Entertainment Culture

In From Holmes to Sherlock, Mattias Boström re-creates the full story behind the legendary detective and his many incarnations - a real-life narrative of success, tragedy, and family secrets that has never previously been told in its entirety.

Herman J. (1897-1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture's only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture.

In Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams, Donald Bogle tells - for the first time - the story of a place both mythic and real: Black Hollywood. Spanning 60 years, this deliciously entertaining history uncovers the audacious manner in which many Blacks made a place for themselves in an industry that originally had no place for them. Through interviews and the personal recollections of Hollywood luminaries, Bogle pieces together a remarkable history that remains largely obscure to this day.

Imagine 50 Cent’s Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter written by a nerdy Black kid from Newark, New Jersey, who made it big despite the skepticism of his family. That’s Top Billin'.

The son of first-generation Tongan immigrants, Hau drew on the legacy of his name (meaning 'King') to become one of the nation's most influential musical artists. But the best stories often come from the humblest beginnings. A promising junior rugby player, Hau decided in his teens to trade in the footy boots for Hammer pants, soaking up every bar and breakbeat of the new sound and culture exploding out of urban America: DJ Kool Herc and LL Cool J, mix-tapes and graffiti, velour Kangols and Beat Street.

When the Nicholas Brothers danced, uptown at the Cotton Club, downtown at the Roxy, in segregated movie theatres in the South, and dance halls across the country, audiences cheered, clapped, stomped their feet, and shouted out uncontrollably. In Brotherhood in Rhythm, Constance Valis Hill interweaves an intimate portrait of these great performers with a rich, detailed history of jazz music and dance, both bringing their act to life and explaining their significance through a colorful analysis of their eloquent footwork, their full-bodied expressiveness, and their changing style.

Назначение этих лекций — помочь человеку, далекому от систематического изучения культуры, начать ориентироваться в мировом культурном процессе. Нравы классической Античности, живопись Высокого Возрождения, русский реализм, современное постмодернистское искусство, язык китча, рекламы и нашей повседневности — мы видим, что язык культуры меняется, но есть ли незримый закон, подобно маятнику определяющий ее движение? От пещер каменного века до рождения мегаполиса — автор прослеживает этапы становления культуры и выделяет признаки, которые характеризуют культуру, клонящуюся к закату.

The Rainbow Age of Television explores why queer people are so invested in—and conflicted by—the kinds of storytelling that TV has to offer. Above all, it's a celebration of the LGBTQIA+ shows, their characters, and their creators that define this new age in television.

From the beginning, American cinema has been both a powerful mythmaker and a social critic. D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, arguably the first feature film, shows us just how early in its history cinema had established its influence. Birth of a Nation famously portrayed the Ku Klux Klan in a favorable light, a portrayal that contributed to the modern resurgence of the group and brought racist depictions of African Americans imported from the minstrel show to the silver screen. In response, filmmakers of color have created nuanced and indelible portraits of race.

Tumbling from one love entanglement to another, 30-something teacher Izzy Comyn has a predilection for inappropriate men. Over the three hilarious series of Up the Garden Path, Izzy, played by Imelda Staunton, deals with the complicated ups and downs of her attempts to find true love.

Jon Fine spent nearly 30 years performing and recording with bands that played various forms of aggressive and challenging underground rock music. And, as he writes in this memoir, at no point were any of those bands "ever threatened, even distantly, by actual fame". Yet when members of his first band, Bitch Magnet, reunited after 21 years to tour Europe, Asia, and America, diehard longtime fans traveled from far and wide to attend those shows.

This memoir of a professional biographer's life tells the inside story of how he became interested in his subjects and reveals the mechanics of the trade: how to assemble proposals for publishers, conduct interviews and archival research, and joust with editors, subjects, and their literary estates. Other biographers have described their process but remained discrete, not wishing to offend their sources and supporters. This author has forgone such caution.

Hollywood stars have always furthered fashion's cause of seducing the masses into buying designers' clothes by acting as living billboards. Now, red carpet celebrities are no longer content to just advertise and are putting their names on labels that reflect the image they - or their stylists - created.

Is the top still spinning? Was it all a dream? In the world of Christopher Nolan's four-time Academy Award-winning movie, people can share one another's dreams and alter their beliefs and thoughts. Inception is a metaphysical heist film that raises more questions than it answers: Can we know what is real? Can you be held morally responsible for what you do in dreams? What is the nature of dreams, and what do they tell us about the boundaries of "self" and "other"?

There has never been a show business book quite like The Show Won't Go On, the first comprehensive study of a bizarre phenomenon: performers who died onstage. From the comedy magician who dropped dead on live television to the amateur thespian who expired during a play called The Art of Murder, the book is a celebration of lives both famous and obscure, as well as a dramatic and accurate recounting of events leading to the moments they died "doing what they loved."

On December 22, 1953, Mort Sahl took the stage at San Francisco's hungry i and changed comedy forever. Before him, standup was about everything but hard news and politics. In his wake, a new generation of smart comics emerged - Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, and the Smothers Brothers, among others.

Bigger Than Fashion is about the relentless rise of streetwear; it’s a captivating story of how a fiercely guarded counterculture, full of iconoclasts and hustlers, was disregarded until it skyrocketed into a massively influential lifestyle and fashion movement worth billions of dollars. Streetwear was built on the fusion of subcultures, unflinching DIY ethos, and a fiery sense of community that attracted everyone from skaters and hip-hop heads to punks and graffiti artists.

Shatner takes a comprehensive look at this singular performer, using archival sources and information culled from interviews with friends and colleagues to transport listeners through William Shatner's remarkably bumpy career: his spectacular failures and triumphs; tragedies, including the shocking death of his third wife, Nerine; and, ultimately, the resilience Shatner has shown, time and again, in the face of overwhelming odds. Author Michael Seth Starr unravels the mystery of William Shatner, stripping away the many myths associated with his personal life.

Greg Gutfeld hates artificial tolerance. At the root of every single major political conflict is the annoying coddling Americans must endure of these harebrained liberal hypocrisies. In fact, most of the time liberals use the mantle of tolerance as a guise for their pathetic intolerance. And what we really need is smart intolerance, or as Gutfeld reminds us, what we used to call common sense. The Joy of Hate tackles this conundrum head on- - replacing the idiocy of open-mindness with a shrewd judgmentalism that rejects stupid ideas, notions, and people.

The creators of the popular website Black Nerd Problems bring their witty and unflinching insight to this engaging collection of pop culture essays - on everything from Mario Kart to issues of representation - that “will fill you with joy and give you hope for the future of geek culture” (Ernest Cline, number one New York Times best-selling author).