This in-depth series of literary portraits studies celebrities who died in famous and tragic ways―ways that still resonate as archetypal death scenarios in present day.
 • 13 essays on specific celebrities, each of which is a mini-biography

Dead Celebrities, Living Icons: Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar

Ebert, John David

History

Praeger

From the 15th century until the mid-1990s, media based on the printed word--books, magazines, handbills, newspapers, and journals--dominated society. Today, an onslaught of digital media centered on the Internet is developing at a breathtaking pace, destabilizing the very idea of printed media and fundamentally reshaping our world in the process. This study explores how Internet entities like Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Google, and gadgets such as digital cameras, cell phones, video games, robots, drones, and all things MacIntosh have affected everything from the book industry and copyright law to how we conduct social relationships and consider knowledge. Including a chronology of significant events in the history of the digital explosion, this investigation of the often overlooked "shadow" side of new technology chronicles life during a radical societal shift and follows the process whereby one world disintegrates while another takes its place.

New Media Invasion: Digital Technologies and the World They Unmake

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

McFarland Company

Disasters, both natural and man-made, are on the rise. Indeed, a catastrophe of one sort or another seems always to be unfolding somewhere on the planet. We have entered into a veritable Age of Catastrophes which have grown both larger and more complex and now routinely very widespread in scope. The old days of the geographically isolated industrial accidents, of the sinking of a Titanic or the explosion of a Hindenburg, together with their isolated causes and limited effects, are over. Now, disasters on the scale of Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill or the Japan tsunami and nuclear reactor accident, threaten to engulf large swaths of civilization. This book analyzes the efforts of Westerners to keep the catastrophes outside, while maintaining order on the inside of society. These efforts are breaking down. Nature and Civilization have become so intertwined they can no longer be separated. Natural disasters, moreover, are becoming increasingly more difficult to differentiate from "man-made."

The Age of Catastrophe: Disaster and Humanity in Modern Times

McFarland

The metaphysical age, according to Martin Heidegger, extends from Plato to Husserl, but in this new book by John David Ebert, the middle of the second millenium BC--a time of cultural collapse and disintegration--becomes its essential prelude. By 1300 BC, the Gilgamesh Epic was at the apogee of its popularity, while the utopian reforms of the rebel pharaoh Akhenaten had recently collapsed in failure. Moses was about to lead the Hebrews on the Exodus out of Egypt and the Trojan War, together with the collapse of most of the societies of the eastern Mediterranean, was only a century away. Ebert examines the three figures of Gilgamesh, Akhenaten and Moses as laying down the basic prototypes for rebellion against the reigning authorities of the instituted state religions in favor of the creation of new forms of renegade spirituality that will ultimately establish the foundations for the Western religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the process, the birth of the metaphysical age is shifted from Greece to the Near East in this short book that examines its earliest origins.

Rage and the Word: Gilgamesh, Akhenaten, Moses and the Birth of the Metaphysical Age

Ancient Civilizations

Post Egoism Media

In this new scene-by-scene break-down of the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, contemporary culture critic John David Ebert frames the work in reference to an archaeology of the film’s images. At the same time, Ebert connects this ancient history with“postmodern” contemporary critical theory, drawing upon Lacan, Derrida, Gadamer, and Cornelius Castoriadis, unpacking and analyzing Francis Ford Coppola’s classic, one of the most famous and wildly inventive works in cinema history. In 23 chapters, Ebert interprets the longer Apocalypse Now Redux version, delving deep into the film’s complex layers of literary meaning and aesthetic significance. John David Ebert has authored ten previous books, including Art After Metaphysics, Dead Celebrities Living Icons, The New Media Invasion, Post-Classic Cinema, and Gods &amp; Heroes of the Media Age.

Apocalypse Now Scene-by-Scene

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

We are living in an age of rapidly evanescent media transformations. From radio and pulp fiction to cinema, comic books, paperback novels, television and the Internet, the twentieth century has arguably produced more media innovations than in the past five thousand years of recorded history. And whereas Heidegger had announced that the gods were gone and that contemporary modernity was an age of beings abandoned by Being, in this new book by John David Ebert, the ancient gods are found to be still alive and well and living in the various cultural environments configured by new media. Every media innovation, Ebert contends, makes new kinds of heroes possible, and in his book, Gods & Heroes of the Media Age, Ebert demonstrates that though the media reshape society in drastic and sometimes unexpected ways, they can also act to bring forth new heroes who often represent old gods in new guise. In this book, the reader will find essays on heroes like Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian, Flash Gordon, the Shadow, James Bond, Mad Max and even Breaking Bad's Walter White.

Gods & Heroes of the Media Age: From Captain Nemo to The X-Files

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

With this new book by John David Ebert, Blade Runner Scene-by-Scene, Ebert performs an archaeology of Ridley Scott's main thematic concerns: death, origin, genesis and the quest for immortality. In doing so, he compares the film to such ancient and classic texts as The Gilgamesh Epic. Scott's vision of the Los Angeles of 2019 is seen as a type of decaying, late stage cosmopolis; and the Replicants as slave labor manufactured to work their modern latifundia.

Blade Runner Scene-by-Scene

In this new collection of essays cultural critic John David Ebert traces the history of what Jacques Derrida termed "Transcendental Signifieds" as they have evolved from the archetypes of ancient myth through the philosophical Ideas of German Idealist philosophy and on down to their disintegration into the floating signifiers of today's consumer society. From myth to philosophy to science, these ultimate signifieds have undergone many transformations: beginning as the Sumerian gods, Ebert carefully traces the impacts of science and technology upon these Ideas as they changed over the millenia, finally becoming dismantled by Heidegger's "abbau" and then dangerously assaulted by the Unabomber's attempts to assassinate the very men of science who are creating today's mass of consumerist archetypes. Science and popular culture have deconstructed the ultimate signifieds of ancient ritual, symbol and myth, and now we are set adrift in a sea of floating signifiers that are competing with each other to fill the semiotic vacancies left behind by the collapse of such ancient and ultimate referents as God, Soul, Freedom and Immortality. This collection of nine essays, never before published in book form, spans the breadth of Ebert's career from 1997 to 2015.

Myths, Gods, Machines: Illuminations on Mythology, History and Science

Philosophy

In their new book, Hypermodernity & The End of the World, John David Ebert, Brian Francis Culkin and Michael Aaron Kamins map out the cartography of Hypermodernity, an epoch which the authors demarcate as having come into being in 1995 with the advent of the Internet. As they travel across the digital medial landscape, the authors discuss the transformations wrought by Hypermodernity across the domains of economics, politics, art, film, literature and culture generally. The deworlding of the human individual by computational technologies wed together with neoliberal capitalism is discussed in great detail, as well as the rise of the avataric subject, pandemic narcissism, the ominous significance of Donald Trump, data mining by privateers, the dissolution of community, the erosion of cultural values and the eclipsing of the human by the Abyss—it’s all in here, the first ever thorough discussion of the implications of Hypermodernity as a structurally distinct epoch from Modernity and Postmodernity. So buy your ticket, step right up, strap on your seatbelt, and get ready for a wild ride.

Hypermodernity and The End of The World

Culkin, Brian Francis

Independently published

Are cinema's best days behind it? That's what John David Ebert argues in his new book, a collection of film reviews and essays spanning eight years, in which he articulates the concept of post-classic cinema. A "post-classic" art style is a phase in which the repetition of a fixed stock of forms, cloned and serialized endlessly, gains the field of the medium in question. Film, as it neared the end of the last millenium, became simultaneously depleted of fresh content as well as technologically overburdened. And now, with the switch from celluloid to digital, it has been dealt the coup de grace. An entire age -- of drive-in theaters, midnight movies and double features -- is disappearing, and the future of the movie theater itself, with attendance at record lows, has now come into question. Film, it is evident, is no longer the "youngest medium."

Post-Classic Cinema: Collected Film Reviews 2005 - 2013

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ebert, John David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ebert, John David