David Lowery

Brilliantly illustrated and designed by the London-based film magazine Little White Lies, Bong Joon-ho examines the career of the South Korean writer/director, who has been making critically acclaimed feature films for more than two decades. First breaking out into the international scene with festival-favorite Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), Bong then set his sights on the story of a real-life serial killer in 2003’s Memories of Murder and once again won strong international critical attention, taking home the prize for Best Director at the San Sebastian Film Festival. But it was 2006’s The Host that proved to be a huge breakout moment both for Bong and the Korean film industry. The monster movie, set in Seoul, premiered at Cannes and became an instant hit—South Korea’s widest release ever, setting new box office records and selling remake rights in the US to Universal. Bong’s next feature, Mother (2009) also premiered at Cannes, once again earning critical acclaim and appearing on many “best-of” lists for 2009/2010. Bong’s first English-language film, Snowpiercer (2013)—set on a postapocalyptic train where class divisions erupt into class warfare—followed on its heels, bringing his work outside of the South Korean and film festival markets and onto the stage of global commercial cinema. With 2017’s Okja (which became a center of controversy due to its being produced and released by Netflix), Bong became even more of an internationally known name, with the New York Times' A. O. Scott calling the film “a miracle of imagination and technique.” Bong’s next film, the 2019 black comedy/thriller Parasite, simultaneously scaled back—the film is mostly set in just two locations, with two Korean families taking center stage—and took his career to new heights, winning the Palme d’Or with a unanimous vote, as well as history-making Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film. Parasite’s jarring shifts in tone—encompassing darkness, drama, slapstick, and black humor—and its unsubtle critiques of late capitalism and American imperialism are in conversation with Bong’s entire body of work, and this mid-career monograph will survey the entirety of that work, including his short films, to flesh out the stories behind the films with supporting analytical text and interviews with Bong’s key collaborators. The book also explores Bong’s rise in the cultural eye of the West, catching up readers with his career before his next masterpiece arrives.

A memoir of more than three decades of fishing trips, The Mud Daddy Chronicles follows three journalists and friends through the seasons of their lives. Mysterious omens over the years reveal that a supernatural current, an environmental warning, courses through these annual weekend quests for fish. Three young men with dreams and goals become gray-haired guys with grit and guts. These stolen weekends pile up year after year until the years and trips blend one into the other and become decades. All soon realize that a spiritual dimension accompanies these pilgrimages for smallmouthbass. Full of fishing tips (as well as plans for a potato launcher, suggestions for lures and 20+ man-and- a-pan recipes) The Mud Daddy Chronicles is a glimpse into a mystical and remarkable natural world while offering a cautionary tale about theenvironmental threats that haunt our national waterways. The stories and recipes in this book prove, too, that nothing is better than a crisp autumn morning on a boat on the water - life-long friends nearby, libations at hand and a smallmouth bass tugging on 10-pound test

The Politics of Dissatisfaction: Citizens, Services, and Urban Institutions is destined to be a classic in public administration and public policy; it makes major theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature in both fields. It is a rigorous empirical attempt to assess the public choice view of citizenship and local government. The research upon which this book is based was founded on conversations between two of its authors, W. E. Lyons and David Lowery, during the early 1980s.

The Politics of Dissatisfaction: Citizens, Services, and Urban Institutions is destined to be a classic in public administration and public policy; it makes major theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature in both fields. It is a rigorous empirical attempt to assess the public choice view of citizenship and local government. The research upon which this book is based was founded on conversations between two of its authors, W. E. Lyons and David Lowery, during the early 1980s.

Understanding United States Government Growth develops and tests alternative explanations of government growth since World War II. It opens with an analysis of debate about the causes and consequences of government growth, including the excessive government view that the public sector has grown beyond the scope demanded by citizens due to its own structural defects, and the responsive interpretation that government has gown because it has reacted appropriately to external public demands. The authors review the major political and economic explanations for government growth and criticize earlier empirical attempts to test these explanations. In the second half of the book, they distinguish four components of government growth: growth in the cost of government and growth in the scope of government activities in three domains--transfer payments, domestic purchases, and defense purchases. Both responsive and excessive explanations of each of these components of growth are developed and tested to allow an evaluation of the validity of the two contrasting views about big government.