The First World War; a new low in the annals of armed conflict; coincided with a golden age for the relatively new art of advertising. Striking and colourful posters were produced throughout the years 1914ndash;18 to recruit soldiers; promote investment; keep up morale and; naturally; to vilify the enemy; prominent artists including Alfred Leete paired bold images with punchy text to maximise impact. The selection in this book offers an informative guide to the range of posters created and to how they were displayed around the nation; and explores the publics increasing dissatisfaction with being patronised and goaded. From the iconic; commanding Your Country Needs YOU! to the anxious domestic scene of Daddy; What Did YOU Do in the War?; and including the infamous depiction of a bayoneting in Back Him Up!; this book puts the reader in the shoes of the Great War man in the street.
2016-02-17 2016-02-17File Name: B01BWNXRJE
Review
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Battle of the CroonersBy takingadayoffReal Men Dont Sing took me a long time to finish -- I had to keep stopping to find youtubes of the music and movies Allison McCracken was writing about. Although Im fairly familiar with even the earliest examples of Bing Crosbys songs; I didnt know what Rudy Vallee sounded like or any of the other popular crooners of the 1920s and 1930s. Hearing and seeing them in action was entertaining and made the books arguments clearer.Today if you think of "crooners;" Bing Crosby might still come to mind; and Tony Bennett and Michael Buble perhaps. Theres nothing especially effeminate about those singers; but when crooning became a phenomenon in the 1920s; it was a term associated with young white men with untrained voices who sang quavery pleading ballads about their mothers or their girlfriends; or more likely; about girls they hoped would somehow become their girlfriends. The new sound recording and broadcasting technology allowed these whispery and erotic voices into peoples homes. They seemed vulnerable and urgent and became enormously popular with young women and older women alike. Many men liked them too; some because they appreciated the way the songs put their wives and girlfriends in a romantic mood; others because they found the crooners; with their metrosexual makeup and collegiate clothing; exciting.McCracken makes the obvious connections with later singers such as David Cassidy and Michael Jackson (although there does seem to be a difference between the adult audiences of earlier crooners and the teen and pre-teen audiences of the later singers.) More interesting is the comparison she draws between proto-crooners Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby. When there was a conservative backlash against crooners for not being manly enough; Vallee virtually ignored the criticisms and continued to play to his audience in all its variety. Crosby on the other hand; made an all out effort to combat the "sissy" accusations; playing up his he-man credentials.McCracken even takes issue with what is probably the definitive biography of the first half of Crosbys life; Gary Giddins A Pocketful of Dreams; for playing down Crosbys concerns on questions of his masculinity. She backs up her argument with plenty of evidence.After reading real Men Dont Sing; I am more determined than ever; when I get my time machine; to go back and visit America in the 1920s; when everything was changing and it seemed that it was truly an age when "Anything Goes."(Thanks to NetGalley and Duke University Press for a digital review copy.)
