Books by Richard Striner

Providing a unique perspective on economic history and policy, this book shows how a daring method once recommended by top economists could be adapted to help America pay for the things it needs.

Hard Times presents a comprehensive account of economic depressions in America, from colonial times to the "great recession" that began in 2008. Striner conveys how Americans have always endured and rebounded from hard times, emerging as a stronger nation in the aftermath of each downturn.

This is a definitive study of films that have been built around the themes of love, death, and the afterlifefilms about lovers who meet again (and love again) in heaven, via reincarnation, or through other kinds of after-death encounters. Far more than books about mere ghosts in the movies or religion in movies, Love in the Afterlife presents a complex but highly distinctive and unique patternthe love-death-afterlife patternas it was handed down by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks (in the Isis and Orpheus myths, for example), developed by Freud and his followers in the duality of ';Eros and Thanatos,' and then featured in popular movies from the 1920s to the recent past. Among its other qualities, Love in the Afterlife may encourage readers to look at movies differently and reflect upon the possibility that other patterns in cinema may have gone undetected for years. Furthermore, this book will show how the love-death-afterlife theme found its way into all sorts of different film types: melodramas, comedies, war films, horror films, film noir, and other genres. The book will be well illustrated and quotations from film reviews will enliven its pages. A long appendix gives production data on almost sixty individual films.