Hollywood’s Publisher of Peccadilloes
Shocking True Story is a good, though by no means exhaustive or thorough, account of Confidential, Hollywood's publication of record for prurient interests.
By Gerald Early
Tales of a Working Girl
Day’s characters seemed to give her fans not only a coping fantasy but a sense of inspiration. One of the problems with the intelligentsia is that it will not respect or take seriously any fantasy that is not built on some idea or resistance to hegemony, which Day’s fantasy clearly was not.
Playing the Most Famous Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World
The OO7 Diaries reveals filmmaking as both a nearly heroic exercise in tenacity and an astonishingly pure expression of absurdity.
The Republican Party and What It Means
Republican Character reminds readers that the men and women in politics are rarely ideologically consistent, often opportunistic, and sometimes make strange alliances and unappealing compromises.
The Myth of the Good Son
I suppose mothers are always trying to save their sons. And sons are always making their mothers suffer, always making their mothers need to save them. Despite my stupidity, my unworthiness, my mother was determined to save me anyhow.
Baseball, Race, and the Americas
Alou is one of the best baseball autobiographies of recent years because it offers the story of race and baseball not from a non-American perspective, but from someone who got to know the United States very well as both a resident and a subject of its foreign policy, as both insider and outsider.
The Painful Persistence of Pruitt-Igoe’s Long Goodbye
Some places record the rise and fall of a significant building, or evoke historical events that took place there. Others, like the site where the notorious St. Louis public housing complex known as Pruitt-Igoe once stood, serve less as memorials than material imprints of loss and unresolved histories.
Seasons of the Southpaw
The basic facts are here, from Spahn’s upbringing in Buffalo to his last year in baseball with the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants, as well as some useful quotes but there are two problems with Freedman's book.
Pow! Bam! Biff! Tales of the Comic Book Wars
Slugfest is a fun book for anyone interested in comic books, in American popular culture generally, or in the obsessive and sometimes pathological nature of business competition. But it is not the incisive book about this industry that still awaits its author.
Baseball and the Fate of America
William J. Ryczek aptly documents baseball's generation of conflict through 1968, the year “America's pastime” confronted racial militancy, Vietnam, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, and also the growing dominance of football.
Lyndon Johnson’s Tragic Last Hurrah
Kyle Longley's book on LBJ mixes two rich elements: one of the most remarkable, and remarkably flawed men, ever to be U.S. president, plus one of the most troubling, tragic, and turbulent years of the 20th century.
The Black Conservative Lion in Winter
Those familiar with Sowell’s major works will find little here that has not been argued in his other books. For his fans, this consistency gives his arguments greater validity and provides greater comfort.