Bøger af Landon Y. Jones

A former People magazine editor reveals how our cult of celebrity has shaped our politics, our culture, and our personal lives—for better or worseFrom the writer and editor who coined the term “baby boomer” comes Celebrity Nation, an exploration into how and why fame no longer stems only from heroic achievements but from the number of “likes” and shares—and what this change means for American culture. Landon Jones—who spent decades in “celebrityland” only to emerge, like Alice, blinking in the sunlight—brings a personal and first-person perspective on fame and its dark underbelly, complicated even further by the arrival of the internet and social media. Jones draws on his experience as the former managing editor of People magazine to bolster his account with profiles of celebrities he knew personally, ranging from Malcolm X to Princess Diana, as well as observations about contemporary social media stars like Kim Kardashian and computer-generated macro-influencer Miquela, a self-proclaimed “19-year-old Robot living in LA.” In analyzing the stories of over 75 celebrities, spanning decades and industries, Jones shows how celebrity has been wielded as a weapon of mass distraction to spawn narcissism, harm, and loneliness. And yet, in these stories we also see a path forward. Jones highlights luminaries like Nobel Peace prize winner Maria Ressa and lauded environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who have effected meaningful change not by glorifying themselves but by turning to their communities for action. A lively analysis of celebrity culture’s impact on nearly every facet of our lives, Celebrity Nation helps us to recognize how the apparatus of fame operates.

"A former People magazine editor reveals how our cult of celebrity has shaped our politics, our culture, and our personal lives-for better or worse"--

The journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark remain the single most important document in the history of American exploration. Through these tales of adventure, edited and annotated by American Book Award nominee Landon Jones, we meet Indian peoples and see the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and western rivers the way Lewis and Clark first observed them -- majestic, pristine, uncharted, and awe-inspiring.

Between 1803 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark co-captained the most famous expedition in American history. Clark, as the highest-ranking federal official in the West, spent three decades overseeing its consequences. In a combination of storytelling and scholarship, Landon Y. Jones vividly depicts Clark's life and the dark and bloody ground of America's early West.