Herbert Schiller, for decades one of America's leading critics of the communications industry, here offers a pungent salvo in the battle over information. In Information Inequality he explains how privatization and the corporate economy directly affect our most highly prized democratic institutions: our schools and libraries, our media, and our political culture. Airwave frequencies are being auctioned off. Newspapers and electronic media increasingly are collapsing into vast global structures. "In the United States of the 1990's," Schiller writes, "the notion of community has become mostly nostalgic. Every facet of living is being, or has been, transformed into a separate, paid-for transaction." The corporate economy's pursuit of still greater private returns is systematically eliminating those institutions and structures that sustain the public interest and the common good. A master media-watcher, Schiller presents a crisp and far-reaching indictment of the "data deprivation" corporate interests are inflicting on the social fabric. From the realm of advertisisng to the so-called 'empowering' networks of cyberspace, technologies continue to be developed in ways that exacerbate social inequality. Schiller concludes with a cautionary analysis of the world economy: thoguh socialism's failures may lull the Western market into a sense of security, our social needs are more severe, more pressing than ever before. A "next radical moment" will hinge on the question of freedom of information, on the need for equal "information access" for all.

The first extended critical biography of Brooks, perhaps one of the most influential literary critics of the 20th century. Royden draws on interviews and extensive research to recreate the New Criticism milieu which included John Crowe Ransom and I.A. Richards, and which Brooks advocated as a method of scholarship that became the standard for several generations. The biography does not separate the life from the work, and constitutes an important survey of criticism since the 1930s in addition to being a hallmark biographical study.
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