Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc explores the rise of youth as consumers of popular culture and the globalization of popular music in Russia and Eastern Europe. This collection of essays challenges assumptions that Communist leaders and Western-influenced youth cultures were inimically hostile to one another. While initially banning Western cultural trends like jazz and rock-and-roll, Communist leaders accommodated elements of rock and pop music to develop their own socialist popular music. They promoted organized forms of leisure to turn young people away from excesses of style perceived to be Western. Popular song and officially sponsored rock and pop bands formed a socialist beat that young people listened and danced to. Young people attracted to the music and subcultures of the capitalist West still shared the values and behaviors of their peers in Communist youth organizations. Despite problems providing youth with consumer goods, leaders of Soviet bloc states fostered a socialist alternative to the modernity the capitalist West promised. Underground rock musicians thus shared assumptions about culture that Communist leaders had instilled. Still, competing with influences from the capitalist West had its limits. State-sponsored rock festivals and rock bands encouraged a spirit of rebellion among young people. Official perceptions of what constituted culture limited options for accommodating rock and pop music and Western youth cultures. Youth countercultures that originated in the capitalist West, like hippies and punks, challenged the legitimacy of Communist youth organizations and their sponsors. Government media and police organs wound up creating oppositional identities among youth gangs. Failing to provide enough Western cultural goods to provincial cities helped fuel resentment over the Soviet Union’s capital, Moscow, and encourage support for breakaway nationalist movements that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Despite the Cold War, in both the Soviet bloc and in the capitalist West, political elites responded to perceived threats posed by youth cultures and music in similar manners. Young people participated in a global youth culture while expressing their own local views of the world.

The comprehensive guide to the place that brought sport climbing to North America— a full-color, thoroughly updated new edition Smith Rock State Park. It was on the impressive crags of this Oregon hideaway that American sport climbing came into its own, and to this day, some of the hardest climbs in the United States are found on these walls. Alan Watts, who has played a leading role in the development of this popular rock-climbing destination, details more than 1,700 routes at Smith Rock and the surrounding area. This new edition updates hundreds of routes, includes hundreds of new ones, and has new photos of each crag, wall, and route. No other guide is as comprehensive or thorough, and no author more respected for his intimate knowledge of one of the world’s most popular climbing destinations.

This book considers the experience of women as children and as mothers, and feminist critiques of gender as important sources of insight into the conduct, dynamics, and motivation of a feminist peace politics, examining the history, the scope, and the current condition of women's peace movements.

This in-depth study offers a new examination of a region that is often overlooked in political histories of the Bluegrass State. George G. Humphreys traces the arc of politics and the economy in western Kentucky from avid support of the Democratic Party to its present-day Republican identity. He demonstrates that, despite its relative geographic isolation, the region west of the eastern boundary of Hancock, Ohio, Butler, Warren, and Simpson Counties to the Mississippi River played significant roles in state and national politics during the New Deal and postwar eras. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, Humphreys explores the area's political transformation from a solid Democratic voting bloc to a conservative stronghold by examining how developments such as advances in agriculture, the diversification of the economy, and the civil rights movement affected the region. Addressing notable deficiencies in the existing literature, this impressively researched study will leave readers with a deeper understanding of post-1945 Kentucky politics.

This informative and fully illustrated volume explores the untold story of agate gemstones hidden in Kentucky’s scenic Knobs Region. With their fine grain and rich assortment of colors, agate stones are coveted by collectors and becoming rarer across the globe. Some of the most beautiful specimens in the world have been found in the rugged terrain of eastern Kentucky. In Kentucky Agate, authors Roland L. McIntosh and Warren H. Anderson reveal the beauty and diversity of this sought-after stone with hundreds of color photographs. Kentucky Agate also reveals locations where agate may be found, offering maps of the region surrounding the city of Irvine, Kentucky, including parts of Estill, Powell, Jackson, Menifee, Madison, and Lee counties. With detailed photographs revealing aspects of the rock not visible to the naked eye, this book also provides fascinating information on the history, geology, chemistry, and formation of the mineral.

Politics, religion, and social change in the post-communist world of Eastern Europe and Russia.

From renowned diplomat and musician András Simonyi -- whom Stephen Colbert calls "the only ambassador I know who can shred a mean guitar!" -- comes a timely and revealing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain and longing for freedom while chasing the great power of rock and roll. In ROCKING TOWARD A FREE WORLD, Simonyi charts the struggle of growing up in 1960s Hungary, a world in which listening to his favorite music was a powerful but furtive endeavor: records were black-market bootlegs; concerts were held under strict control, even banned; protests were folded into song lyrics. Get caught listening to Western radio could mean punishment, maybe prison. That didn't matter to Simonyi, who from an early age felt the tremendous pull of rock and roll, the lure of American popular culture, and a burning desire to buck the system. Inspired by the protest music coming out of the West, he formed a band and became part of Hungary's burgeoning rock scene. Then came the setbacks: tightening of control by the state, the seemingly inescapable weight of an authoritarian system, and the collapse of Simonyi's own dreams of stardom. A story of youth, rebellion, and hope, ROCKING TOWARD A FREE WORLD sheds new light on two of the most powerful forces of the modern age: global democracy and rock and roll. Deeply vital and compelling, Simonyi's memoir chronicles how one man's tremendous connection to American and British popular music inspired him to make a difference in his country and, eventually, the world. It tells the story of a generation, as played out in song lyrics and guitar riffs.