Here, the author assesses our modern book culture by focusing on five key elements including the explosion of retail bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, and the formation of the Oprah Book Club.

Bringing together the history of European astroculture and American-Soviet spaceflight with scholarship on the 1970s, this cutting-edge volume examines the reconfiguration of space imaginaries from a multiplicity of disciplinary ...

"Sixty years after his arrival in America in 1913 at age fifteen, Syrian-American Mohammed (Ed) Aryain recounts his life as first a dry-goods peddler and then a merchant and family man on the Great Plains, eventually owning a store in ...

Based on extensive research at eight universities - Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Stanford, Michigan, and California at Berkeley - Reuben examines the aims of university reformers in the context of nineteenth-century ...

This profoundly reflexive process is skillfully described." --The New York Times Book Review "Provocative...Compelling...Powerfully conveys why reading matters, why it is both a delight and a necessity." --The Harvard Review

Yet the emergence of the book was a process of immense historical importance and heralded the dawning of the epoch of modernity.