The Bad Girl S Guide To The Open Road

Suggests ideas for trips for women who love to drive, including unusual festivals and museums, things to do in a small town, and the best songs to listen to in the car.

From the author of the very funny and successful Paranoids Pocket Guide, comes the ultimate self-help book for women. It's a guide to the open road that's strictly AAAthat's attitude, adventure, and ass-kicking good times. Filled with indispensable information such as how to get out of a speeding ticket without crying and 14 ways to open a beer bottle on your car, The Bad Girl's Guide to the Open Road also gives the practical lowdown on what to do when your engine overheats, you get a flat, or you need a safe and legal place to spend the night in your car. The fabulous pocket format and indestructible cover make it perfect for flinging in the glove compartment (or stashing in your cubicle if you can't leave right away). For every woman who's about to break unless she gets a break, this hilarious book is the antidote to the doldrumswhether work-, man-, or self-induced. The Bad Girl's Guide to the Open Road: because sometimes a girl's just gotta go.

Women experience and portray travel differently: Gender matters - irreducibly and complexly. Building on recent scholarship in women's travel writing, these provocative essays not only affirm the impact of gender, but also cast women's journeys against coordinates such as race, class, culture, religion, economics, politics, and history. The book's scope is unique: Women travelers extend in time from Victorian memsahibs to contemporary «road girls», and topics range from Anna Leonowens's slanted portrayal of Siam - later popularized in the movie, The King and I, to current feminist «descripting» of the male-road-buddy genre. The extensive array of writers examined includes Nancy Prince, Frances Trollope, Cameron Tuttle, Lady Mary Montagu, Catherine Oddie, Kate Karko, Frances Calderón de la Barca, Rosamond Lawrence, Zilpha Elaw, Alexandra David-Néel, Amelia Edwards, Erica Lopez, Paule Marshall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Marilynne Robinson.

“[A] compendium of beyond-Seinfeldian, fear-inducing factlets . . . What if, snorting back laughter while reading it, you rupture a key blood vessel?” —Entertainment Weekly Are you worried sick? If not, maybe you should be. Because a pair of drawstring sweatpants could bring about your most embarrassing moment. And a toothpick in your sandwich can be the deadliest of weapons. Including hundreds of bizarre-but-true things that can get you, this compact volume will induce nervous page flipping and make even the most snug and secure folks bona fide paranoiacs. Chilling black and white photographs document the everyday items that menace your safety. But whether it’s archibutyrophobia (the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth) or phobophobia (the fear of fear itself) that eventually gets you, don’t be afraid to buy this book. You never know what might happen to you if you don’t. “A new handbook for our times . . . a numbing catalog of afflictions and conditions, possibilities and probabilities of everything that can, and surely will, go terribly, terribly wrong.” —Washington City Paper

Over the years, cars have helped to define the experiences and self-perceptions of women in complex and sometimes unexpected ways. When women take the wheel, family structure and public space are reconfigured and re-gendered, creating a context for a literary tradition in which the car has served as a substitute for, an escape from, and an extension of the home, as well as a surrogate mother, a financial safeguard, and a means of self-expression. Driving Women examines the intersection of American fiction—primarily but not exclusively by women—and automobile culture. Deborah Clarke argues that issues critical to twentieth-century American society—technology, mobility, domesticity, and agency—are repeatedly articulated through women's relationships with cars. Women writers took surprisingly intense interest in car culture and its import for modern life, as the car, replete with material and symbolic meaning, recast literal and literary female power in the automotive age. Clarke draws on a wide range of literary works, both canonical and popular, to document women's fascination with cars from many perspectives: historical, psychological, economic, ethnic. Authors discussed include Wharton, Stein, Faulkner, O’Connor, Morrison, Erdrich, Mason, Kingsolver, Lopez, Kadohata, Smiley, Senna, Viramontes, Allison, and Silko. By investigating how cars can function as female space, reflect female identity, and reshape female agency, this engaging study opens up new angles from which to approach fiction by and about women and traces new directions in the intersection of literature, technology, and gender.

Machine generated contents note: -- 1. Introduction: Speaking of the Generations -- 2. The Republican Generation - (born 1742-1766) -- 3. The Compromise Generation - (born 1767-1791) -- 4. The Transcendental Generation - (born 1792-1821) -- 5. The Gilded Generation - (born 1822-1842) -- 6. The Progressive Generation - (born 1843-1859) -- 7. The Missionary Generation - (born 1860-1882) -- 8. The Lost Generation - (born 1883-1900) -- 9. The G.I. Generation - (born 1901-1924) -- 10. The Silent Generation - (born 1925-1942) -- 11. The Boom Generation - (born 1943-1960) -- 12. The Thirteenth Generation, or Generation X - (born 1961-1981) -- 13. The Millennial Generation, or Generation Y - (born 1982-2004) -- 14. The Homeland Generation - (born 2005-current).