Böcker av James D. Bloom

Treating Philip Roth as a war writeras well as a sportswriter, crime reporter, political commentator, and Newark chroniclerRoth's Wars: A Career in Conflict offers a thoroughly researched account of the novelist's preoccupation with wars around the world and wars at home. This wide-ranging social and cultural history of Roth's career examines intersections between Roth's preoccupations as a writer and the work of contemporaries, such as J.D. Salinger, Joan Didion, George Plimpton, Hannah Arendt, E.L. Doctorow, Flannery O'Connor, Michael Herr, and Don DeLillo. The legends and icons who figure in this account of Roth's career include Dwight Eisenhower, Meyer Lansky, Ernie Pyle, Bob Dylan, Johnny Appleseed, Anne Frank, JFK, Mickey Mantle, the Marx Brothers, Thomas Paine, Sandy Koufax, and Franz Kafka.

The comedic work of the children of modern Jewish immigrants overturned the prevailing languages and imageries with which an Anglocentric United States had traditionally represented and expanded itself. In ^IGravity Fails: The Comic Jewish Shaping of Modern America^R, James D. Bloom approaches these developments by first surveying this transformation as it affected literature, entertainment, commerce, and politics, and then offers sharply focused chapters that look at changes in sexual candor, reactions to the Holocaust, and critiques of race.Indeed, the personae discussed here pioneered unprecedented candor toward and scrutiny about sex and violence, and no other book delves as deeply or as widely among art forms, media, and levels of cultural hierarchy. Including considerations of the work of such diverse artists as Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, Gilda Radner, Philip Roth, Jerry Seinfeld, and Stephen Sondheim, Gravity Fails provides a unique, penetrating, and hilarious look at a major force in the progress of American culture.