Amateur Hour

This book assesses the impact of presidential character on the popularity, productivity, and ethics of contemporary presidents. Through comparative analyses, author Lara Brown demonstrates that the character of a president’s leadership does not change in office and that the success of future presidents can be evaluated before they step into the White House. She traces the rise of “amateur outsiders,” like Donald Trump, and asserts the need for systemic reform and cultural reassessment of presidential character. Intended for students and scholars of the presidency, this book also holds appeal for general readers who seek understanding of past and future presidential elections.

“Kimberly Harrington deftly and hilariously uncovers all of the lies and bullshit women are told about motherhood. This book made me laugh, sure, but it also made me feel seen.” — Jennifer Romolini, chief content officer at Shondaland.com and author of Weird in a World That’s Not An emotionally honest, arresting, and funny collection of essays about motherhood and adulthood. “Being a mother is a gift.” Where’s my receipt? Welcome to essayist Kimberly Harrington’s poetic and funny world of motherhood, womanhood, and humanhood, not necessarily in that order. It’s a place of loud parenting, fierce loving, too much social media, and occasional inner monologues where timeless debates are resolved such as Pro/Con: Caving to PTO Bake Sale Pressure (“PRO: Skim the crappiest brownies for myself. CON: They’re really crappy.”) With accessibility and wit, she captures the emotions around parenthood in artful and earnest ways, highlighting this time in the middle—midlife, the middle years of childhood, how women are stuck in the middle of so much. It’s a place of elation, exhaustion, and time whipping past at warp speed. Finally, it’s a quiet space to consider the girl you were, the mother you are, and the woman you are always becoming.

The ultimate, comprehensive investigation into the life and career of Vice President Kamala Harris from former Washington Examiner and Breitbart News political reporter Charlie Spiering. Who is the real Kamala Harris? And how did she ascend to the second highest office in the country? Despite her limited experience in national politics and confusing professional history, there hasn’t been a comprehensive examination of Vice President Kamala Harris’s journey to the White House...until now. Find out how the San Francisco socialite turned politico fast-tracked her way onto the national stage, only to lose the faith of her base and her president. With exclusive reporting and a detective’s eye, Charlie Spiering delivers the first-ever deep dive into Kamala Harris’s hilarious, incompetent, radical path to the vice presidency. From her tumultuous tenure as California prosecutor to the fiery interrogator in the United States Senate, then to her disastrous presidential campaign and finally, her calamitous first years in executive office, this is an unfettered look at the woman who is only one heartbeat away from leading the free world.

Anyone who wants to change college teaching will have to start here.

A wonderful reader for anyone who loves the great programs of old-time radio, this definitive encyclopedia covers American radio shows from their beginnings in the 1920s to the early 1960s.

"Paints a picture of fifty years of American music, set against a Harlem backdrop. From swing and bebop to R&B and rock and roll, soul, disco, funk, and rap ... "--Dust jacket.

In this tender, funny, and sharp companion to her acclaimed memoir-in-essays Amateur Hour, Kimberly Harrington explores and confronts marriage, divorce, and the ways love, loss, and longing shape a life. Six weeks after Kimberly and her husband announced their divorce, she began work on a book that she thought would only be about divorce — heavy on the dark humor with a light coating of anger and annoyance. After all, on the heels of planning to dissolve a twenty-year marriage they had chosen to still live together in the same house with their kids. Throw in a global pandemic and her idea of what the end of a marriage should look and feel like was flipped even further on its head. This originally dark and caustic exploration turned into a more empathetic exercise, as she worked to understand what this relationship meant and why marriage matters so much. Over the course of two years of what was supposed to be a temporary period of transition, she sifted through her past—how she formed her ideas about relationships, sex, marriage, and divorce. And she dug back into the history of her marriage — how she and her future ex-husband had met, what it felt like to be madly in love, how they had changed over time, the impact having children had on their relationship, and what they still owed one another. But You Seemed So Happy is a time capsule of sorts. It’s about getting older and repeatedly dying on the hill of being wiser, only to discover you were never all that dumb to begin with. It’s an honest, intimate biography of a marriage, from its heady, idealistic, and easy beginnings to it slowly coming apart and finally to its evolution into something completely unexpected. As she probes what it means when everyone assumes you’re happy as long as you’re still married, Harrington skewers engagement photos, Gen X singularity, small-town busybodies, and the casual way we make life-altering decisions when we’re young. Ultimately, this moving and funny memoir in essays is a vulnerable and irreverent act of forgiveness—of ourselves, our partners, and the relationships that have run their course but will always hold profound and permanent meaning in our lives.

Television came to Pittsburgh in 1949 when WDTV (the forerunner of KDKA-TV) went on the air. Whereas many television stations in the United States began reading news on the air only to comply with FCC requirements, WDTV treated news seriously from day one with its first regular program, a local news show called "Pitt Parade." Today KDKA is still highly regarded among journalists for its news programming. Although television news may seem familiar to us, it was anything but familiar to the men and women of early television. Hinds shows how they borrowed liberally from newspapers, radio, motion picture newsreels, theater, and even magazines to create, by trial and error, suitable ways to present the news. Rather than instantly replacing radio, television news moved slowly from the "rip and read" radio-style format, which simply duplicated what came over the wire services and was in the newspapers, to the conventions of local newscasts we take for granted today--live remotes, lead and feature stories, sports and weather, all brought together by an in-studio anchor. Pittsburghers will recognize many familiar names in Hinds's account--Bill Burns, Paul Long, Florence Sando, Eleanor Schano, and others--veterans of Pittsburgh broadcasting whom Hinds has interviewed for this book. The story they tell is the story of dozens of other stations across the country. In the process, they tell us much about the early history of television in America. Lynn Boyd Hinds spent over twenty years in Pittsburgh television and radio before moving to Penn State University where he was an affiliate producer for WPSX-TV, the public broadcasting station in Central Pennsylvania. There he created and hosted the popular quiz show, "The Pennsylvania Game." Today he is Associate Professor of Broadcast News in the Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism at West Virginia University.