills and fine motor skills. Like most parents who have no previous knowledge of braille and its usefulness, I was clueless. I had occasionally observed adults who were blind reading braille books or magazines when we were waiting for an appointment at the eye clinic of the University of Illinois. I was amazed by how rapidly their fingers could fly over the pages of dots. LEARNING BRAILLE TOGETHER Because the university programs that offered braille instruction in my state were too far from where we lived (there were no distance-learning programs then), I sought out a place where I could take courses in braille. Fortunately, I found a community college program that offered braille classes in its adult education program. In my classes, I learned about the braille cell and was absolutely amazed! …

Magazine Reading and Involvement and Young Adults' Sexual Health Knowledge, Efficacy, and Behaviors

These studies investigate connections between magazine reading and involvement and young people's sexual health knowledge, self-efficacy, intentions, and contraception use. Study 1 assessed sexual health behaviors and magazine reading among 579 undergraduate students (69% were female; 68% were White; Mage = 19.73). As expected, more frequent reading of mainstream magazines was associated with greater sexual health knowledge, safe-sex self-efficacy, and consistency of using contraception, although results varied across sex and magazine genre. Study 2 replicated and expanded on these findings with a survey of 422 undergraduate students (51% were female; 71% were White; 49% were age 18 or younger), incorporating a more extensive knowledge scale, questions about safe-sex intentions, and measures of magazine involvement. Results suggest that magazine use is associated with positive sexual health outcomes among young people.

Driven: Branding Derek Jeter, Redefining Race

Promoting the opening of the Museum of the City of New York's exhibit, The Glory Days: New York Baseball, 1947-1957, curator Ann Meyerson noted that for the first time since Jackie Robinson crossed the major league's color line in 1947, not a single African American player was likely to be included on either of the city's teams' twenty-five man rosters in 2007. Excluding, for the sake of argument, Mets prospect Lastings Milledge, now with the Nationals, where did that leave the captain of the New York Yankees, Derek Jeter? In a 2005 interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Jeter handled the subject of his race with characteristic, media-savvy care: My Dad is black, my Mom is Irish, and I'm Catholic, so I hear everything. I'm in New York and there are all different people, all races and religions. I can to everyone.(1) Since his 1996 rookie season, Derek Jeter has not only played shortstop for the New York Yankees, he has parlayed his ability to relate to everyone into what advertisers hope will translate into an ability to sell to everyone, working overtime as a pitching machine. Most of the products Jeter pitched before 2006 were ones generally associated with baseball and conventionally endorsed by its players--Nike sneakers, Gatorade sports drink, Ford cars and trucks, and a variety of breakfast and snack foods, including Ritz crackers, Post cereals, Skippy peanut butter, and, perhaps inevitably, Oreos. Not so surprisingly for one of the most generously compensated players in the game, Jeter also endorsed a financial institution, Fleet Bank. In his role as a well-known man about town, not altogether unfamiliar to the readers of New York's gossip columns, Jeter also appeared with his equally famous, generous compensator, George M. Steinbrenner, in a Visa commercial. Recently, however, Jeter has branched out beyond the expected, connecting his image to two very different brands. A short hop across town from the Museum of the City of New York, near the Morningside Heights home of Columbia University, Jeter peers out from a sign atop the subway entrance at 116th Street. Next to his readily identifiable image is the word DRIVEN. Driven is the signature fragrance of a line of products for men, introduced by Avon in April 2006 with a nationwide, integrated campaign including print ads, an interactive Web site, and, in the New York area, a variety of outdoor signage on busses and taxis, including the ad at the 116th Street subway entrance and others like it. According to Avon's Web site, Driven [reflects] the unique personality of one of the most driven men in America, Derek Jeter.(2) New York commuters of another stripe, returning home to North Jersey's more affluent suburbs from a lucrative day at the office in their well-appointed luxury vehicles, are also greeted by Jeter's giant visage, this time pitching Movado 800 series chronographs as they crawl down the helix from the Lincoln Tunnel to Route 3. Print ads bearing virtually the same image and accompanying copy have appeared in Gentleman's Quarterly, the New York Times Magazine, and other glossy publications aimed at a demographic, who, like the Yankees' captain, have a great deal of disposable income as well as a great deal of self-defined style. Jeter, who, along with New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, is the face of the brand, is also featured in a television commercial for Movado. Certainly, these ad campaigns target two separate and distinct groups of consumers, groups which, as early as the 1920s, the advertising industry differentiated as and class, respectively.(3) Despite the placement of an ad for Driven in GQ's December 2006 issue, the magazine's readers--the advertising industry's class--are probably not tying up circuits placing calls to their Avon ladies to order Driven. Neither is the fragrance, produced by a company that claims its brochures are distributed to over fifteen million customers biweekly, the epitome of mass when it comes to cosmetics, likely to be marketed heavily to luxury-conscious metrosexuals. …

Page 2: Green Books

Page 2 American Book Review American Book Review Founded 1977 by Ronald Sukenick Published at the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Houston–Victoria American Book Review specializes in reviews of frequently neglected published works of fiction, poetry, literary and cultural criticism from small, regional, university, ethnic, avant-garde, and women’s presses. ABR as a literary journal aims to project the sense of engagement that writers themselves feel about what is being published. It is edited and produced by writers for writers and the general public. Comment on its reviews is encouraged, as are suggestions for future reviews. Send all editorial correspondence or review copies to: American Book Review, University of Houston–Victoria, School of Arts and Sciences, 3007 N. Ben Wilson, Victoria, TX 77901-5731 Telephone: (361) 570-4101 Fax: (361) 580-5501 Email: americanbookreview@uhv.edu Send all subscription correspondence to: American Book Review, University of Houston–Victoria, 3007 N. Ben Wilson, Victoria, TX 77901-5731 Telephone: (361) 570-4101 Email: americanbookreview@uhv.edu© 2009 by American Book Review ISSN 0149-9408. Covers and cover details used by permission. American Book Review appears bimonthly.Annual subscription rates are $24 for a one-year and $40 for a two-year individual subscription; $30 for a one-year institutional subscription; $35 for a one-year foreign, airmail subscription. American Book Review is published by its editors, and is made possible, in part, by generous support from the School ofArts and Sciences, University of Houston–Victoria and Friends of ABR. This project is also supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes a great nation deserves great art, and the Texas Commission on the Arts. ABR is also a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. Trade distribution by Hudson–RPM, 150 Black River Road, Worcester, MA 01607; and Armadillo, 7310 LaCienaga Blvd., Inglewood, CA 90302. Indexed in Humanities International Complete, Book Review Index, Current Contents/Arts & Humanities, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. http://americanbookreview.org Publisher: Editor: Managing Editor: Assistant Editor: Layout: Subscription Manager: Cover Image: Focus Editor: Publisher Emeritus: Associate Editors: Contributing Editors: Assistants: Jeffrey R. Di Leo Jeffrey R. Di Leo Charles Alcorn David C. Felts David C. Felts Sunitha Subbaiah David C. Felts, “Montaigne Redux in Neon” Thomas Larson Charles B. Harris Mark Amerika, R.M. Berry, C. S. Giscombe, Larry McCaffery, Doug Nufer, Lance Olsen, Kevin Prufer, John Tytell, Barry Wallenstein, Tom Williams, Eric Miles Williamson Rudolfo Anaya, Ron Arias, John Ashbery, Michael Bérubé, Rosellen Brown, Andrei Codrescu, William Demby, Rikki Ducornet, Raymond Federman, William Gass, Russell Hoover, Steve Katz, Clarence Major, Michael McClure, Joyce Carol Oates, Marjorie Perloff, Robert Peters, Corinne Robins, Charles Russell, Paul Schiavo, Barry Seiler, Charles Simic, Bruce Sterling, Regina Weinreich Katie Lauren Moody Page 2 If you find it enjoyable to curl up in bed with a good book, imagine what it would be like curling up with 1,500 good books. Not so cozy? Consider Kindle 2: an electronic reader recently released by Amazon that not only allows you to store seven times as many books as the original version, but also will “read” the books to you—albeit in a computerized voice. The Kindle 2 also allows you to read newspapers, blogs, and magazines, including—hold the presses—ABR! It might be argued that with the rise of the digital age, the book, journal, and newspaper as “paper and ink” objects need to give way to the electronic word. Not only is the paper and ink object more expensive to produce (and reproduce) than its digital double, but the electronic word can be disseminated, searched, destroyed, and recycled far more easily than its material counterpart. If it is indeed the case that the dissemination of the books, magazines, journals, and newspapers that we know and love is more affordable and accessible digitally than physically, then why has the transition been so slow? While legitimate arguments can be made that the quality of digital publication is inferior to print publication or that digital information is easier to “recycle” (viz., plagiarize or use without paying) than printed information, these are just historical, not natural, facts. There is nothing intrinsically inferior...

Preadolescents' Self-concept and Popular Magazine Preferences

This article draws on a larger study of Canadian children's sense of self and media habits, 223 children in all (112 boys, 111 girls; 10- to 13-year-olds; M = 11.17y). Participants completed a questionnaire on their self-descriptions and reading habits over a 3-year period. Content analysis of the responses showed great diversity in preadolescents' magazine reading habits and self-descriptions. Results showed that across all ages, girls preferred mainly fashion and entertainment magazines, whereas boys preferred mainly magazines concerning sports and video games. Results suggest that preadolescents' popular magazine reading habits may differ according to age and gender, and may reflect their self-perceptions. Educational implications for critical media literacy are discussed.