Best Selling Books by Andrew Smith

The history, legends, and cookery of America's favorite snack food Whether in movie theaters or sports arenas, at fairs or theme parks, around campfires or family hearths, Americans consume more popcorn by volume than any other snack. To the world, popcorn seems as American as baseball and apple pie. Within American food lore, popcorn holds a special place, for it was purportedly shared by Native Americans at the first Thanksgiving. In Popped Culture, Andrew F. Smith tests such legends against archaeological, agricultural, culinary, and social findings. While debunking many myths, he discovers a flavorful story of the curious kernel's introduction and ever-increasing consumption in North America. Unlike other culinary fads of the nineteenth century, popcorn has never lost favor with the American public. Smith gauges the reasons for its unflagging popularity: the invention of "wire over the fire" poppers, commercial promotion by shrewd producers, the fascination of children with the kernel's magical "pop," and affordability. To explain popcorn's twentieth-century success, he examines its fortuitous association with new technology—radio, movies, television, microwaves—and recounts the brand-name triumphs of American manufacturers and packagers. His familiarity with the history of the snack allows him to form expectations about popcorn's future in the United States and abroad. Smith concludes his account with more than 160 surprising historical recipes for popcorn cookery, including the intriguing use of the snack in custard, hash, ice cream, omelets, and soup.

Marbury is another world, a dark world that best friends Jack Whitmore and Conner Kirk have fallen into before. A stranger had given Jack a pair of glasses – it's through the lenses that the boys get to Marbury. Told through Conner's point of view, THE KING OF MARBURY asks whether Marbury is only in Jack and Conner's minds, or if it might actually be real. You decide. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Essays that treat the topic of slavery in many ways, especially finding validity for slavery as an abstract principle, both as instituted by the Bible and as a reflection of the authoritarian bases of religious and civil government. Smith argues for the fitness of the system to supply the needs and cater to the limited abilities of slaves, arguing against the idea of equal rights for unequal people. He refutes emancipation, warning that civil chaos would result, asserting that the slave system is beneficial for all Southerners and is related to the greater stability of the South versus the North. The last essay lays out the responsibilities of slave-owners to ask for reasonable work and to provide all the necessities of life to the slave.

A portrait of the twelve men who journeyed to the moon draws on interviews with the nine surviving astronauts who walked on the moon to determine how their lives were transformed by the experience and its aftermath.

What does it mean to talk about everyday racism, and why should we do so? Racism and Everyday Life brings together the sociologies of racism and everyday life in a new way in order to reflect on these questions. Smith argues that racism and everyday life are not just 'act' and 'context' respectively, but rather they are part of the making of each other. Using a variety of historical and contemporary examples, this book draws on the pioneering insights of W.E.B. Du Bois and other writers in order to explore the interwoven relationship between racism and the everyday.

Includes an excerpt from the Andrew Smith novel, The Alex crow.

Southern Africa's first people communities are the groups of hunter-gatherers and herders, representing the oldest human lineages in Africa, who migrated from as far as East Africa to settle in what is now Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. These groups, known today as the Khoisan, are represented by the Bushmen (or San) and the Khoe. In First People, archaeologist Andrew Smith examines what we know about southern Africa's earliest inhabitants, drawing on evidence from excavations, rock art, the observations of colonial-era travellers, linguistics, the study of the human genome and the latest academic research. Richly illustrated, First People is an invaluable and accessible work that reaches from the Middle and Later Stone Age to recent times, and explores how the Khoisan were pushed to the margins of history and society. Smith, who is an expert on the history and prehistory of the Khoisan, paints a knowledgeable and fascinating portrait of their land occupation, migration, survival strategies and cultural practices.

The story of the dotcom bubble, its tumultuous crash, and the visionary pioneer at its epicentre... 'The Social Network meets Hammer of the Gods via Warhol's Factory' Independent 'Effervescent...vivid...this is a book whose time has come' Sunday Times One morning in February 2001, Josh Harris woke to the certain knowledge that he was about to lose everything. The man Time magazine called 'The Warhol of the Web' was now reduced to the role of helpless spectator as his personal fortune dwindled from 85 million dollars…to 50 million…to nothing. In the space of a week. If the mania attending those events is hard to recall, it's because when the crash came, the dreams and expectations of those surreal few years were swept away with near Biblical inclemency. More than a decade later, they seem shrouded in a kind of pre-Millennial mist; might never have happened. How easy to forget that at the end of 1999, the world seemed to be spinning off its axis as a new one evolved before our eyes, with anything imaginable seeming to be possible, in real time... In his bestselling book Moondust, Andrew Smith looked at the lives of the nine remaining Moonwalkers, how their exploits helped shape an era and how that era left its mark on them. In Totally Wired, he goes in search of the truth about one of the most extraordinary and mysterious events of the 20th century, the dotcom bubble of the 1990s, and draws a direct line from there to where we are now. 'A brilliant exploration of madness and genius in the early days of the web' Guardian

Finn Easton, sixteen and epileptic, struggles to feel like more than just a character in his father's cult-classic novels with the help of his best friend, Cade Hernandez, and first love, Julia, until Julia moves away.

Victorian demons provides the first extensive exploration of largely middle-class masculinities in crisis at the fin de siècle. It analyses how ostensibly controlling models of masculinity became demonised in a variety of literary and medical contexts, revealing the period to be much more ideologically complex than has hitherto been understood, and makes a significant contribution to Gothic scholarship. Andrew Smith demonstrates how a Gothic language of monstrosity, drawn from narratives such as 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' and 'Dracula', increasingly influenced a range of medical and cultural contexts, destabilising these apparently dominant masculine scripts. He provides a coherent analysis of a range of examples relating to masculinity drawn from literary, medical, legal and sociological contexts, including Joseph Merrick ('The Elephant Man'), the Whitechapel murders of 1888, Sherlock Holmes's London, the writings and trials of Oscar Wilde, theories of degeneration and medical textbooks on syphilis.

This book explores the commonly expressed notion that 'the city is a stage'. Public spaces in our cities are increasingly being used as venues for major events.