Residential Mortgage Lending or Tourists of History

Residential Mortgage Lending

Author: Marshall W Dennis

For lending professionals and individuals interested in learning how to get the loan they deserve. This book offers a practical, real-world perspective on the details of mortgage lending and provides the professional with a solid tool for assisting in the decision making process of granting or application for a mortgage.

New interesting textbook: Nutrition for Foodservice and Culinary Professionals or Our Favorite Quick and Easy Recipes

Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero

Author: Marita Sturken

In Tourists of History, the cultural critic Marita Sturken argues that over the past two decades, Americans have responded to national trauma through consumerism, kitsch sentiment, and tourist practices in ways that reveal a tenacious investment in the idea of America's innocence. Sturken investigates the consumerism that followed from the September 11th attacks; the contentious, ongoing debates about memorials and celebrity-architect designed buildings at Ground Zero; and two outcomes of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City: the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the execution of Timothy McVeigh.

Sturken contends that a consumer culture of comfort objects such as World Trade Center snow globes, FDNY teddy bears, and Oklahoma City Memorial T-shirts and branded water, as well as reenactments of traumatic events in memorial and architectural designs, enables a national tendency to see U.S. culture as distant from both history and world politics. A kitsch comfort culture contributes to a "tourist" relationship to history: Americans can feel good about visiting and buying souvenirs at sites of national mourning without having to engage with the economic, social, and political causes of the violent events. While arguing for the importance of remembering tragic losses of life, Sturken is urging attention to a dangerous confluence-of memory, tourism, consumerism, paranoia, security, and kitsch-that promulgates fear to sell safety, offers prepackaged emotion at the expense of critical thought, contains alternative politics, and facilitates public acquiescence in the federal government's repressive measures at home and its aggressive political and militarypolicies abroad.

About the Author:
Marita Sturken is a professor of culture and communication at New York University

Theresa Kintz - Library Journal

This engaging book probes the impact of two traumatic historical events, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City bombing, from a novel perspective. Sturken seeks to illuminate the transformation of the secular into the sacred, and the intersection of two cultures: that of mourning and that of consumerism. Like an archaeologist, Sturken (culture & communications, NYU) digs deep to uncover the symbolism contained in our material response to politically motivated violence. She offers a sophisticated and insightful analysis of what the treatment of the actual sites, now ruins, and the cultural production of souvenirs say about the psyche of the American consumer-citizen. The book is full of images exemplifying how the construction of post-tragedy national identity draws upon our notions of collective innocence, incorporating material culture in the quest for certainty and comfort in an uncertain and uncomfortable world. For example, our fear is soothed by the public presence of the Teddy Bear and the Stars and Stripes. With the terrorist as iconoclast, the memorial and the souvenir come to the emotional rescue. Readers will be fascinated by the social and political commentary buried in Sturken's appraisal of kitsch. A thought-provoking work; highly recommended.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     1
Consuming Fear and Selling Comfort     35
Citizens and Survivors: Cultural Memory and Oklahoma City     93
The Spectacle of Death and the Spectacle of Grief: The Execution of Timothy McVeigh     139
Tourism and "Sacred Ground": The Space of Ground Zero     165
Architectures of Grief and the Aesthetics of Absence     219
Conclusion     287
Notes     295
Bibliography     319
Index     333