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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
Found Highways has commented on (16) products
All Hopped Up & Ready to Go Music from the Streets of New York 1927 77
by
Tony Fletcher
Found Highways
, March 12, 2010
This book is subtitled "Music from the Streets of New York," but it's a very entertaining history of American (including Latin American) pop music. If, like me, you don't care about the cult of New York City as much as postwar pop music, you'll still enjoy reading this book. My favorite parts were the times I didn't live through myself--jazz, bebop, the male black R&B groups, and the so-called girl groups. But it also covers blues masters like Leadbelly, Harlem jazz bands, Latin music, left-wing political folk music and its revival in the 1960s, and punk, glam, and rap. Tony Fletcher's history of pop music
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Have You Seen A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films
by
David Thomson
Found Highways
, January 03, 2010
It will probably take me a few years to read about every one of the thousand films David Thomson saw fit to talk about in this book. That's fine. Just like Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film, this book is wonderful for reference and browsing both. "Have You Seen . . .?" is definitely the best film book of the last ten years.
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How the Beatles Destroyed Rock N Roll An Alternative History of American Popular Music
by
Elijah Wald
Found Highways
, December 06, 2009
Hot jazz vs. sweet dance music. Elvis vs. Pat Boone. Duke Ellington vs. Paul Whiteman. As conductor Mitch Miller put it, music from Bach to schlock. The theme of this entertaining history of American popular music is that with change in the music business there was always continuity. Music critics might prefer certain artists or particular kinds of music, but the people enjoying the music had their own preferences. I started reading this book and couldn't put it down. I'm going to get Elijah Wald's other books on blues and popular music.
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View From The Bridge
by
Nicholas Meyer
Found Highways
, September 06, 2009
The View from the Bridge is the most interesting book about how movies get made I've ever read. Nicholas Meyer talks about the art and the commerce both, and shows how each influences the other. Even though Meyer makes it clear that making movies like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a business (he never would have gotten into what he at first considered ludicrous space opera if not for the money), he never once in this book uses the word “franchise.” His films are stories, and he wants audiences to relate to them as tales about real people, not as interchangeable portions of a video game. (As William Shatner said, even on Star Trek everyone is human.) Meyer characterizes himself as not a creator but a re-creator of stories. He's still making films about real people, like The Human Stain, based on a Philip Roth novel. I hope he gets to make his version of Don Quixote someday.
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Dangerous Games The Uses & Abuses of History
by
Margaret Macmillan
Found Highways
, July 26, 2009
History can be dangerous, kids! Don't try this at home. That is part of professional historian Margaret MacMillan's message in her short book of long essays. She explores what history is good for, and more interestingly, how it has been abused. Plenty of examples make this a compelling read -- she is opinionated and backs up her opinions with facts.
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Philosophy in the Twilight Zone
by
Carroll, No?l
Found Highways
, May 25, 2009
This Wiley-Blackwell book, Philosophy in The Twilight Zone, is more readable than many in other series linking philosophy to different areas of popular culture--film, TV, comics, science fiction, unnamed boy wizards. You'd think there isn't much left to say about the original 1960s Twilight Zone, and nothing interesting, but you'd be wrong. With a minimum of academic jargon the contributors analyze "the treachery of the commonplace" in a way that makes it as interesting as the the Twilight Zone stories were the first time you saw them.
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Revolution The Explosion Of World Cinema in the Sixties
by
Peter Cowie
Found Highways
, May 21, 2009
Peter Cowie's book Revolution!: The Explosion of World Cinema in the Sixties isn't just a history of the different European film trends that made up "cinema culture." Revolution! covers all the important directors and films of the French New Wave, Italian neo-realism, the English working-class cinema, Eastern European film, even independent American movies of the 1960s. (Any book that talks about John Frankenheimer's psychological horror film Seconds starring Rock Hudson has my approval.) This is an interesting book to read after (or before) Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris. Cowie's book explains a lot of what inspired the "New Hollywood" films of 1967--including Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and In the Heat of the Night.
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Love & Hisses The National Society of Film Critics Sound Off on the Hottest Movie Controversies
by
Peter Rainer
Found Highways
, April 14, 2009
This anthology of film criticism is much more interesting and informative than most single-author collections. I liked the way several of the authors made me rethink my evaluation of certain filmmakers. For instance, even though I still think David Lynch is a brilliant director, Armond White makes a good case that Lynch is motivated by a fearful prudishness as much as a clear vision of corruption. If you like Pauline Kael and David Thomson, you'll enjoy reading this.
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Shambling Towards Hiroshima
by
James Morrow
Found Highways
, March 28, 2009
What if it hadn't been the Atomic Age, but the Lizard Age instead? What if, during World War II, scientists and grade B movie makers had put their talents together to threaten the Japanese with destruction from the sea, from kaiju eiga monsters like Godzilla? Would biological monsters have been as terrifying as nuclear obliteration? Having inspired terror, would the creators of these monsters have felt the same guilt as the atomic scientists when remembering their victims? James Morrow's Shambling Towards Hiroshima is unique. Whether you're more interested in Robert Oppenheimer or James Whale, you won't be able to stop reading until the end, when you learn the monster's fate.
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Vertigo Years
by
Philipp Blom
Found Highways
, February 23, 2009
Philipp Blom's excellent social history, The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 covers politics, philosophy, architecture, art, music, opera, literature, film. It tells the stories of actors, kings, scientists, and murderers of both kinds (the psychopaths who killed one person at a time and political leaders who enslaved millions). It's the story of what George Bernard Shaw called “the New Man, demoralizing himself with a halfpenny newspaper,” someone who (according to Octave Mirbeau) “can no longer stand still . . . impatient to get going once he has arrived somewhere because it is not somewhere else. . .” But everyone who lived then wasn't like Shaw, in essence a person of the nineteenth century. There were artists (like Picasso and Matisse) and scientists (like Einstein, Curie, and Edison) who saw what benefits this new world of speed could bring to humanity if it were allowed to. The Vertigo Years asks: how would we have experienced the first fifteen years of the twentieth century if the rest of it (with Nazism, Stalinism, two world wars, and the atomic bomb) didn't haunt us from the future? The Vertigo Years is very readable history, not counterfactual fantasy, but it does prove what Emile Durkheim said: “Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imagination.”
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Shakespeare & Modern Culture
by
Marjorie Garber
Found Highways
, February 07, 2009
William Shakespeare: a playwright and philosopher who influenced Nietzsche and Sartre, but who was also a source for Kiss Me, Kate, and West Side Story. Shakespeare affected Freud's view of human psychology, but in a twist of time-travel he also inspired Sophocles. How is this possible? In this entertainingly written book (rare, for a serious study of Shakespeare's stories), Professor Marjorie Garber explains how Shakespeare's plays all âtake place in triple time: in the time they are set . . . the time when they are written . . . and the time when they are produced and performed, or read and interpreted.â We learn what poets as diverse as Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Cobain have made of Shakespeare, and how actresses as different as Peggy Ashcroft and Claire Danes have interpreted him. Professor Garber takes ten plays (The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Coriolanus, Macbeth, Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Henry V, Hamlet, and King Lear) and examines one aspect of human nature (such as Youth or Estrangement) in each. One of the most interesting topics to me was Garber's chapter on the play MacBird, by Barbara Garson, produced in 1964 and set in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. MacBird is a serious political drama, but it shares a form with a science fiction musical I saw in Sydney, Australia, in the early 1990s, Return to the Forbidden Planet. (âShakespeare's forgotten rock and roll masterpieceâ won the Olivier Award for best musical in 1990, and I think Olivier, perhaps the 20th century's greatest Shakespearean actor and director, would have been pleased.) Each play (MacBird and Return to the Forbidden Planet) is derived from one of Shakespeare's plays (Macbeth and The Tempest), but MacBird and Return to the Forbidden Planet both use dialogue inspired by several of Shakespeare's other plays to carry their stories forward. When you watch these two plays you're on the edge of your seat trying to predict what famous soliloquy will come up next in the story. (I confess a partiality for the science fiction musical because it uses Motown era R&B hits like âGloriaâ in addition to iambic pentameter.) Like Shakespeare's own plays, the modern work that steals from him (let's quit using words like âinspiredâ) can be serious or funny, political or personal. I guarantee that if you like to watch Shakespeare on the stage, you'll enjoy reading Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare and Modern Culture.
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Spellbound by Beauty Alfred Hitchcock & His Leading Ladies
by
Donald Spoto
Found Highways
, December 24, 2008
Since this book about Hitchcock's relationships with his female stars was written by someone who "was committed to the idea that he was history's greatest filmmaker," Hitchcock must have been a reprehensible character indeed. The obscene pranks Hitchcock played on the set and the more devious psychological games he played--almost always on women--don't detract from the artistry in the films, but Spoto isn't merely a apologist for a stunted man who never grew up: "[N]o artistic goal justifies cruelty or exploitation." The most intriguing thing I learned from Spellbound by Beauty was how the same collaborators behind the camera (writers, editors, production designers) were responsible for a "Hitchcock" picture, from his very first films in England. This is ironic, since Hitchcock is often considered the ultimate "auteur" filmmaker.
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I Talked with a Zombie: Interviews with 23 Veterans of Horror and Sci-Fi Films and Television
by
Tom Weaver
Found Highways
, December 08, 2008
I Talked with a Zombie: Interviews with 23 Veterans of Horror and Sci-Fi Films and Television, Tom Weaver's latest collection of interviews with B-movie filmmakers and actors, is one of his best. Among the actors Weaver interviewed: Lee Merriwether (Batman, 4D Man), Tandra Quinn (Mesa of Lost Women, The Neanderthal Man), Betta St. John (Tarzan and the Lost Safari, Corridors of Blood), Olive Sturgess (The Raven, Thriller), Robert Conrad (The Wild Wild West), James Darren (The Time Tunnel), Ron Harper (Planet of the Apes), William Reynolds (Cult of the Cobra, The Land Unknown, The Thing That Couldn't Die, The Twilight Zone, The FBI), and Frankie Thomas, Al Markim, and Jan Merlin (all stars of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet). Ann Carter was only six years old when she worked with stars Fredric March and Veronica Lake in I Married a Witch. Her most famous fantasy role was in The Curse of the Cat People, where Simone Simon played her “imaginary” friend, Irena, who said in the original Cat People: “I like the dark, it's friendly.” Jumping from the sixties to the seventies, actor Ron Harper talks about the TV version of Planet of the Apes, a continuation of the multi-film epic that Eric Greene dissects in his book, Planet of Apes as American Myth (McFarland Publishers), one of the best books on science fiction film I've read. If any movie series was ever a mirror held up to America, it's the Planet of the Apes films. One of the most interesting interviews is with actor Eric Braeden. Braeden was going by his original name, Hans Gudegast, when he starred on the TV series Rat Patrol in the sixties. Besides starring in Colossus: The Forbin Project, a classic of 1970s cult cinema, Braeden played a bloodless scientist in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, a film that was more than just a sequel in a profitable series, but was the movie that turned the Apes saga into a Sophoclean tragedy. In trying to prevent the future they fear, the humans bring it about. From cat people to giant tarantulas to space cadets. I Talked with a Zombie has it all. The dark is friendly.
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Death from the Skies These Are the Ways the World Will End
by
Philip Plait
Found Highways
, December 05, 2008
In Death from the Skies! These Are the Ways the World Will End . . ., Philip Plait starts small, then progresses to mega-disasters, showing that “the Universe is . . . trying to kill everybody.” He reminds us that the word “disaster” originally meant “bad star” to the Romans. The Romans may have meant it in an astrological sense, but many of the Ways the World Will End do come from stellar phenomena. The global extinction events Plait covers include: asteroid impacts, coronal mass ejections from the Sun, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts from exploding stars called “hypernovae,” black holes eating the Earth (the details of this scenario are really fascinating in a ghoulish way), and alien attack. This book also makes it clear how unimaginative recent disaster movies (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, War of the Worlds, Deep Impact, Armageddon) have been. The wave of end-of-the-world films we're about to endure (including an unnecessary remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still and who knows how many movies tied to the “Mayan Calendar” and the year 2012) doesn't promise much more originality. We love these scary stories, but as Plait asks, “What horror movie is still scary once the lights are on?”
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On Tarzan
by
Alex Vernon
Found Highways
, November 13, 2008
Civilization vs. nature. Literacy vs. instinct. Violence vs. pacifism. Animal vs. human. "[O]ur act of reading and later watching Tarzan has ruined us." Alex Vernon's study of the Tarzan in the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and in the movies (especially the movies with Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan) shows just how we've been ruined. Thanks to the greed of those who kept invading his world, Tarzan had to face the same temptations and struggles as "civilized" human beings, but without the social programming. This book covers everything from cult-film actress Acquanetta (Tarzan and the Leopard Woman) to Sigmund Freud (Totem and Taboo). And what about Jane and her relationship with her father?
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Fall Out The Unofficial & Unauthorised Guide to the Prisoner
by
Alan Stevens
Found Highways
, November 11, 2008
This is the perfect book for someone who wants to think about what is the best television series ever produced in the English language. The film critic David Thomson said that for fifty years two threats hung over us—nuclear war and television—and that television was more pernicious. I agree with him. But The Prisoner justifies the existence of television as an art form if nothing else does. This is the perfect book for someone who may have caught a couple episodes of The Prisoner and knows it's some kind of cult TV show. Each episode is analyzed in detail but without going into such length as to be boring (each story was only fifty minutes or so of commercial TV, after all). Along with synopses of the episodes, the book examines several themes developed during the course of the series—gender, reality, individuality, political theory, and more. This is also the perfect book for someone who's watched the entire series more than once and read every book about it they've come across. Besides talking about the stories, some of which have pretty obvious meanings, Stevens and Moore see new possibilities. Fall Out also discusses TV tie-in novels published in the late 1960s (Stevens and Moore find them less boring than I did), a four-part comic book series I thought was interesting (maybe because the story of Number Six and the Village was meant to be visual), and several unproduced TV scripts. Stevens and Moore also put The Prisoner in context of contemporary British and American TV series and Cold War fiction. Fall Out also looks at the show's literary influences (not just the obvious ones like Orwell). The reason this book is interesting is the reason the series The Prisoner is interesting. There are no final answers. Number One has more than one face and it's up to us to decide which, if any, is real. Be seeing you.
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