Smokin' Rockets: The Romance of Technology in American Film, Radio and Television, 1945-1962

Book Description

Science and technology had a significant influence on American culture and thought in the years immediately following World War II. The new wonders of science and the threat of the Soviet Union as a powerful new enemy made science fiction a popular genre in radio, television, and film. Mutant creatures spawned by radioactive energy and intergalactic dictators unleashing horrific weapons upon Earth were characteristic of science fiction at the time and served as warnings to the very real dangers posed by the atomic age.

This work examines science and science fiction in American culture beginning in the year World War II ended and going to 1962, the year of John Glenn's orbital flight and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The radio work of Arch Oboler and the significance of his "Rocket from Manhattan," which aired only one month after the dropping of the first atomic bomb and asked serious questions about the use of atomic energy, are examined. Other topics are the conflict between the free world and the Communist world in the context of science fiction plot lines, the dangers of science as shown in films like Godzilla, Them!, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and radio and television programs, the flying saucer phenomenon and the treatment of such stories in the media (with special attention given to the 1956 documentary UFO), the changing and more positive depictions of scientists, television programs like Flash Gordon and Space Patrol, the shift in the balance of world power due to the successful launching of Sputnik I by the Russians in 1957, the "end of the world" theme in science fiction, and the American journey into space.

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Links social/political changes to trends in science fiction.......2002-11-07

How have science and technology been celebrated in American film, radio and TV from 1945-1962? Smokin' Rockets examines science and science fiction worlds in American culture from a scholarly standpoint; up to the Cuban missile crisis. Shifts in themes and presentation are studied in chapters that link social and political changes to trends in science fiction.

Smokin' Rockets: The Romance of Technology in American Film, Radio and Television, 1945-1962

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Smokin' Rockets: The Romance of Technology in American Film, Radio and Television, 1945-1962
Patrick Lucanio
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000MUDCYY

Book Description

Acclaimed author/actress Denise Chávez explores the history, lore, and preparation of tacos—and other art forms—in a warm and exuberant memoir, with recipes.

"Tacos are sacred to me," writes Chávez, who's set many a fictional scene in a Southwestern restaurant or around a dinner table. And here are her special recipes, including her mother's Tacos a la Delfina ("I swear these tacos are really good cold!") and Granma Lupe's Pasta (not macaroni but a savory mincemeat-like taco filling). Here, too, are tips on shopping, cooking, and serving: "Offer up the meal with gratitude and remember: Tacos are one of life's greatest things!"

"We live in chile country," she adds. "We are blessed to be here. Food is more than food; it's a culture. And tacos are more than tacos."

Chile country is the setting for Chávez's magical, tragicomic fiction. And in A Taco Testimony she also tells wonderful stories that connect literature with culture and food with life along the Mexican-American border.

"Time and love are the essence of all Mexican cooking," Chávez says—including her spicy, juicy writing, and this feast of a book.

Customer Reviews:

A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture.......2007-07-18

It's so very true that you never really value what you have until it's gone. Such is the tone of A Taco Testimony. Like many of us, much of the author's life was spent wanting to get away from her small hometown and well away from her family. She wanted a life of her own where she could define who she wanted to be and where she could be a shining star.

Fortunately, as being part of a family seems to do, the author could never quite shake off who she was, where she came from, and those that loved her. She was the one that ended up taking care of her parents. In doing so, she was given a gift- the understanding that her parents were human just like her, they made mistakes, they had regrets, and like her they were extremely stubborn which often left feelings unsaid. Throughout it all, during the good times and the bad, there were tacos.

A Taco Testimony serves as both a memoir of the author's life experiences and a tribute to her parents. It was this latter aspect of the piece that really touched me. I started reminiscing through my own experiences, began seeing them in a new light and had the incredible urge to phone my mother and have a real conversation.

No thanks, I'm full.......2007-07-12

I take my food, my family and my culture very seriously. I think this book...was almost uh...fake? If it was fiction - still - it didn't make any sense. Dog food tacos? Please. I know & knew people in high AND low places, and I have never known anyone who has heard of or done this - I even asked several people, thinking I was wrong; but no. If you have two bucks for dog food, you buy rice or beans. I mean, really! I was even raised in an extreme poverty household, and though my sisters & I had to forage for what the normal population would not do, that is not something we ACTUALLY would do! I hate to say, but this book was either boring, or it was completely full of b.s. I almost wondered if it was some big joke? A lie? If you're serious about your and others culture, family, cuisine, etc., there are hundreds of other books you should look into. If you pick this one up, and start reading it you'll see. Sorry, but this one ain't it.

Next Time Please Stick to Fiction.......2007-01-22

As a resident of the author's city, I was looking forward to reading her much anticipated release. Unfortunately though, I was sorely disappointed. In fact, the reviewer who awarded A Taco Testimony two stars was generous. Unlike the 2-star reviewer though, I stuck with it, reading page after dull page, hoping it would improve (but never does), much like a monotonous "Saturday Night Live" skit that doesn't know when to end.

Without semblance of structure, she haphazardly places poems, recipes, and anecdotes at random, repeating herself ad nauseam utilizing the sophomoric "Taco is life" metaphor. Moreover, her inchoate thoughts lack depth and detail. Riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions, full of fluff and devoid of content, her style resembles that of a grade-groveling high school sycophant, trying to con her audience with melodrama and malaise, but inevitably saying nothing of note.

In her weak attempt to explain "Culture", for example, she affirms that it is lack of cultural awareness that results in our inability to know and respect others which ultimately causes violence in the world. Here, I agree. Yet her very example epitomizes HER ignorance of culture. With awkward phrasing she states, "A man who lives here but is not from here is trying to sue the city to get the three crosses, the symbol of our town, removed from all public displays." Not only does she promote divisiveness by insinuating that he is an outsider, despite claims throughout her book that we are all one people, she fails to acknowledge that the crosses of Calvary are recognized worldwide as the autograph of Christianity - that the triumvirate could represent centuries of violence perpetrated against non-believers. By failing to recognize the identities of non-adherents of Christianity, she obliterates them from the landscape, engaging in her own brand of cultural imperialism. Thus, the crosses are not merely the symbol of our town, the simplistic notion that the author would like us to believe.

Perhaps the author is better suited to writing fiction. I can only hope her tacos are better than her book.

Uninteresting.......2006-12-13

Uninteresting recipes, uninteresting writing. So uninteresting in fact that I skipped whole pages and sections and never found out if she even got around to explaining that the word taco means wadding or wedge, such as the wadding that used to be used to stuff cannons. Visual image, stuffing a taco "wad of food" into your mouth.

The praised Delfina's tacos, which are a guisado of ground beef, onion, sweet peas, salt pepper and comino stuffed into a softened with oil tortilla and bake until crisp,well, it's an interesting recipe that I haven't seen before but a lot of work for not very much of a pay-off in flavor.

Reading the book reminded me of times when I would be stuck having to listen to someone ramble on about whatever, and not having a means to extricate myself from the situation. Fortunately, in the case of the book, all I had to do was close it and shelve it.

It's a fine leisure choice for any who would understand both family interrelationships and cultural infleunces........2006-12-12

This is no cookbook about tacos, but it is a food memoir reviewed here for its even wider-ranging survey of culture, family, and belief. Denise Chavez reflects on her coming of age in New Mexico, surveying her family's traditions, memories, and food-influenced lives. It's a fine leisure choice for any who would understand both family interrelationships and cultural infleunces.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Growing food in the southwest mountains: A permaculture approach to home gardening above 6,500 feet in Arizona, New Mexico, southern Colorado and southern Utah

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Growing food in the southwest mountains: A permaculture approach to home gardening above 6,500 feet in Arizona, New Mexico, southern Colorado and southern Utah
Lisa Rayner
Manufacturer: Flagstaff Tea Party
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Vegetables | Gardening & Horticulture | Home & Garden | Subjects | Books

Horticulture | Agricultural Sciences | Science | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0971956502

Social Adaptation to Food Stress: A Prehistoric Southwestern Example (Prehistoric Archeology and Ecology series)

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Social Adaptation to Food Stress: A Prehistoric Southwestern Example (Prehistoric Archeology and Ecology series)
Paul E. Minnis
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Theory | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0226530248

Book Description

Combining anthropology, archeology, and evolutionary theory, Paul E. Minnis develops a model of how tribal societies deal with severe food shortages. While focusing on the prehistory of the Rio Mimbres region of New Mexico, he provides comparative data from the Fringe Enga of New Guinea, the Tikopia of Tikopia Island, and the Gwembe Tonga of South Africa.

Minnis proposes that, faced with the threat of food shortages, nonstratified societies survive by employing a series of responses that are increasingly effective but also are increasingly costly and demand increasingly larger cooperative efforts. The model Minnis develops allows him to infer, from evidence of such factors as population size, resource productivity, and climate change, the occurrence of food crises in the past. Using the Classic Mimbres society as a test case, he summarizes the regional archeological sequence and analyzes the effects of environmental fluctuations on economic and social organization. He concludes that the responses of the Mimbres people to their burgeoning population were inadequate to prevent the collapse of the society in the late twelfth century.

In its illumination of the general issue of responses to food shortages, Social Adaptation to Food Stress will interest not only archeologists but also those concerned with current food shortages in the Third World. Cultural ecologists and human geographers will be able to derive a wealth of ideas, methods, and data from Minnis's work.

Encarnación's Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California (California Studies in Food and Culture, 9)

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California Hispanic Women's History

Encarnación's Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California (California Studies in Food and Culture, 9)
Encarnación Pinedo
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Baking | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

History | Gastronomy | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

General | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

Mexican | Regional & International | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

Mexico | Americas | History | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0520236513

Book Description

In 1991 Ruth Reichl, then a Los Angeles Times food writer, observed that much of the style now identified with California cuisine, and with nouvelle cuisine du Mexique, was practiced by Encarnación Pinedo a century earlier. A landmark of American cuisine first published in 1898 as El cocinero español (The Spanish Cook), Encarnación's Kitchen is the first cookbook written by a Hispanic in the United States, as well as the first recording of Californio food--Mexican cuisine prepared by the Spanish-speaking peoples born in California. Pinedo's cookbook offers a fascinating look into the kitchens of a long-ago culture that continues to exert its influence today.
Of some three hundred of Pinedo's recipes included here--a mixture of Basque, Spanish, and Mexican--many are variations on traditional dishes, such as chilaquiles, chiles rellenos, and salsa (for which the cook provides fifteen versions). Whether describing how to prepare cod or ham and eggs (a typical Anglo dish labeled "huevos hipócritas"), Pinedo was imparting invaluable lessons in culinary history and Latino culture along with her piquant directions. In addition to his lively, clear translation, Dan Strehl offers a remarkable view of Pinedo's family history and of the material and literary culture of early California cooking. Prize-winning journalist Victor Valle puts Pinedo's work into the context of Hispanic women's testimonios of the nineteenth century, explaining how the book is a deliberate act of cultural transmission from a traditionally voiceless group.

Customer Reviews:

California Hispanic Women's History .......2007-06-08

Until recent history, women rarely wrote their own stories for the history books, men did. This is especially true of the Hispanic women living in the lands after the Mexican war (1848). The Hispanics living in California and other territories that became the American Southwest were quickly defrauded of their land and civil rights. This cookbook begins with beautifully researched and sensitively written essays describing the social-political context within which Encarnacion penned her recipes. The recipes are as she wrote them in 1898. To cook them accurately presumes adequate knowledge of cooking. Cookbooks are more than a collection of recipes, they transmit culture. This book is necessary for any person deeply interested in the cultural context of California and Southwest cuisine. Before I read this book, I wondered how accurate or true to my experience it would be. My late grandmother, Catalina Maria Ortiz Acosta, was a woman from a prominent Hispanic family, and was born in Los Angeles in 1904. When I read this book I recognized the recipes from the meals and the style of food my grandmother had cooked. The history confirmed the stories she would tell me about the various political elite she knew. (Catalina Pico, the grand daughter of Pio Pico, the last Mexican Governor or Alta California was her godmother.) I highly recommend this book.

Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food And the World from Working-class Mexican And Mexican American Women (Rio Grande/Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Tradition)

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Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food And the World from Working-class Mexican And Mexican American Women (Rio Grande/Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Tradition)
Meredith E. Abarca
Manufacturer: Texas A&M University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Essays | Gastronomy | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1585445312

Book Description

"Literally, chilaquiles are a breakfast I grew up eating: fried corn tortillas with tomato-chile sauce. Symbolically, they are the culinary metaphor for how working-class women speak with the seasoning of their food."-from the Introduction

Through the ages and across cultures, women have carved out a domain in which their cooking allowed them to express themselves, strengthen family relationships, and create a world of shared meanings with other women. In Voices in the Kitchen, Meredith E. Abarca features the voices of her mother and several other family members and friends, seated at their kitchen tables, to share the grassroots world view of these working-class Mexican and Mexican American women.

In the kitchen, Abarca demonstrates, women assert their own sazón (seasoning), not only in their cooking but also in their lives. Through a series of oral histories, or charlas culinarias (culinary chats), the women interviewed address issues of space, sensual knowledge, artistic and narrative expression, and cultural and social change. From her mother's breakfast chilaquiles to the most elaborate traditional dinner, these women share their lives as they share their savory, symbolic, and theoretical meanings of food.

The charlas culinarias represent spoken personal narratives, testimonial autobiography, and a form of culinary memoir, one created by the cooks-as-writers who speak from their kitchen space. Abarca then looks at writers-as-cooks to add an additional dimension to the understanding of women's power to define themselves.

Book Description

If you are what you eat, then it would follow that grocery shopping is the way you construct your identity, and that markets and grocery stores are the laboratories in which whole cultures build theirs--as well as an early place to spot changes. This small, chunky and completely charming gift book presents portraits of Mexican consumer products alongside photographs of the supermarkets, stores, markets and street vendors where they are sold. The accompanying text places all this graphically striking raw material in the context of its historical antecedents and contemporary food trends, and considers the situation of locally conceived, designed and distributed products like these in the age of global consumerism. In Mexico traditional design, like the work showcased here, is competing with digital media and work done by international corporate design firms. Culturally specific images are being displaced by global ones, the Virgin of Guadalupe by Disney cartoons, literally changing the face of the food and beverages that Mexicans eat. Mexican industry is holding its own against the onslaught for now, and Mexican products still serve the needs of the vast majority of the country's population. That is: Mexican products sold in packaging that is less than environmentally friendly, displaying images that are not politically correct, and using ingredients that are banned in other countries still serve their needs. As El Super confirms, bad things come in great packages.

Food Culture in Mexico (Food Culture around the World)

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Food Culture in Mexico (Food Culture around the World)
Janet Long-Solis , and Luis Alberto Vargas
Manufacturer: Greenwood Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 031332431X

Book Description

Since ancient times, the most important foods in the Mexican diet have been corn, beans, squash, tomatillos, and chile peppers. The role of these ingredients in Mexican food culture through the centuries is the basis of this volume. In addition, students and general readers will discover the panorama of food traditions in the context of European contact in the sixteenth century--when the Spaniards introduced new foodstuffs, adding variety to the diet--and the profound changes that have occurred in Mexican food culture since the 1950s. Recent improvements in technology, communications, and transportation, changing women's roles, and migration from country to city and to and from the United States have had a much greater impact. Their basic, traditional diet served the Mexican people well, providing them with wholesome nutrition and sufficient energy to live, work, and reproduce, as well as to maintain good health. Chapter 1 traces the origins of the Mexican diet and overviews food history from pre-Hispanic times to recent developments. The principal foods of Mexican cuisine and their origins are explained in the second chapter. Mexican women have always been responsible for everyday cooking, including the intensive preparation of grinding corn, peppers, and spices by hand, and a chapter is devoted to this work and a discussion of how traditional ways are supplemented today with modern conveniences and kitchen aids such as blenders and food processors. Surveys of class and regional differences in typical meals and cuisines present insight into the daily lives of a wide variety of Mexicans. The Mexican way of life is also illuminated in chapters on eating out, whether at the omnipresent street stalls or at fondas, and special occasions, including the main fiestas and rites of passage. A final chapter on diet and health discusses current health concerns, particularly malnutrition, anemia, diabetes, and obesity.

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Let's Eat!
Beatrice Hollyer , and Oxfam
Manufacturer: Frances Lincoln Childrens Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Ages 4-8 | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

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A Taste of Culture - Foods of Mexico (A Taste of Culture)

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A Taste of Culture - Foods of Mexico (A Taste of Culture)
Barbara Sheen
Manufacturer: KidHaven Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Cooking | Sports & Activities | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0737730366

Book Description

Many Mexican dishes represent the country's unique mix of Indian and European cuisine. Packed with interesting and informative facts, this colorful volume gives readers a taste of Mexican history, culture and folklore, as well as food origins. Simple recipes tied to the text make this book a multi-sensory experience. Readers will have fun exploring Mexico's snacks and sweets, specialty foods, favorite dishes, and traditional holiday meals.

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Travels in Peru and Mexico: Volume 1
S. S. Hill
Manufacturer: Adamant Media Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Mexico | Americas | History | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1402187319
Release Date: 2003-03-07

Book Description

This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1860 edition by Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, London.

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