At the memorial held after Martin Ritt's death in 1990, he was hailed as this country's greatest maker of social films. From No Down Payment early in his career to Stanley & Iris, his last production, he delineated the nuances of American society. In between were other social statements such as Hud, Sounder, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Norma Rae, and The Great White Hope. He was a leftist who embraced various radical movements of the 1930s and, largely because of this involvement, was blacklisted from television in the early 1950s. His film The Front, about the blacklisting, was his most autobiographical. He was a Jew from New York; yet he went to a small college in North Carolina, Elon, where he played football for "The Fighting Christians". His school days in the South gave him a lifelong love for the region. Thus, in his movies, he was just as much at home with southern as with northern topics. He did not deal totally in his southern experience with racism and poverty. He directed The Long Hot Summer and The Sound and the Fury, both of which described conflicts between and among white social groups. He once remarked, "I have spent most of my film life in the South". Some referred to his films as "think movies", and perhaps this is why he never won an Oscar for best directing. But he gave moviegoers all over the world an opportunity to see what America was really like - from the viewpoint both of the wealthy and of the poor. It may be, unfortunately, that we will never see his likes again.

Just a trolley ride from El Paso, Ciudad Juárez was a popular destination in the early 1900s. Enticing and exciting, tourists descended on this and other Mexican border towns to browse curio shops, dine and dance, attend bullfights, and perhaps escape Prohibition America. In Postcards from the Chihuahua Border Daniel D. Arreola captures the exhilaration of places in time, taking us back to Mexico’s northern border towns of Cuidad Juárez, Ojinaga, and Palomas in the early twentieth century. Drawing on more than three decades of archival work, Arreola uses postcards and maps to unveil the history of these towns along west Texas’s and New Mexico’s southern borders. Postcards offer a special kind of visual evidence. Arreola’s collection of imagery and commentary about them shows us singular places, enriching our understandings of history and the history of change in Chihuahua. No one postcard tells the entire story. But image after image offers a collected view and insight into changing perceptions. Arreola’s geography of place looks both inward and outward. We see what tourists see, while at the same time gaining insight about what postcard photographers and postcard publishers wanted to be seen and perceived about these border communities. Postcards from the Chihuahua Border is a colorful and dynamic visual history. It invites the reader to time travel, to revisit another era—the first half of the last century—when these border towns were framed and made popular through picture postcards.

Test films, pilots, trial series, limited runs, summer tryouts--by whatever name, televison networks have produced thousands of experimental shows that never made it into the regular line-up. Some were actually shown, but failed to gain an audience; many others never even made it on the air. This work includes more than 3,000 experimental television programs, both aired and unaired, that almost became a series. Entries include length, network, air date (if appropriate), a fact-filled plot synopsis, cast, guest stars, producer, director, writer, and music coordinator. Fully indexed.

Pete the Cat’s cool adaptation of the classic children’s song "Itsy Bitsy Spider" will have have young readers laughing and singing along. The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout. Down came the rain.... As the itsy bitsy spider struggles, Pete and his friends know just what to do to help out! Fans of James Dean's #1 New York Times bestselling Pete the Cat will love rocking out with Pete.

Have a Happy Golden Straub Day! The message floated in the sky for all to read; citizens chanted it to each other, motorists tooted it on their car horns as they drove the uncongested freeways. Earth had become a paradise, courtesy of Cordwainer Hardware International; population dwindling, war a thing of the past, free, untrammelled sex the right of all. But is paradise everything . . .? In this vividly realised novel, S. G. Compton charts the growth of CHI and the bland, idyllic world they engineered. Too idyllic for some; for beneath the surface darker forces were at work. At their heart was Scudder Laznett; brilliant, irascible, uncompromising. Scudder had begun a little game of his own; what that game was, Pete Laznett only discovered by slow degrees. And what he discovered was horrifying.

Twin tales of middle-class hilarity and despair from the writer who was dubbed “America’s preeminent comic novelist” by the New York Times When college professor Hank Tattersall sees his former flame, Lucy Stiles, at a campus concert, it sets off a chain reaction that results in one of the funniest and most unforgettable exit scenes in American literature—involving a locked door, an alcoholic dog, and a punning doppelgänger. The Cat’s Pajamas is the story of how Tattersall, a scrupulous self-reflector, falls from point A to point Z, rushing through a host of identities and indignities along the way. The unexamined life may not be worth living, he discovers, but the examined one is hardly a bed of roses. In Witch’s Milk, Tillie Seltzer has her own trials to attend to. Chief among them is her marriage to Pete, the kind of guy who tucks a cigarette behind his ear and calls everybody Frisbee. When they first met, Tillie had more sophisticated tastes—dark strangers, homburg hats—but she was also a thirtysomething virgin whose prospects weren’t getting any better. When she cracked a joke about the honeymoon being over, Pete believed her. Now stuck in suburbia with a sick child and a philandering husband, Tillie takes a hard look in the rearview mirror. Her search for an escape route will lead her to the most unexpected place of all. These short novels are linked by Tillie’s cameo appearance in Hank’s narrative and by the thrilling blend of satire, tragedy, and philosophy that defines the one-of-a-kind fiction of Peter De Vries.

Marie Graham has driven from Northampton and the funeral of her much-loved great aunt, Clara Pelletier, to Montreal to find her dear Uncle Charlie in the Sisters of the Sacred Heart nursing home, where he has lived for over twenty-five years. Their reunion is bittersweet. Uncle Charlie, nearly ninety-three, is failing. His greatest wish is to know everything that happened to the family that he left behind when he disappeared after serving his prison sentence for the accidental killing of his brother. Marie tells him the story of their French-Canadian family from the time right after World War II until 1980. All the joy and sorrow are here, all the choices made and the consequences described. This is a tale of lives lived in a time of change when old ways gave way to new challenges and new possibilities. Pete returned home from the war determined to pursue his dream of a successful business. Angela learned from her experience working in a bomb factory that she likes the feeling of accomplishment she experienced then and seeks to find that again. Clara demonstrates her capacity to love and to survive whatever life deals her. Marie and Amy and Petey are examples of how the strength of strong family bonds guide each new generation. These are characters to capture your interest and your heart.