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Call Me Sister: District Nursing Tales from the Swinging Sixties


Jane Yeadon - 2013
    Staff nursing in a ward where she's challenged by an inventory driven ward sister, she reckons it's time to swap such trivialities for life as a district nurse.Independent thinking is one thing, but Jane's about to find that the drama on district can demand instant reaction; and without hospital back up, she's usually the one having to provide it. She meets a rich cast of patients all determined to follow their own individual star, and goes to Edinburgh where Queen Victoria's Jubilee Institute's nurse training is considered the cr me de la cr me of the district nursing world.Call Me Sister recalls Jane's challenging and often hilarious route to realizing her own particular dream.

Sholay: The Making of a Classic


Anupama Chopra - 2000
    National award winning film journalist Anupama Chopra tells the fascinating story of how a four-line idea grew to become the greatest blockbuster of Indian cinema.

Sexy Liberal!: Of Me I Sing


Stephanie Miller - 2015
    With Arbitron ratings clocking over 3+ million listeners a week and simulcast daily in 37 million homes on Free Speech TV, where she is also the number one show, her strongest numbers are in the grand prize demographic of highly educated males 25-54, despite, or maybe because of , her status as an out gay woman. It probably explains the sublime effectiveness of her national billboard slogan: "Stephanie Miller...making men rise in the morning". Stephanie also headlined the country’s number one comedy tour, “Stephanie Miller’s Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour", as well as the number one comedy album, "Stephanie Miller's Sexy Liberal Comedy Album". She has recently had her second #1 comedy album in the country with her "Stephanie Miller's Happy Hour, Volume One". She frequents the Holy Trinity of cable news: CNN, MSNBC, and FOX, where she bursts the infallibility balloons of right wingers, often with one well-aimed pinpoint punchline. Here is SEXY LIBERAL!, which you can see as Al Franken rewritten by Sarah Silverman, Chelsea Handler horizontal on the desk of The Daily Show. Steph is the youngest child of Congressman William Miller of NY, Barry Goldwater’s running mate in 1964. We all know how that turned out. Though Steph was only 3, she shows here how that defeat affected her as much as it changed the Republican Party. It made her who she is. SEXY LIBERAL! is the book her 3,000,000 fans have been begging her to write. it’s both deeply personal and hilariously political. But most of all it is Stephanie’s unique voice, her jokes, her happy clappy optimism, and her truth that they tune in to day after day, that they download as a subscription podcast, that they buy tickets for, to see her unbleeped and in person. That’s what SEXY LIBERAL! delivers. Like an uncensored comedy drone right to your door!“Stephanie Miller is like ice cream for breakfast, or box-wine through a Krazy Straw: pure pleasure that some people say is bad for you, but you know better. Sexy Liberal! is deeply, deeply profane, big-hearted, surprising, and it might make you pee your pants a little. Just what you need! Read this book. Stephanie Miller for Everything, 2016!”--Rachel Maddow, host of The Rachel Maddow and author of Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power “Sexy Liberal! is a great book with mind-expanding astuteness and side-splitting humor. Stephanie Miller is so wondrously witty and wise you will want to quote her. But, first, you must read her. Buy this book and help Amazon at last turn a profit. --Lily Tomlin “Sexy Liberal! is inspired reading. It is laugh-enhancing and beyond thought-provoking! A must read. --Jane Wagner Reading Stephanie's book is like being on the best kind of dinner date. The conversation is smart, funny and politically insightful. And Stephanie's contribution bad either. Seriously, what a fun read. Stephanie, in her wonderfully self-deprecating way, lets you into her brilliant mind, her no BS take on the political scene, and life itself. Enter at your own risk.--Rob Reiner

Who the Hell's in It: Conversations With Hollywood's Legendary Actors


Peter Bogdanovich - 2000
    He started out as an actor (he debuted on the stage in his sixth-grade production of Finian’s Rainbow); he watched actors work (he went to the theater every week from the age of thirteen and saw every important show on, or off, Broadway for the next decade); he studied acting, starting at sixteen, with Stella Adler (his work with her became the foundation for all he would ever do as an actor and a director).Now, in his new book, Who the Hell’s in It, Bogdanovich draws upon a lifetime of experience, observation and understanding of the art to write about the actors he came to know along the way; actors he admired from afar; actors he worked with, directed, befriended. Among them: Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, John Cassavetes, Charlie Chaplin, Montgomery Clift, Marlene Dietrich, Henry Fonda, Ben Gazzara, Audrey Hepburn, Boris Karloff, Dean Martin, Marilyn Monroe, River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier, Frank Sinatra, and James Stewart.Bogdanovich captures—in their words and his—their work, their individual styles, what made them who they were, what gave them their appeal and why they’ve continued to be America’s iconic actors.On Lillian Gish: “the first virgin hearth goddess of the screen . . . a valiant and courageous symbol of fortitude and love through all distress.” On Marlon Brando: “He challenged himself never to be the same from picture to picture, refusing to become the kind of film star the studio system had invented and thrived upon—the recognizable human commodity each new film was built around . . . The funny thing is that Brando’s charismatic screen persona was vividly apparent despite the multiplicity of his guises . . . Brando always remains recognizable, a star-actor in spite of himself. ” Jerry Lewis to Bogdanovich on the first laugh Lewis ever got onstage: “I was five years old. My mom and dad had a tux made—I worked in the borscht circuit with them—and I came out and I sang, ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ the big hit at the time . . . It was 1931, and I stopped the show—naturally—a five-year-old in a tuxedo is not going to stop the show? And I took a bow and my foot slipped and hit one of the floodlights and it exploded and the smoke and the sound scared me so I started to cry. The audience laughed—they were hysterical . . . So I knew I had to get the rest of my laughs the rest of my life, breaking, sitting, falling, spinning.”John Wayne to Bogdanovich, on the early years of Wayne’s career when he was working as a prop man: “Well, I’ve naturally studied John Ford professionally as well as loving the man. Ever since the first time I walked down his set as a goose-herder in 1927. They needed somebody from the prop department to keep the geese from getting under a fake hill they had for Mother Machree at Fox. I’d been hired because Tom Mix wanted a box seat for the USC football games, and so they promised jobs to Don Williams and myself and a couple of the players. They buried us over in the properties department, and Mr. Ford’s need for a goose-herder just seemed to fit my pistol.”These twenty-six portraits and conversations are unsurpassed in their evocation of a certain kind of great movie star that has vanished. Bogdanovich’s book is a celebration and a farewell.From the Hardcover edition.

Of Moose and Men: A Skewed Look at Life in Alaska


A.E. Poynor - 1999
    E. Poynor. For less than twenty percent of what you paid for that grande maple-choco-frappa-machacino latte you'll spew out your nose while reading this book, you can learn about an aspect of Alaska most people never think about: everyday life in Alaska. Of Moose and Men: A Skewed Look at Life in Alaska provides a unique insight into the Land of the Midnight Sun, where laughing about the trials unique to the country is better than giving up.

Eye of the Storm: Experiencing God When You Can't See Him


Ryan Stevenson - 2020
    Here, Stevenson shares about the turmoil of his early life, the rejection and pain faced in his initial attempts to launch his music career, the grief experienced during his mother’s long battle with cancer, the stress and burnout of his days working as a paramedic, and how an unexpected lightning storm gave him a front-row seat to a miracle that would turn his life around. When the dark clouds roll in, Stevenson has learned to listen to that still, small voice he hears—the voice of a trustworthy God who holds on to him even during the fiercest storms.

Dizzy & Jimmy: My Life with James Dean: A Love Story


Liz Sheridan - 1975
    The year was 1951. Dean had recently arrived in Manhattan in search of Broadway stardom. Sheridan was a tall, graceful aspiring dancer. They met one rainy afternoon in the parlor of the Rehearsal Club, a chaperoned boardinghouse for young actresses -- and before long Dizzy and Jimmy were inseparable. Together they hunted for jobs, haunted all-night bars and diners, and gloried in the innocent rebellion of early-'50s bohemian New York. Dizzy Sheridan and James Dean were lovers; they lived together; as even ardent Dean fans may be surprised to learn, they were engaged to be married. But when Dean began to find success on the Broadway stage and then was lured to Hollywood, the couple parted amid tears and broken dreams -- dreams that would be dashed forever when Dean died in a car crash in 1955, not long after seeing Dizzy for the last time.Dizzy & Jimmy marks the first time Liz Sheridan has written about this joyous yet ill-starred romance. She brings us closer than we have ever been to the vibrant young actor before he became a Hollywood icon, capturing his unstudied charm, his complicated psyche, the spontaneous delight he took from the world around him, and the passion he invested in his work and life. It is a journey that takes in many locales, from Dean's boyhood home in Fairmount, Indiana, to Sheridan's recuperative travels through the Caribbean after their breakup. But at its heart Dizzy & Jimmy is the story of a love affair with Manhattan -- of nights spent stealing kisses in Times Square, sharing a walkup in the Hargrave Hotel, dancing after hours beneath the stars in Grand Central Station. And in Sheridan's bittersweet, embraceable telling, it becomes a story no reader, Dean fan or otherwise, will soon forget.

Ken Burns: The Kindle Singles Interview (Kindle Single)


Tom Roston - 2014
    In this illuminating, in-depth Q & A, “America’s storyteller” lets readers in on his philosophical approach to understanding our nation’s past, as well as a little family secret for overcoming your fears.Tom Roston is a veteran journalist who began his career at The Nation and Vanity Fair magazines, before working at Premiere magazine as a senior editor. He writes a regular blog about nonfiction filmmaking on PBS.org and he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. He lives with his wife and their two daughters in New York City. Cover design by Adil Dara.

Spirited Away


Andrew Osmond - 2008
    Spirited Away, directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, is Japan’s most successful film, and one of the top-grossing ‘foreign language’ films ever released.  Set in modern Japan, the film is a wildly imaginative fantasy, at once personal and universal.  It tells the story of a listless little girl who stumbles into a magical world where gods relax in a palatial bathhouse; where there are giant babies and hard-working soot sprites, and where a train runs across the sea. Andrew Osmond’s insightful study describes how Miyazaki wrote, storyboarded and directed Spirited Away with a degree of creative control undreamt of in most popular cinema, using the film’s delightful, freewheeling visual ideas to explore issues ranging from personal agency and responsibility to what Miyazaki sees as the lamentable state of modern Japan.  Osmond unpacks the film’s visual language, which many Western (and some Japanese) audiences find both beautiful and sometimes bewildering.  He traces connections between Spirited Away and Miyazaki’s prior body of work, and provides an account of the film’s production and the creative differences between Miyazaki and his collaborators, arguing that Spirited Away uses the cartoon medium to create a compellingly immersive drawn world.

101 Things I Learned in Film School


Neil Landau - 2010
    Written by Neil Landau, an experienced screenwriter and script consultant to the major movie studios, this is the perfect book for anyone who wants to know about the inner-workings of this industry. Whether it's someone who wants to make movies as a full-timecareer, or just someone who is interested in film, this book covers it all.

Best Music Writing 2011


Alex Ross - 2011
    Celebrating the year in music writing by gathering a rich array of essays, missives, and musings on every style of music from rock to hip-hop to R&B to jazz to pop to blues, it is essential reading for anyone who loves great music and accomplished writing. Scribes of every imaginable sort—novelists, poets, journalists, musicians— are gathered to create a multi-voiced snapshot of the year in music writing that, like the music it illuminates, is every bit as thrilling as it is riveting.

Inside The Wicker Man: How Not to Make a Cult Classic


Allan Brown - 2000
    Allan Brown describes the filming and distribution of the cult masterpiece as a 'textbook example of How Things Should Never Be Done'. The omens were bad from the start, and proceeded to get much, much worse, with fake blossom on trees to simulate spring, actors chomping on ice-cubes to prevent their breath showing on film, and verbal and physical confrontations involving both cast and crew. The studio hated it and hardly bothered to distribute it, but today it finds favour with critics and fans alike, as a serious—if flawed—piece of cinema. Brown expertly guides readers through the film's convoluted history, attempting along the way to explain its enduring fascination, and providing interviews with the key figures—many of whom still have an axe to grind, and some of whom still harbour plans for a sequel.

A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960


Jeanine Basinger - 1993
    Films widely disparate in subject, sentiment, and technique, they nonetheless shared one dual purpose: to provide the audience (of women, primarily) with temporary liberation into a screen dream - of romance, sexuality, luxury, suffering, or even wickedness - and then send it home reminded of, reassured by, and resigned to the fact that no matter what else she might do, a woman's most important job was...to be a woman. Now, with boundless knowledge and infectious enthusiasm, Jeanine Basinger illuminates the various surprising and subversive ways in which women's films delivered their message. Basinger examines dozens of films, exploring the seemingly intractable contradictions at the convoluted heart of the woman's genre - among them, the dilemma of the strong and glamorous woman who cedes her power when she feels it threatening her personal happiness, and the self-abnegating woman whose selflessness is not always as "noble" as it appears. Basinger looks at the stars who played these women (Kay Francis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Susan Hayward, Myrna Loy, and a host of others) and helps us understand the qualities - the right off-screen personae, the right on-screen attitudes, the right faces, the right figures for carrying the right clothes - that made them personify the woman's film and equipped them to make believable drama or comedy out of the crackpot plots, the conflicting ideas, and the exaggerations of real behavior that characterize these movies. In each of the films the author discus

Disney's World: A Biography


Leonard Mosley - 1985
    But while sharing the general admiration of a man whose cinematic achievements were always so happily inspired and inspiring, this biographer discloses all teh facts, no matter how unpalatable, abut a man whose all too huma flaws and weakenesses of character were as real as a genuine talents and vision

Movies Based on True Stories: What Really Happened? Movies versus History


Alan Royle - 2015
    A look at over 400 of the best historical movies (and some of the worst) purporting to be ‘factual’ or ‘based on actual events’; and how Hollywood has distorted, altered, manipulated, exaggerated, even falsified history under the all-encompassing premise…based on a true story…