[URBANTH-L]NEW BOOK: Urban Nightmares

[Stephen Macek]

Dear Urbanth-L:

My new book might of interest to folks on this list. The publisher's
blurb and a link to the book's webpage is appended below. 

URBAN NIGHTMARES: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the
City
Steve Macek

A hard-hitting look at the role of right-wing ideologues and the mass
media in demonizing urban America.

University of Minnesota Press | 360 pages | 2006
ISBN 0-8166-4360-1 | hardcover | $69.00
ISBN 0-8166-4361-X | paperback | $22.95

In Urban Nightmares, Steve Macek documents the scope of alarmist
representations of the American city in the 1980s and
90s, examines the ideologies that informed them, and exposes the
interests they ultimately served. Macek explains how Hollywood
filmmakers, advertisers, and journalists  validated the right-wing
discourse on the urban crisis, popularizing its vocabulary. Network
television news and weekly news magazines, he shows, covered the inner
city and its inhabitants in ways consonant with the right's demonizing
discourse. At the same time, Hollywood zealously recycled this antiurban
bias in films ranging from genre thrillers like Falling Down and
Judgment Night to auteurist efforts like Batman and Seven. Even
advertising, Macek argues, mobilized fears of a perilous urban realm to
sell products from home alarm systems to SUVs.

"Urban Nightmares is a consistently revealing, even controversial book.
An outstanding contribution to the urban literature."  --Robert A.
Beauregard, author of "Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities"

For more information, including the table of contents, visit the book's
webpage:
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/M/macek_urban.html