Hooray for Hollywood
To our Puritan, “agrarian” instincts, Hollywood is all that is wrong with America, the decadent city, the sin factory that has warped the culture beyond repair. Here is the trope of American declension.
Reviews
Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah
Deetz’s Bound By Fire sets out to address our on-going gastronomic rehabilitation by focusing on the story of Virginia’s enslaved plantation cooks. She has taken on a difficult task, for those unsung chefs of the antebellum and colonial era left no cookery compilations or published sources behind.
How Enduring Failure Becomes Its Own Form of Triumph
Few historians so aptly make Grant and his time so legible to a 21st-century readership that continues to grapple with the political legacies of slavery and the Civil War.
Latin America’s Cold War Discontent
In an engaging, well-written, exhaustively-researched, even-handed, and insightful book, Patrick Iber not only brings to light previously obscure aspects of this story but also details the complexities and contradictions that bedeviled all sides of the struggle.
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.
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.
From Radical Warrior to Lion in Winter
If at times we are perplexed and frustrated by Frederick Douglass and other times galvanized and inspired, it is only because he lived in our most perplexing and frustrating time as a nation.
The Genesis of Germ Theory History
Fitzharris takes readers from the pre-Listerian surgical theaters replete with pathogenic microorganisms and decaying bodies to sterile hospital wards filled with recovering patients.
Selling Fracking as the Way of the Future
Sernovitz’s goal is to tell us all about “fracking” for oil and gas, and how it is not only inevitable and good but actually something close to God’s work. Fasten your seatbelt.