A portrait of the trailblazing film producer whose career spanned five decades."Bernstein packs an astonishing amount of solid film history into his lucid chronicle of Wangers whirlwind corporate liaisons. ... A fully realized, A-line biopic of a fascinating life in the movies."Tom Doherty, Film Quarterly.

Award-winning author Walter Wangerin Jr. gracefully explores the dynamics of prayer. With luminous prose, he surveys the landscape of communication and communion with God--what whole prayer feels like, looks like, and sounds like. If you long for a deeper relationship with God, Whole Prayer is a trustworthy guide.

Walt Disney, David O. Selznick, Mary Pickford, Orson Welles, and an elite group of movie producers secretly formed their own society in an effort to break up the old studio monopolies. The Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers initiated profound changes in Hollywood but today has been forgotten Using original SlMPP documents, this book reveals the story that has waited over 40 years to be told.

Rare correspondence from Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, Jane Fonda, and other Hollywood luminaries from the silent film era to the 1970s. Letters from Hollywood reproduces in full color scores of entertaining and insightful pieces of correspondence from some of the most notable and talented film industry names of all time—from the silent era to the golden age, and up through the pre-email days of the 1970s. Culled from libraries, archives, and personal collections, the 135 letters, memos, and telegrams are organized chronologically and are annotated by the authors to provide backstories and further context. While each piece reveals a specific moment in time, taken together, the letters convey a bigger picture of Hollywood history. Contributors include celebrities like Greta Garbo, Alfred Hitchcock, Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra, Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, Cary Grant, Francis Ford Coppola, Tom Hanks, and Jane Fonda. This is the gift book of the season for fans of classic Hollywood. With a foreword by Peter Bogdanovitch. “This is, quite simply, one of the finest books I’ve ever read about Hollywood.” —Leonard Maltin

This is a moving, star-filled account of one of Hollywood’s true golden ages as told by a man in the middle of it all. Walter Mirisch’s company has produced some of the most entertaining and enduring classics in film history, including West Side Story, Some Like It Hot, In the Heat of the Night, and The Magnificent Seven. His work has led to 87 Academy Award nominations and 28 Oscars. Richly illustrated with rare photographs from his personal collection, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History reveals Mirisch’s own experience of Hollywood and tells the stories of the stars—emerging and established—who appeared in his films, including Natalie Wood, John Wayne, Peter Sellers, Sidney Poitier, Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, and many others. With hard-won insight and gentle humor, Mirisch recounts how he witnessed the end of the studio system, the development of independent production, and the rise and fall of some of Hollywood’s most gifted (and notorious) cultural icons. A producer with a passion for creative excellence, he offers insights into his innovative filmmaking process, revealing a rare ingenuity for placating the demands of auteur directors, weak-kneed studio executives, and troubled screen sirens. From his early start as a movie theater usher to the presentation of such masterpieces as The Apartment, Fiddler on the Roof, and The Great Escape, Mirisch tells the inspiring life story of his climb to the highest echelon of the American film industry. This book assures Mirisch’s legacy—as Elmore Leonard puts it—as “one of the good guys.” Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association

The Vietnam War's influence on politics, foreign policy, and subsequent military campaigns is the center of much debate and analysis. But the impact on veterans across the globe, as well as the war's effects on individual lives and communities, is a largely neglected issue. As a consequence of cultural and legal barriers, the oral histories of the Vietnam War currently available in English are predictably one-sided, providing limited insight into the inner workings of the Communist nations that participated in the war. Furthermore, many of these accounts focus on combat experiences rather than the backgrounds, belief systems, and social experiences of interviewees, resulting in an incomplete historiography of the war. Chinese native Xiaobing Li corrects this oversight in Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans. Li spent seven years gathering hundreds of personal accounts from survivors of the war, accounts that span continents, nationalities, and political affiliations. The twenty-two intimate stories in the book feature the experiences of American, Chinese, Russian, Korean, and North and South Vietnamese veterans, representing the views of both anti-Communist and Communist participants, including Chinese officers of the PLA, a Russian missile-training instructor, and a KGB spy. These narratives humanize and contextualize the war's events while shedding light on aspects of the war previously unknown to Western scholars. Providing fresh perspectives on a long-discussed topic, Voices from the Vietnam War offers a thorough and unique understanding of America's longest war.

Proclaiming in his dedication "an enduring contempt for all that is typical of Hollywood," screenwriter Bright (1908-1989), probably best known for his penning of the James Cagney vehicle Public Enemy, sets the tone for his memoir of movies, Communist Party politics, and the Hollywood blacklist. Connecting world political developments to his experiences in Hollywood, Bright spares very few from his acerbic pen, railing against fascists and the FBI and describing the Communist Party as opportunistic. The memoir covers the decades 1930 to 1960. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This volume brings together historians of imperialism and race, travel and modernity, Islam and India, the Pacific and the Atlantic to show how a 'transnational' approach to history offers fresh insights into the past. Transnational history is a form of scholarship that has been revolutionising our understanding of history in the last decade. With a focus on interconnectedness across national borders of ideas, events, technologies and individual lives, it moves beyond the national frames of analysis that so often blinker and restrict our understanding of the past. Many of the essays also show how expertise in 'Australian history' can contribute to and benefit from new transnational approaches to history. Through an examination of such diverse subjects as film, modernity, immigration, politics and romance, Connected Worlds weaves an historical matrix which transports the reader beyond the local into a realm which re-defines the meaning of humanity in all its complexity. Contributors include Tony Ballantyne, Desley Deacon, John Fitzgerald, Patrick Wolfe and Angela Woollacott.

'Hollywood' as a concept applies variously to a particular film style, a factory-based mode of film production, a cartel of powerful media institutions and a national (and increasingly global) 'way of seeing'. It is a complex social, cultural and industrial phenomenon and is arguably the single most important site of cultural production over the past century.This collection brings together journal articles, published essays, book chapters and excerpts which explore Hollywood as a social, economic, industrial, aesthetic and political force, and as a complex historical entity.