<i>Scandalous!: 50 Shocking Events You Should Know About (So You Can Impress Your Friends)</i> (review)
2012; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/bcc.2012.0238
ISSN1558-6766
Autores ResumoReviewed by: Scandalous!: 50 Shocking Events You Should Know About (So You Can Impress Your Friends) Elizabeth Bush Fryd, Hallie . Scandalous!: 50 Shocking Events You Should Know About (So You Can Impress Your Friends). Zest, 2012. 221p. illus. with photographs Paper ed. ISBN 978-0-9827322-0-5 $13.99 Ad Gr. 9-12. Anyone who's ever propped a celebrity magazine behind a textbook in class (come on, admit it) will immediately appreciate the brilliance of this offering, a couple hundred pages of juicy gossip raised almost to respectability by dual claims to historical significance and cultural literacy. Fryd digs up the most pungent dirt from twentieth-century America and mounds it into neat little four-page piles under consistent headings of "What Went Down," "Quoteables," "The Aftermath," "Why We Still Care," and a sidebar of related intrigue. From the 1906 murder of womanizing architect Stanford White at the hands of a jealous husband, through the less titillating but arguably more important shenanigans of the Gore-Bush 2000 election recount, readers are treated to a parade of political, sexual, athletic, criminal, and financial hijinks. "What Went Down" descriptions are tiny germs of stories in concise and slangy text (a notable number of characters are "pissed off"). The "Why We Still Care" sections constitute the author's best shot at making this exercise relevant, but for every seriously thought-provoking issue—"The [Mapplethorpe] scandal created an on-going debate on how much control the government should have over the art it funds"—there is at least another overblown bit of fluff—"The [Milli Vanilli] scandal illustrated how focused the public is on image." Since the scandals here grind to a halt at the turn of the millennium, most readers will have been in diapers, at best, when the most recent stories broke. And that, happily, clinches the argument that this is really a book about history. Really. It is. Sure. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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