Lou's school year is off to a rocky start. Her BFF, Mina, won't speak to her, but a new friend, Mary Emily, never shuts up. Lou's mom and her new boyfriend are madly in love, but all their smooching is getting on Lou's nerves. Meanwhile, a wrecking ball is smashing down the apartment that used to belong to her beloved Tristan. Lou still has a friend in Paul, if she can just work up the courage to write him a letter. Life was a lot easier when dressing up in her pink princess gown and going to the park for ice cream would solve any problem. Is it any wonder that Lou is down in the dumps?

DIVA cultural studies account of America during the 1930s as seen through Key West, Harlem, Hollywood, and Reno./div

Lou's school year is off to a rocky start. Her BFF, Mina, won’t speak to her, but a new friend, Mary Emily, never shuts up. Lou's mom and her new boyfriend are madly in love, but all their smooching is starting to get on Lou's nerves. Meanwhile, a wrecking ball is smashing down the apartment that used to belong to her beloved Tristan. Lou still has a friend in Paul, if she can just work up the courage to write him a letter. Life was a lot easier when dressing up in her pink princess gown and going to the park for ice cream would solve any problem. Is it any wonder that Lou is down in the dumps?

Mucking around in the messy terrain of American trash, Jani Scandura tells the story of the United States during the Great Depression through evocative and photo-rich portraits of four locales: Reno, Key West, Harlem, and Hollywood. In investigating these Depression-era “dumps,” places that she claims contained and reclaimed the cultural, ideological, and material refuse of modern America, Scandura introduces the concept of “depressive modernity,” an enduring affective component of American culture that exposes itself at those moments when the foundational myths of America and progressive modernity—capitalism, democracy, individualism, secularism, utopian aspiration—are thrown into question. Depressive modernity is modernity at a standstill. Such a modernity is not stagnant or fixed, nor immobile, but is constituted by an instantaneous unstaging of desire, territory, language, and memory that reveals itself in the shimmering of place. An interpretive bricolage that draws on an unlikely archive of 1930s detritus—office memos, scribbled manuscripts, scrapbooks, ruined photographs, newspaper clippings, glass eyes, incinerated stage sets, pulp novels, and junk washed ashore—Down in the Dumps escorts its readers through Reno’s divorce factory of the 1930s, where couples from across the United States came to quickly dissolve matrimonial bonds; Key West’s multilingual salvage economy and its status as the island that became the center of an ideological tug-of-war between the American New Deal government and a politically fraught Caribbean; post-Renaissance Harlem, in the process of memorializing, remembering, grieving, and rewriting a modernity that had already passed; and Studio-era Hollywood, Nathanael West’s “dump of dreams,” in which the introduction of sound in film and shifts in art direction began to transform how Americans understood place-making and even being itself. A coda on Alcatraz and the Pentagon brings the book into the present, exploring how American Depression comes to bear on post-9/11 America.

We are all in the dumps For diamonds are thumps The kittens are gone to St. Paul's! The baby is bit The moon's in a fit And the houses are built Without walls Jack and Guy Went out in the Rye And they found a little boy With one black eye Come says Jack let's knock Him on the head No says Guy Let's buy him some bread You buy one loaf And I'll buy two And we'll bring him up As other folk do Two traditional rhymes from Mother Goose, ingeniously joined and interpreted by Maurice Sendak.

With the increasing integration of the major economies of the world, trade frictions have also increased. The Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, once scheduled for completion in December 1990, has been slowed over the issue of agricultural subsidies. The U.S.-Japanese trade relations have continued to be a source of friction between the two countries. At issue in all these disputes is whether the United States and other countries are playing "fairly" in the international trade arena. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) outlines a variety of rules designed to ensure fairness. The United States, like other GATT signatories, has enacted statutes designed, for the most part, to be consistent with the GATT requirements. In this book, Richard Boltuck and Robert E. Litan, joined by a team of attorneys and economists with direct experience in "unfair trade" practice investigations, provide the first study of how one of the U.S. governmental agencies charged with implementing the U.S. laws governing unfair trade—the Department of Commerce—has actually discharged its statutory mission. In particular, the book focuses on the antidumping and countervailing duty statutes, provisions allowing the United States to impose offsetting duties on imports that are sold here at prices below those charged by the producers in their home countries that benefit from subsidies provided by foreign governments to encourage exports. Although these provisions may have once been obscure parts of the U.S. trade laws, they have figured importantly in many recent celebrated trade disputes, including those involving the import of foreign-made semiconductors, steel, lumber, screen displays for laptop computers, word processors, and minivan vehicles. All but one of the authors in the volume are highly critical of the procedures used by the Department of Commerce to calculate margins of dumping and export subsidization. Specifically, they find that a

Dump Truck Daisy and her construction vehicle crew are on a secret nighttime mission — build a playground before sunrise! Detailed endnotes provide additional information about construction vehicles and inclusive playgrounds. Vibrant artwork and a catchy disco tune and animation make this a stellar choice for any child who is fascinated by construction vehicles.