Ruling Passions: essays on just about everything

by Nick Perry, Ian Wedde (Foreword)

These essays are by one of Australasia's leading media and social science intellectuals. "Culture" is often seen as somehow elevated above daily life (set in a rarefied realm) or set apart from it (e.g. the anthropological study of cultures other than our own). But for contemporary sociologists and media theorists, culture is better seen as the matter-of-fact practice and taken-for-granted nature of everyday life. Culture is inherent to how the world is made to mean something, how knowledge is produced and how society functions. As a result, we need to interrogate what we take as "given." Nick Perry is well placed to interrogate the stuff of daily life. In Ruling Passions , his lucid, enjoyable and probing essays on shopping, telephoning, watching TV, playing sport, gambling and travel show us how we can "read" our own environments and, in so doing, interpret the world around us and our place within it.

224 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 2011

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Nick Perry spent his childhood in Dorset, out in the countryside daydreaming most of the time. He was educated at Parkstone Sea Training School before leaving for London where he worked for ATV Television. He travelled around Europe moving from job to job until he came into money. On impulse he bought a hill farm in North Wales, some experiences of which form the backdrop to Peaks and Troughs. He lives with his wife Arabella in the Wiltshire countryside where he spends his time writing, walking and listening to classical music.