- Avatars of the Word
- James J. O'Donnell
- In this penetrating book, James O'Donnell takes a reading on the promise and the threat of electronic technology for our literate future. He reinterprets today's communication revolution through a series of refracted comparisons with earlier revolutionary periods: the transition from oral to written culture, from the papyrus scroll to the codex, from copied manuscript to print.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000
- Hearing Gesture
- Susan Goldin-Meadow
- This book explores how we move our hands when we talk, and what it means when we do so. Focusing on what we can discover about speakers--adults and children alike--by watching their hands, Goldin-Meadow discloses the active role that gesture plays in conversation and, more fundamentally, in thinking. In general, we are unaware of gesture, which occurs as an undercurrent alongside an acknowledged verbal exchange. This book makes clear why we must not ignore the background conversation.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
- Inside Deaf Culture
- Carol A. Padden
- Tom L. Humphries
- In this absorbing story of the changing life of a community, the authors of Deaf in America reveal historical events and forces that have shaped the ways that Deaf people define themselves today. Inside Deaf Culture relates Deaf people's search for a voice of their own, and their proud self-discovery and self-description as a flourishing culture.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
- The Power of News
- Michael Schudson
- Michael Schudson holds that news is a form of culture, complete with its own literary and social conventions and powerful in ways far more subtle and complex than its many critics might suspect. A penetrating look into this culture, The Power of News offers a compelling view of the news media's emergence as a central institution of modern society, a key repository of common knowledge and cultural authority.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover