Politics Entertainment

Here is the epic human drama behind the making of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967 - Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Doctor Dolittle, and Bonnie and Clyde - and through them, the larger story of the cultural revolution that transformed Hollywood and America forever.

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives - to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives.

Acclaimed journalist Peter Doggett recounts the previously untold story of the dramatic final chapter in the lives, loves, and legal battles of John, Paul, George, and Ringo - a.k.a. The Beatles - from their breakup in 1969 to the present day. Called "refreshingly straightforward and highly readable" by the Daily Telegraph (London), You Never Give Me Your Money is the dramatic and intimate story of the breakup and aftermath of The Fab Four as it's never been told before.

If you read a standard history of magic, you learn that it begins in ancient Egypt with the resurrection of a goose in front of the Pharaoh. You discover how magicians were tortured and killed during the age of witchcraft. You are told how conjuring tricks were used to quell rebellious colonial natives. The history of magic is full of such stories, which turn out not to be true. Behind the smoke and mirrors, however, lies the real story of magic.

When musicians in the New York folk scene of the 1960s grew tired of city life, they decided to "get it together in the country". They headed for Woodstock - not to the site of the infamous music festival of 1969 but to the Catskills, to Bearsville, to Woodstock proper. Counterculture revolutionaries like Janis Joplin, Richie Havens, and Paul Butterfield got "back to the land", turning the once sleepy hollow into a funky Shangri-La.

Perhaps the most unconventional and literally breathtaking father-son story you'll ever read, My Friend Leonard pulls you immediately and deeply into a relationship as unusual as it is inspiring. The father figure is Leonard, the high-living, recovering coke addict, "West Coast Director of a large Italian-American finance firm" (read: mobster) who helped to keep James Frey clean in A Million Little Pieces.

When journalist Steve Lopez sees Nathaniel Ayers playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles' skid row, he finds it impossible to walk away. More than 30 years ago, Ayers was a promising classical bass student at Juilliard - ambitious, charming, and also one of the few African-Americans there - until he gradually lost his ability to function, overcome by schizophrenia.

Over time, the two men form a bond and Lopez imagines that he might be able to change Ayers' life. The Soloist is a beautifully told story of devotion in the face of seemingly unbeatable challenges.

Frank Sinatra. Dean Martin. Sammy Davis, Jr. Peter Lawford. Joey Bishop. They call themselves The Clan. But to an awed world, they are known as The Rat Pack. They had it all. Fame. Gorgeous women. A fabulous playground of a city and all the money in the world. The backing of fearsome crime lords and the blessing of the President of the United States. But the dark side - over the thin line between pleasure and debauchery, between swinging self-confidence and brutal arrogance - took its toll. In four years, their great ride was over, and showbiz was never the same.

Cuando El chavo del ocho se estrenó en los años 70, el programa ofrecía un retrato poco común de la vida de la clase trabajadora que resonó en la gente de toda América Latina. En el pico de su popularidad, 350 millones de personas lo sintonizaban cada semana. Y durante casi 50 años, el legado de “el chavo” se mantuvo vivo a través de una creciente base de fans multigeneracional y sus retransmisiones diarias. Hasta 2020, cuando El Chavo dejó de emitirse repentinamente.

In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out stars' sexual affairs, drug use, and sexuality, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the best-selling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Confidential's spectacular rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall.

The Ultimate History of the '80s Teen Movie goes behind the scenes of a genre where cult hits mingled with studio blockbusters, where giants like Spielberg and Coppola rubbed shoulders with baby-faced first-timers, and where future superstars Sean, Demi, and Tom all got their big break. Music, comedy, and politics all play a part in the surprisingly complex history of the '80s teen movie. And while the films might have been aimed primarily at adolescents, the best tackle universal issues and remain relevant to all ages.

With her disarming, intimate, completely accessible voice, and dry sense of humor, Nora Ephron shares with us her ups and downs in I Feel Bad About My Neck, a candid, hilarious look at women who are getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself.

Much has been written about the storied New Hollywood of the 1970s, but while Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola were making their first classic movies, a parallel universe of directors gave birth to the modern horror film - aggressive, raw, and utterly original. Based on unprecedented access to the genre's major players, New York Times critic Jason Zinoman's Shock Value delivers the first definitive account of horror's golden age.

In this fascinating analysis of how to listen to both contemporary and classical music analytically, eminent American composer Aaron Copland offers provocative suggestions that will bring listeners a deeper appreciation of the most viscerally rewarding of all art forms.

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.

In the 1970s, Paris fashion exploded like a champagne bottle left out in the sun. Amid sequins and longing, celebrities and aspirants flocked to the heart of chic, and Paris became a hothouse of revelry, intrigue, and searing ambition. At the center of it all were fashion’s most beloved luminaries - Yves Saint Laurent, the reclusive enfant terrible, and Karl Lagerfeld, the flamboyant freelancer with a talent for reinvention - and they divided Paris into two fabulous halves.

Movies matter—that is the message of Reel to Real, bell hooks' classic collection of essays on film. They matter on a personal level, providing us with unforgettable moments, even life-changing experiences, and they can confront us, too, with the most profound social issues of race, sex and class. Here bell hooks—one of America's most celebrated and thrilling cultural critics—talks back to films that have moved and provoked her, from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction to the work of Spike Lee.

The most compelling figures in the Warner Bros. story are the sagacious Mo Ostin and the unlikely crew of hippies, eccentrics, and enlightened execs who were the first in the music business to read the generational writing on the wall in the mid-1960s. By recruiting outsider artists and allowing them to make the music they wanted, Ostin and his staff transformed an out-of-touch company into the voice of a generation. Along the way, they revolutionized the music industry and, within just a few years, created the most successful record label in the history of the American music industry.

Stieg Larsson's best-selling Millennium Trilogy is an international phenomenon. These books express Larsson's lifelong war against injustice, his ethical beliefs, and his deep concern for women's rights. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy probes the compelling philosophical issues behind the entire trilogy. What philosophies do Lisbeth Salander and Kant have in common? To catch a criminal, can Lisbeth and Mikael be criminals themselves? Can revenge be ethical?

From prehistoric Mexico to modern Istanbul, Mary Beard looks beyond the familiar canon of Western imagery to explore the history of art, religion, and humanity. Conceived as an accompaniment to How Do We Look and The Eye of Faith, the famed Civilizations shows on PBS, renowned classicist Mary Beard has created this elegant volume on how we have looked at art.