Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves. The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art.

The warming of the Earth has been the subject of intense debate and concern for many scientists, policy-makers, and citizens for at least the past decade. Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, a new report by a committee of the National Research Council, characterizes the global warming trend over the last 100 years, and examines what may be in store for the 21st century and the extent to which warming may be attributable to human activity.

'Not tonight, darling, I've got a headache...' An estimated one in three couples suffer from problems associated with one partner having a higher libido than the other. Marriage therapist Michele Weiner Davis has written THE SEX-STARVED MARRIAGE to help couples come to terms with this problem. Weiner Davis shows you how to address pyschological factors like depression, poor body image and communication problems that affect sexual desire. With separate chapters for the spouse that's ready for action and the spouse that's ready for sleep, THE SEX-STARVED MARRIAGE will help you re-spark your passion and stop you fighting about sex. Weiner Davis is renowned for her straight-talking style and here she puts it to great use to let you know you're not alone in having marital sex problems. Bitterness or complacency about ho-hum sex can ruin a marriage, breaking the emotional tie of good sex.