For over fifty years, the American Film Institute has flourished as one of America’s great cultural entities. Its graduates, faculty, supporters, and trustees have included such acclaimed individuals as Steven Spielberg, Maya Angelou, Gregory Peck, Meryl Streep, Les Moonves, Patty Jenkins, David Lynch, Jane Fonda, Edward James Olmos, Shonda Rhimes, James L. Brooks, Michael Nesmith, Sir Howard Stringer, and many other respected leaders in the worlds of film, television, digital media, and p...

An argument for putting sentiment aside and maximizing the practical impact of our donated dollars: "Powerful, provocative" (Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times).Peter Singer's books and ideas have been disturbing our complacency ever since the appearance of Animal Liberation. Now he directs our attention to a challenging new movement in which his own ideas have played a crucial role: effective altruism. Effective altruism is built upon the simpl...

A leading economist and researcher report from the front lines of a revolution in solving the world's most persistent problem.When it comes to global poverty, people are passionate and polarized. At one extreme: We just need to invest more resources. At the other: We've thrown billions down a sinkhole over the last fifty years and accomplished almost nothing.Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel present an entirely new approach that blazes an optimistic and realistic...

A new life running a high country sheep station in New Zealand. Christine Fernyhough is well known as a leading Auckland philanthropist, having set up Books in Homes and then the Gifted Kids Programme for high achieving children in low decile schools. In 2003 she was a recent widow when she spied an advertisement for the sale of the legendary Castle Hill Station, near Porters Heights in the Canterbury alps. A woman of energy and enterprise, she bought it and so began a ne...

Jim Clark shares his experiences as a highly successful film editor at a time when films were a true collaboration of talented individuals. The legendary "Doctor" Clark was the man who could make sick films healthy again. The role of editor in the collective collaborative process that is the making of any film is massively important but not one that is generally recognized outside the small pond that is the filmmaking community. In this wonderfully enjoyable memoir this point becomes stead...

The veteran urban activist and author of the revolutionary Toxic Charity returns with a headline-making book that offers proven, results-oriented ideas for transforming our system of giving.In Toxic Charity, Robert D. Lupton revealed the truth about modern charity programs meant to help the poor and disenfranchised. While charity makes donors feel better, he argued, it often hurts those it seeks to help. At the forefront of this burgeoning yet ineffective compassi...

Among the greatest challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century is that of sustaining a healthy civil society, which depends upon managing the tension between individual and collective interests. Bruce R. Sievers explores this issue by investigating ways to balance the public and private sides of modern life in a manner that allows realization of the ideal of individual freedom and, at the same time, makes possible the effective pursuit of the common good. He traces the developme...

A leading investment professional explains the world of impact investing -- investing in businesses and projects with a social and financial return--and shows what it takes to make sustainable, transformative change.Impact investment -- the support of social and environmental projects with a financial return -- has become a hot topic on the global stage; poised to eclipse traditional aid by ten times in the next decade. But the field is at a tipping point: Will imp...

Jim Jarmusch: Music, Words and Noise is the first book to examine the films of Jim Jarmusch from a sound-oriented perspective. Exploring the director’s extensive filmography, including Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Down By Law (1986), Dead Man (1995) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Sara Piazza identifies the three essential acoustic elements that structure film: music, words and noise. Through this unique reading, she reveals how Jarmusch cr...

"We watch what is moving fast from a platform that is also moving fast," writes Geoffrey O'Brien in the beginning of Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows. This collection—gathering the best of a decade's worth of writing on film by one of our most bracing and imaginative critics—ranges freely over the past, present, and future of the movies, from the primal visual poetry of the silent era to the dizzying permutations of the merging digital age.Here are 38 searching essays on c...

A comprehensive history of film lighting, from its earliest origins to the heyday of Hollywood dominance - and beyond. This is a book about the art of lighting, "the relevance of pictures, and the responsibility of all those who take pictures of the world and show them". In an age of constant digital snapshots, with their mercilessly artless recording of everything around us, the award-winning director and scriptwriter Richard Blank makes a compelling case for this increasingly neglected a...

Bringing together an expansive range of writing by scholars, critics, historians, and filmmakers, The Documentary Film Reader presents an international perspective on the most significant developments and debates from several decades of critical writing about documentary. Each of the book's seven sections covers a distinct period in the history of documentary, collecting both contemporary and retrospective views of filmmaking in the era. And each section is prefaced by an introduc...