Gina is literally beside herself with confusion when she comes back to life in a strange place among a horde of duplicate Ginas! She and her sister selves must find out who they really are, where they are, why they're there, and what to do about a sudden invasion of half-crystal minions of the *Umbra,* specter of the last universe!

Serpentus botches a secret mission to Jade right in plain sight of Julia, G'nolga and Rhoaton, who are scouting for signs of Dreadwing's newest terrifying weapon. They chase Serpentus into a volcanic ruin and corner him, only for him to trigger the mountain's eruption!

Having taken down most of their powerful pursuers, Serpentus and Sherisha continue toward the powerful artifact their master, Dreadwing, sent them to retrieve. Only three heroes remain to stop them: Julia Diggers, her arch-rival G'nolga, and chi-based Weapons-Master Rhoaton. But with Sherisha able to manipulate all the deathtraps protecting the artifact against them, even their combined expertise may not be enough!

Describes the life of glamour girl Peggy Hopkins Joyce, whose many marriages, expensive tastes, and wild lifestyle made her more famous in the 1920s and '30s than her stints as a Broadway and movie star.

The international bestseller! The book beaches were made for! When New York billionaire Adam Gold moves to London, every red-blooded woman wants to get him into bed...and down the aisle. Karin is a successful fashion entrepreneur and London's most glamorous socialite. Her name is synonymous with style and class, and Adam Gold could be her perfect accessory -- but can the whispers surrounding her ex-husband's death keep her from her prize? Erin, a young, naïve country girl with literary aspirations, never dreamed of traveling in such lofty social circles until she finds herself in the role of Adam's personal assistant and protégé. As her sights grow higher, the promise of riches, and lust for her handsome boss, threaten everything she once valued. Molly, a fading eighties supermodel, can't seem to leave her glory days, or her expensive drug habit, in the past. Ultracompetitive, unabashedly ruthless, Molly will risk everything to secure the man who may be her last chance at marriage. Summer, Molly's daughter, is an innocent beauty living in the shadow of her famous mother. When she lands a television deal and becomes the latest "it girl," Adam Gold takes notice. From Monte Carlo to Lake Como, St. Moritz to St. Barts, Gold Diggers takes a heady journey through the social circuit of the superrich into a world of sizzling passion, ruthless ambition and scorching betrayal.

Walt Disney (1901-1966) was one of the most significant creative forces of the twentieth century, a man who made a lasting impact on the art of the animated film, the history of American business, and the evolution of twentieth-century American culture. He was both a creative visionary and a dynamic entrepreneur, roles whose demands he often could not reconcile. In his compelling new biography, noted animation historian Michael Barrier avoids the well-traveled paths of previous biographers, who have tended to portray a blemish-free Disney or to indulge in lurid speculation. Instead, he takes the full measure of the man in his many aspects. A consummate storyteller, Barrier describes how Disney transformed himself from Midwestern farm boy to scrambling young businessman to pioneering artist and, finally, to entrepreneur on a grand scale. Barrier describes in absorbing detail how Disney synchronized sound with animation in Steamboat Willie; created in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs sympathetic cartoon characters whose appeal rivaled that of the best live-action performers; grasped television’s true potential as an unparalleled promotional device; and—not least—parlayed a backyard railroad into the Disneyland juggernaut. Based on decades of painstaking research in the Disney studio’s archives and dozens of public and private archives in the United States and Europe, The Animated Man offers freshly documented and illuminating accounts of Disney’s childhood and young adulthood in rural Missouri and Kansas City. It sheds new light on such crucial episodes in Disney’s life as the devastating 1941 strike at his studio, when his ambitions as artist and entrepreneur first came into serious conflict. Beginning in 1969, two and a half years after Disney’s death, Barrier recorded long interviews with more than 150 people who worked alongside Disney, some as early as 1922. Now almost all deceased, only a few were ever interviewed for other books. Barrier juxtaposes Disney’s own recollections against the memories of those other players to great effect. What emerges is a portrait of Walt Disney as a flawed but fascinating artist, one whose imaginative leaps allowed him to vault ahead of the competition and produce work that even today commands the attention of audiences worldwide.

Take a deep dive into the history of cinematic animation in the United States with the "remarkably thorough and detailed" (Choice) book that Publishers Weekly says is "a lively chronicle of a perennially evolving medium." Animated films started with simple sequential drawings photographed one at a time—little bits of comedic fluff to make amateur title scenes or surreal escapist sequences. Today, animation is a worldwide industry valued at nearly $300 billion and still growing in scope and popularity. In Moving Pictures, Darl Larsen playfully lays out the history of American animation as it transitioned from vaudeville sub-feature to craftsman-like artistry to industrial diversion and, ultimately, to theatrical regulars on par with blockbusters. Larsen identifies and discusses the major figures, movements, and studios across the nearly 120 years of animation in the United States. Progressing chronologically, the book follows animation from stage performance through to its use as wartime propaganda, its seven-minute heyday and decamp to television, and finally the years of struggle as cartoons became feature films. Covering everything from the generations preceding Mickey Mouse to recent releases such as Super Mario Bros., Moving Pictures is an essential read for movie fans and a nostalgic revisiting of some of America’s favorite films.

Beginning in the 1830s and continuing for more than a century, blackface minstrelsy--stage performances that claimed to represent the culture of black Americans--remained arguably the most popular entertainment in North America. A renewed scholarly interest in this contentious form of entertainment has produced studies treating a range of issues: its contradictory depictions of class, race, and gender; its role in the development of racial stereotyping; and its legacy in humor, dance, and music, and in live performance, film, and television. The style and substance of minstrelsy persist in popular music, tap and hip-hop dance, the language of the standup comic, and everyday rituals of contemporary culture. The blackface makeup all but disappeared for a time, though its influence never diminished--and recently, even the makeup has been making a comeback. This collection of original essays brings together a group of prominent scholars of blackface performance to reflect on this complex and troublesome tradition. Essays consider the early relationship of the blackface performer with American politics and the antislavery movement; the relationship of minstrels to the commonplace compromises of the touring "show" business and to the mechanization of the industrial revolution; the exploration and exploitation of blackface in the mass media, by D. W. Griffith and Spike Lee, in early sound animation, and in reality television; and the recent reappropriation of the form at home and abroad. In addition to the editor, contributors include Dale Cockrell, Catherine Cole, Louis Chude-Sokei, W. T. Lhamon, Alice Maurice, Nicholas Sammond, and Linda Williams.

The book focuses on the way various film icons engaged in and helped define some major issues of cultural and social concern to America by making heavily politicized movies during the 1970s.