This popular, culture-oriented book is devoted to teaching its readers how to “read” all kinds of texts. Its comprehensive and inclusive approach focuses on the relationship between absorbing traditional works—such as novels, short stories, and poems—and other less-traditional ones—such as movies, the Internet, art works, and television. More importantly, the book teaches learners the usefulness of actively reading their surroundings. Mastering these goals will help readers become successful as students in academic settings, and as participants in the world. An emphasis on accessible and critical works features a variety of reading levels that range from student written to theoretical works, with a large portion from magazines and newspapers. For anyone who loves to read—anything.
Jonathan Silverman is a professor of English at UMass Lowell. He is the editor of Astros and Asterisks: The Houston Sign-Stealing Scandal, Explained.
He is the co-author with Michael Hinds of Johnny Cash International: How and Why the World Loves the Man in Black (University of Iowa Press, 2020), which is the winner of the 2023 Peggy O'Brien Book Prize.
He is also author of Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010); the co-author with Dean Rader of The World Is a Text: Writing, Reading, and Thinking about Culture and Its Contexts (Pearson/Broadview, 2002-2018, five editions); and the co-editor with Meghan Sweeney of Remaking the American College Campus (McFarland, 2016).
He has served as the Fulbright Roving Scholar in Norway (2007-2008) and was a John H. Daniels fellow at the National Sporting Library (2013-2014). He has published articles on horse racing in The Cambridge Companion to Horseracing, The Journal of Sport History, Poor Yorick, Post, and The End of Austin as part of a larger work on horse racing in progress. He has published work in Prospects, Kugelmass, The Rumpus, The Journal of the American West, and The Journal of Radicalism, and wrote for PBS’s website, Remotely Connected.