Alice Echols je kulturní kritička a historička. Jako specialistka na 60. léta je Echols profesorkou na Univerzitě v Jižní Kalifornii, kde se zaměřuje na angličtinu, genderová studia a historii.
Winner of Outstanding Book Award of Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights An award-winning and canonical history of radical feminism, whose activist heat and intellectual audacity powered second-wave feminism--30th anniversary edition A fascinating chronicle of radical feminism's rise and fall from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Seventies, Daring to Be Bad is a must-read for both students of gender history and activists of intersectionality. This thirtieth anniversary edition reveals how current debates about race, transgender rights, queer theory, and sexuality echo issues that galvanized and divided feminists fifty years ago.
To call Janis Joplin the Judy Garland of the Woodstock set is in some sense a fair characterisation. The brassy, carnal, extravagant and ultimately pitiable queen of psychedelic rock is indeed a cultural icon. And while Joplin revelled in her own ballsy, boozy legend, its needy, inebriated, real-life equivalent was a shadow that darkened her short life and, in the decades since her 1970 drug-induced death, has come to eclipse the party-girl persona. To her great credit, author Alice Echols reconciles the two faces of Joplin in this ambitious, thoroughly readable biography. She does so by tracing Joplin from her youth as a natural-born libertine in dreary Port Arthur, Texas, to her emergence as the sole female rock superstar of her era--a period when beneath-the-surface sexism hampered Joplin's progress even while women's liberation was being widely touted. The author does not shy away from sordid sex-and-drugs episodes and there's plenty of raw material---the singer was promiscuous, bisexual and, at various times, an alcoholic, a speed freak and a junkie. Echols, however, elevates this biography above run-of-the-mill rock profiles by painting her subject against an elaborate and ever-changing cultural backdrop. Here is Joplin the aspiring folk-singer, the white-picket-fence wannabe, the wayward daughter, the hit-and-miss recording artist and, finally, the ill-starred spirit with nothing left to lose. --Steven Stolder
Prologue: captain nothing -- Advertisements for himself -- The loan man -- Racketeers and suckers -- Slipping through your fingers -- Sowing grief -- The port of missing men -- Orphans in the storm -- Epilogue
