Product Description
Cynical news hounds, grumbling editors, snooping television newscasters, inquisitive foreign correspondents, probing newsreel cameramen, and a host of others-all can be found in this reference work to Hollywood's version of journalism: from the early one-reelers to modern fare, over a thousand silent and sound films can be found. Each entry includes title, date of release, distributor, director, screenwriter, and major cast members. These credits are followed by a brief plot summary and analysis, cross-references and other information of interest to students and fans of films. The book is arranged alphabetically, and includes a preface, introduction, bibliography, a list of abbreviations, appendices, and an index of names. The detailed introduction covers an historical survey of the topic, with numerous examples of films and dates. The work also includes a selection of stills from various films. ... Read more

Product Description
THIS EDITION IS INTENDED FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Little Wolf gets a job at Weekly Wolf magazine dispensing advice in response to readers' letters, such as a skunk who wonders if she should change her perfume. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Little Wolf is howling good entertainment for all ages
I bought several "Little Wolf" books before a long family trip so our daughter (then 9) would have some new reading material.This entire series is hysterically funny, from the witty writing style, the creative illustrations and just the high-jinx that Little Wolf gets into. The personality of the character is fantastic and kept my daughter glued to the pages, and reading them aloud to anyone who would listen.For a kid who only read when she "had to", this was a feat.She often re-reads them now, even two years later.While other books get handed down to cousins and friends, none of the Little Wolf Series are ever given away. Great for boys or girls, young or just young at heart.We almost named our new kitten "smellybreff" in honor of L.W., but she came with a name! ... Read more

Product Description
A new addition to Blueprint's "Inside" series, this book exposes the internal workings of the field of journalism and provides a guide to the way into the industry. Covering traditional press and magazine as well as radio and television journalism, it is a comprehensive and up to date manual in today's bi-media market. ... Read more

Product Description
These exhilarating letters—selected and introduced by Thomas Kunkel, who wrote Genius in Disguise, the distinguished Ross biography—tell the dramatic story of the birth of The New Yorker and its precarious early days and years. Ross worries about everything from keeping track of office typewriters to the magazine's role in wartime to the exact questions to be asked for a "Talk of the Town" piece on the song "Happy Birthday." We find Ross, in Kunkel's words, "scolding Henry Luce, lecturing Orson Welles, baiting J. Edgar Hoover, inviting Noel Coward and Ginger Rogers to the circus, wheedling Ernest Hemingway— offering to sell Harpo Marx a used car and James Cagney a used tractor, and explaining to restaurateur-to-the-stars Dave Chasen, step by step, how to smoke a turkey." These letters from a supreme editor tell in his own words the story of the fierce, lively man who launched the world's most prestigious magazine.


From the Hardcover edition.Amazon.com Review
"Don't waste your time and words on letters," Harold Ross cautioned morethan one writer. "You don't get paid for them." Happily, The NewYorker's founding editor and dreamer didn't follow his own advice, andnow--thanks to his biographer, Thomas Kunkel--we can share in Ross'srevealing, inspiring, and hilarious correspondence. The fizzing communiquéscollected in Letters from the Editor begin when he was a servicemanin France during World War I, and from the start his impulses were comedic.In April 1918, for example, a shell came a little too close for comfort:"My morale was shattered. I immediately retreated to a subway station andremained there for two hours. I then came up and consumed a whole bottle of'morale.'"

Ross liked to present himself as an unadorned, uneducated type, but fromthe moment he magicked up The New Yorker in 1924, it's clear that hewas far more. Nonetheless, as late as 1949 he declared, "I don't knowanything I've done for the human race, except possibly entertain a minutesegment of it from time to time, and I can't compare myself with Goethe,because I don't know what he did for the race, either." The above quotesshould give readers some notion of Ross's zinging mode, his sentencesgathering into an absurd or satirical finale. Here's another: In 1937, hetold E.B. White: "A gentleman from Montreal wrote in suggesting that yourlast piece be set to music. I suppose you got that letter. There was sometalk that I ought to write you a letter upon completion of ten yearsservice and I started a couple of times on it, my idea being to havethat set to music and sing it to you." And the paragraph only getsbetter from there--just take a look at page 120. In fact, Ross's dispatchesto White and White's wife, New Yorker editor Katharine White, areamong the book's most tantalizing as he wheedles, exclaims, scolds, andinvigorates.

Ross lived for his job, and gave endless support to his writers, artists,and editors. His letters to the likes of Fitzgerald, Thurber, RebeccaWest--not to mention the various Marx brothers--are graceful andunsycophantic. Yet he was no less solicitous to the obscure. In 1949 hecomplimented one Sally Benson on her "very good and trim story" beforeadmonishing her: "Twenty-six stories in the next twenty-six weeks is what Iexpect from you, young lady, and come to think of it no more suicidesduring that period. Our characters have been bumping themselves off sooften lately that our readers think they're reading OfficialDetective half the time."

Of course Letters from the Editor lets us in on far more than TheNew Yorker, but it is Ross's missives and memos to his staff andcontributors--and several more than acrimonious shots at his publisher andadvertising department--that are most intriguing. Here was an editor whowas concerned with every level of the magazine: he kept a card catalogwith story ideas but was equally obsessed with language, commas, typos, andeven the vexed question of large or small capital letters. In this sense,Kunkel's collection is a sublime record of a lost era. Ross was a luckyvisionary, after all, who never concerned himself with target audiences,focus groups, or user testing. By his own lights, he and his colleagueswere not "'aware' of our readers. It's the other way around with me. All Iknow about getting out a magazine is to print what you think is good ... andlet nature take its course: if enough readers think as you do, you're a success,if not you're a failure. I don't think it's possible to edit a magazine by'doping out' your audience, and would never try to do that." Hmmm, couldHarold Ross have something there? --Kerry Fried ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Dinner with Ross.
This book should be read slowly, to get the flavor of the man, and there's a mouthful, as you'd expect. Several chews bit me. Ross writes like his writers, so much so that he could have written in any department of his magazine. He accepts people on their own terms and relates to them as they wish to be, a good approach for anyone, but salutary for someone in charge. His troubles are legion, and friends meant everything to him. And there's an aftertaste from Ross's reactions to articles that one has read--his note to Leibling on the essay about crossing the Atlantic in an oil tanker during WWII, and some bitter flavors, too--his attitudes toward women, blacks, and his publisher. All this is a taste treat for any who wants to savor American prose at its freshest, in company with those who prepared it. And it will leave you hungry for more.

Excellent
Ross is clearly revealed in his letters, as is much of the history of The New Yorker during his time.Greatly enjoyed this.

Engaging
An engaging look at the history of the New Yorker through the founder's own words.A peek into the process of publication of some of the most well-known writers.Famous writers' correspondance with a brutally honest Harold Ross. EXCELLENT!

Worth reading--because Ross is worth reading
Most of the text is Ross's; this is what makes the book worth 4 stars.

Some of the explanatory comments are pretty clumsy:

"Married to Fleischmann's ex-wife, Ruth, a major New Yorker stockholder, Vischer played a strong behind-the-scenes role at the magazine and was trying to keep Ross from quitting."(p. 271)

Would a sentence like that have ever made the pages of the New Yorker?

I can't comment on the selection of letters with any authority, but it's at least adequate: Truman Capote progresses from someone who, in September 1944, "wouldn't have been employed here [even] as [an office boy] probably, if it hadn't been for the man- and boy-power shortage" (Capote had insulted Robert Frost by walking out on poetry reading) to somone whose stories Ross would like to see more of, if they "aren't too psychopathic" in July 1949.

Alive in His Letters
These letters were my companion as I read "Genius in Disguise", Kunkel's wonderful biography of Harold Ross. The biography tells the story of Ross and his founding and development of The New Yorker. These letters bring Ross to life and convey the personality that spotted and nurtured the talent that made the magazine great. Here's a quick letter to John Cheever in 1947, which gives a little flavor of the man:

"Dear Cheever:
I've just read "The Enormous Radio," having gone away for a spell and got behind, and I send my respects and admiration. The piece is worth coming back to work for. It will turn out to be a memorable one, or I am a fish. Very wonderful, indeed."
As ever,
Ross ... Read more

Product Description
Like jazz and baseball, cartoons are an indelible, indigenous part of American culture. Cartoon America celebrates 250 years of American cartooning with an unprecedented selection of original art by the best, most accomplished creators in the history of comics illustration, including Thomas Nast, Charles Schulz, Winsor McCay, Jules Feiffer, and many, many others. With accompanying essays written exclusively for this volume by such luminaries as John Updike, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware, the book includes many firsts, earliests, and one-of-a-kinds, including cells from classic animated films, vintage editorial cartoons, newspaper strips, comic books, and much more. Published in conjunction with the Library of Congress’s landmark exhibition of original art from the collection of cartoonist J. Arthur Wood, Jr., this is a treasure trove for the comics and cartoon enthusiast and an authoritative survey of this distinctly American art form. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Every cartoon tells a story
A fascinating sampling of the cartoon artifacts in the Library of Congress.Clearly this is not meant to be a two hundred year comprehensive history of this popular art form though the book's editor Harry Katz kicks things off with his chapter: A Brief History of American Cartooning.The rest of the colorful pages are essentially based round the original artwork the Library holds and I was surprised by how much they have, like the 1871 woodblocks used by Thomas Nast for his Harper's Weekly illustrations, a Sunday supplement page of George Herriman's Krazy Kat from 1941 or a Herblock syndicated political cartoon from 1998.In fact the Library has one of the world's largest collections of cartoon and caricature original art which it has been acquiring since about 1840.A recent acquisition was the Art Wood collection of 32,00 originals by 3,000 artists, he also contributed a chapter to the book.

One of the main strengths of the book are chapters from the thirty-five contributors, a rich selection of professions like David Levine on caricatures, Art Spiegelman on the Lionel Feininger's Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie's World, Trina Robbins on Rose O'Neill and Nell Brinkley, Paul Conrad on Herblock or John Canemaker on animation art in the Library collection.Each contributor's essay is backed up with reproductions of original art or printed pages.

As a sampling of American cartoon art I thought this was a fascinating look at the subject (though a bit disappointing that there is no bibliography for further study) and handsomely presented, too.My compliments to designer Laura Lindgren for presenting so much visual material in a very sympathetic way.

It's worth remembering that all the wonderful American art in this book is held by the Library of Congress for the benefit of everyone and if you can't make it to Washington their popular website means it is only a click away.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

Very attractive book
First, I want to comment on Englund's review, which I think is too harsh.This book is about CARTOONS.The sub-title which includes the word "comic" is indeed misleading.This book is not about comic books, it's about cartoons, mostly political but also gag cartoons and comic strips.There is one short chapter on animation (and I agree that it's out of place), and one short chapter on comic books (ditto), but the other 36 chapters are interesting, and the drawings are very attractive and representative of the art.Anything from the Yellow Kid and Blondie, through Clare Briggs, Charles Scultz, and James Thurber, to Jeff MacNelly and Herblock.If you like cartoons, if you like the art, it's a great book to read and browse, and it will be a great book 20 years from now just as well.

Another Book That Fails to Do Justice to the Comic Genre
What a disappointment ! ! ! With all the books published over the past fifty years on comic art in general, one would would expect more useful reference material to exist on the subject.Other than the publications of Brian Walker, Bill Blackbeard, Richard Marchall, and precious few others, most authors and editors, including those who produced this volume, fail to understand that not all art that is described by the terms comic and cartoon appeals to the same audience and thatthese various art forms are not all appropriately discussed in the same book.As an inevitable result we get books which do not fulfill the expectations of those interested in any of the loosely related fields.

Comic strip art and comic book art are closely related -- the initial and constant appeal of both lie in the existence of continuing characters who develope over time, thereby becoming small parts of the lives of the readers.Animation art can be similarly ingrained into the viewer's psyche, as the films that are the ultimate product of such art are viewed and reviewed over the course of many years.But it is hard to do justice to both comic stiip/book art and animation art in the same book, given the very different manners by which the two forms of art are produced.Political cartoons are even less compatible with discussions of comic strip/book art, since they serve a very different purpose and are intended for a markedly different audience.Very few comic strip or comic book fans have more than a passing interest in political cartoons.

Few readers seeing the title "Cartoon America" would expect a volume wherein at least half the text and illustrations deal with political cartoons.Aside from the reproduction of some important comic strip originals, this book will probably fall short of almost everyone's expectations.The animation and comic book chapters are particularly weak, not because of the commentary but because the examples of such art in the Library of Congress (specifically the Art Wood collection) are not at all distinguished.Even the chapters devoted to comic strip art are somewhat disappointing.It is becoming increasingly apparent that the vaunted Wood Collection was neither as broad nor as deep as most people assumed and that a large number of the thousands of items in that collection consisted of political cartoons, not comic art.Perhaps the collection would have appeared more impressive if it had been presented through serparate books on the various subjects. It is too bad that we have been given just another in a long line of books that fail to do justice to any of the art forms because they are lumped together in what is an inherently inapropriate mix.

Craig Englund

Cartoon America:Comic Art in the Library of Congress
I'm sure this is a great book, but I could read neither the mouseprint text nor see much of the cartoons. The unwieldy size made a manifier hard to use so I gave up and dumped it at the library.

Aiming High
This is a handsome book, covering the entire history of our country as seen by the critics with the least restraints - the political cartoonists and the comic strip cartoonists. It aims to be comprehensive, and it is, and it includes some wondeful text by people who have spent their lives in the field.

Buy it for your coffee table, but read it before you put it there. ... Read more

Product Description
"Public Libraries in the 21st Century" presents a comprehensive analysis of the impact of recent policy initiatives directly targeted at public libraries along with broader developments in the public sector environment within which they operate. The book provides a unique and thorough guide to the contemporary discourses surrounding issues of identity, social purpose, value and strategy facing the public library service. ... Read more

Product Description
Rough News--Daring Views: 1950s’Pioneer Gay Press Journalism is a collection of the most challenging and wide-ranging essays on gay life--its political, social, religious, and historical aspects--to appear in the pioneer gay press in America. Jim Kepner's contributions to ONE Magazine, the Mattachine Review, ONE Institute Quarterly of Homophile Studies, ONE Confidential, and other publications, at a time when to produce or possess any such material was judged illegal and subversive, are invaluable to students of gay history, homosexuality and the law, and religious and biological arguments on the subject, as well as for analysts of the progress and goals of the gay liberation movement. It is also a popular reader for gays, researchers, teachers, and journalism students interested in the almost overlooked history of the gay and lesbian movement before Stonewall.

The importance of Jim Kepner's contributions to the 1950s’gay press cannot be overstated. In the author's words, “I shed the apologetic attitudes, explored the meaning of gayness, looked at various social and legal aspects of gay life, and critically analyzed the homophobic views of many psychotherapists, theologians, and others, exploring our history and literature, and covering then-current witch-hunts against gays and discussing how we could define and advance our cause. My articles covered . . . a wide range of gay concerns, generally moving well ahead of the timid or homophobic thinking of most gays at the time (though, as shown here, my own ideas also had some evolving to do).” In Rough News--Daring Views, you'll uncover revolutionary articles and reports on:

• the first detailed refutation of claims by a psychotherapist that all exclusive homosexuals were neurotic and could be cured
• the first American outline for a class on Homosexual Sociology
• the first exploration in the American gay press of the question of Whitman's homosexuality
• accounts of the new thinking by British churchmen about homosexuality, morality, and the law, and an overview of religion and homosexuality
• accounts of legal battles and a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court
• anecdotal explorations of the gay beach, the single life, and gays lonely at Christmas time
• explorations of the biological evidence of homosexuality
• the early progress of the gay and lesbian (then referred to as “homophile”) movement
• an account of the 1907-1909 trials on homosexual charges of intimate friends of Kaiser Wilhelm II that effectively removed moderates from the German Imperial government and set Germany on the disastrous road to World War and Nazism
  
  Kepner's writings from the pioneer gay press in America will help gays today understand where they came from, how they thought about themselves five decades ago, how society treated them, and how gays began to reject the definitions put on them by authorities, and begin the process of redefining gays and their place in the world.

Customer Reviews (2)

Eyewitness to the Revolution
Jim Kepner was one of that group of Pioneers in the gay rights movement, including Harry Hay, Dorr Legg and others, centered in Los Angeles, who helped raise the consciousness of the community and paved the way for the Stonewall Rebellion. He singlehandedly amassed the amazing collection that became the International Gay and Lesbian Archive, currently housed at USC. This book is a collection of his writing, starting in the early 50's, for the Mattachine Review, One Magazine, the One Institute Quarterly Review and other such publications. He comments on events and people of the time, and discusses the issues relating to homosexual people and their position in U.S. society. He wrote in an engaging, literate, intelligent style, and these articles together will give you some idea what the world was like for gay people 50 years ago. For devotees of our history within the larger frame of American history, this is an invaluable collection, a window on our past.

Prescient 1950's gay journalism.
The late Jim Kepner both capsulizes and comments on the news of interest to gays (mostly) and lesbians during the 1950's.He was not only a clear writer, but he also anticipated most of the best arguments that have beenput forward since for tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality as natural.A good reminder that gay activism didn't just start with Stonewall. ... Read more

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Product Description
One of the most gifted and influential American journalists of the 20th century, A. J. Liebling spent five years reporting the dramatic events and myriad individual stories of World War II. As a correspondent for The New Yorker, Liebling wrote with a passionate commitment to Allied victory, an unfailing attention to telling details, and an appreciation for the literary challenges presented by the “discursive, centrifugal, both repetitive and disparate” nature of war. This volume brings together three books along with 26 uncollected New Yorker pieces and two excerpts from The Republic of Silence (1947), Liebling’s collection of writing from the French Resistance.

The Road Back to Paris (1944) narrates Liebling’s experiences from September 1939 to March 1943, including his shock at the fall of France and dismay at isolationist indifference in the United States; it contains classic accounts of a winter voyage on a Norwegian tanker during the Battle of the Atlantic, visits to front-line airfields in North Africa, and the defeat of a veteran panzer division by American troops in Tunisia. Mollie and Other War Pieces (1964) brings together Liebling’s portrait of a legendary nonconformist American soldier in North Africa with his eyewitness account of Omaha Beach on D-Day, evocative reports from Normandy, and investigation of a German atrocity in rural France.In Normandy Revisited (1958) Liebling writes about his return to France in 1955 and recalls the joyous liberation of his beloved Paris while exploring with bittersweet perception how wartime experience is transformed into memory. The selection of uncollected New Yorker pieces includes a profile of an RAF ace, surveys of the French underground press, and an encounter with a captured collaborator in Brittany, as well as postwar reflections on battle fatigue, Ernie Pyle, and the writing of military history.

With maps and chronology. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Man, Liebling is so good, he could write an exciting cookbook.
It's called 'Between Meals' and it's going to be included in the follow-up volume by Library of America due March 19, 2009. But you've got to get this volume too, as a taste of what's to come. Really, you're going to want to have everything Mr. Liebling wrote after you've read his reporting on D Day. And with the inclusion of out-of-print material that's proposed to be in the next volume, you will finally be able to.

War Stories with a Twist
Extraordinary recounting of this fine writer's experiences as a war correspondent in WW II.A wonderful companion that frequently remindsus that our lives today, while plagued with difficulties, are no more challenged than those who have gone before us. This book entertains, informs, and ultimately instructs in the most subtle ways ... as good memoirs and histories should.

Liebling is the best. Period.
It's ironic that you have to track this book down in Amazon.comA search under his name earlier today yielded nothing.A.J. Liebling is one of the great American non-fiction writers.PeriodBuy all you can and read all you can.

Really, really good. Really.
Jeffrey from Ohio's review is pretty much right. This collection is outstanding.

The Road Back to Paris, the first book in the collection, is one of the two or three best WWII books ever written and, notably, it covers a part of the war very rarely covered anymore. The writing is simply some of the best English-language writing there is.

As others have mentioned, there is a lot in this collection. Roughly equivalent to four books, I would say. But Liebling is such a compelling writer that I always wanted to get back to reading it.

I read a lot of books and haven't been this pleasantly surprised since Joan Didion's "The White Album." I can't recommend it too highly, for WWII buffs or anyone who likes good writing.

If you love good writing, global politics, human interest, or WWII . . .
Sorry, i haven't even finished this yet, and it will be a while (there's soooo much in this book), but i had to post a review to say this is worth purchasing.If you write for a living, are interested in writing; if you want to know how wars start, proceed, and are conducted; if you wonder what it was like to be a correspondent on a B-26 over France or in a LCI at Normandy or be lost in Tunisia; if you like reading at all, you want to get this book.

The section describing life in France between Hitler's invasion of Poland and the surrender of the Petain government (soon to be Vichy) opens up a whole area that is usually left to a footnote, but explains aspects of modern life in Europe today.Over and over there are sections like that.The pieces are mostly long-form mag pieces, so there's meat, but it is easy to read over a long period, piecemeal.

Buy, buy, buy, buy this book. ... Read more

Product Description
The first major historical study of the origins,production and social impact of newspaper journalism in Wales. This isthe first major study of the newspaper press in Wales. Spanning twocenturies, and the press of two languages, the book explores changesin the organisation of journalism, the printing industry anddistribution methods. It examines diverse forms of ownership and thepatronage of the press by political and religious movements, placingthe newspaper in its broader cultural contexts. Finally, it considersthe legacies of the nineteenth century press for the twentieth, inparticular its relationship with the newer media of radio andtelevision. ... Read more

Product Description
When Gourmet magazine debuted in the 1940s, America’s wineries were still reeling from the lingering effects of Prohibition and the loss of wines from war-torn Europe. But for every closed door, there was an open bottle: The bleak postwar years were actually a prelude to today’s unprecedented and widespread appreciation for the grape. New York Times bestselling author Ruth Reichl reread sixty-five years of wine articles in Gourmet to select the best for History in a Glass. The result is a rollicking tale of great meals, great walks, and wonderful drinks as Americans discover the pleasures of wine.

These marvelous essays were written by men and women who were not only on hand to witness wine’s boom but, in many cases, helped to foster the environment that made it thrive. The early days after World War II provided a great opportunity for James Beard and Frank Schoonmaker to reacquaint oenophiles with the joys of European wines. Through tireless dispatches from the Continent, they inspired American vintners to produce world-class wines on their own rich soil.

In subsequent pieces, an impressive, surprisingly diverse roster of writers revel in the sensual and emotional pleasures of wine: the legendary Gerald Asher reflects on the many faces of Chianti; Hillaire Belloc dispenses bits of wisdom by the glass to his niece on her wedding day; the science fiction titan Ray Bradbury rhapsodizes about the earthy pleasures of dandelion wine; Kate Colman explores the moral quandary surrounding a friend’s unintentionally generous gift of a rare Bordeaux; Hugh Johnson reports on Hungarian varieties during the height of Cold War tensions in the early 1970s; even Gourmet’s current spirits editor, James Rodewald, reminisces on the first time he fell in love–with a bottle of Pinot Noir.

With an Introduction by Ruth Reichl, and covering more than six decades of epicurean delights, History in a Glass is an astonishing celebration of all things good and grape. ... Read more