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History & Criticism eBooks

If you like History & Criticism eBooks, then you'll love these top picks.
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  • Oscar Wars

    A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears

    The author of the New York Times bestseller Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep returns with a lively history of the Academy Awards, focusing on the brutal battles, the starry rivalries, and the colorful behind-the-scenes drama.America does not have royalty. It has the Academy Awards. For nine decades, perfectly coiffed starlets, debonair leading men, and producers with gold in their eyes have chased ... Read more

    $14.99 USD

  • The Secret Life of Puppets

    In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we’ve never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science.In a backward ... Read more

    $27.99 USD

  • Baseball: The Movie

    by Noah Gittell ...
    "Finally, someone takes baseball movies seriously! Baseball: The Movie blends the passion of a fan with the rigorous analysis of a film critic to create a persuasive argument that the baseball movie matters—to baseball, to Hollywood, even to America."—Ben Mankiewicz, host, Turner Classic MoviesFeaturing Field of Dreams, The Bad News Bears, A League of Their Own, and more: a probing and ... Read more

    Was $15.99 USD Now $1.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • Ghibliotheque

    The Unofficial Guide to the Movies of Studio Ghibli

    Revised and updated - includes Miyazaki's new masterpiece, The Boy and the Heron.Explore the films of magical Japanese animation masters Studio Ghibli in this film-by-film celebration for newcomers and long-time fans alike.Ghibliotheque reviews each Studio Ghibli movie in turn, in the voice of expert and newcomer. The lively text delves into production details, themes, key scenes and general ... Read more

    Was $11.99 USD Now $2.99 USD

  • The Best Old Movies for Families

    A Guide to Watching Together

    by Ty Burr ...
    If a child can watch Barney, can’t that same child also enjoy watching Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers? And as they get older, wouldn’t they grow to like screwball comedies (His Girl Friday), women’s weepies (Imitation of Life), and westerns (The Searchers)? The answer is that they’ll follow because they’ll have learned that “old” does not necessarily mean “next channel, please.”Here is an ... Read more

    $5.99 USD

  • Hollywood Enigma

    Dana Andrews

    by Carl Rollyson ...
    Series series Hollywood Legend Series
    Dana Andrews (1909-1992) worked with distinguished directors such as John Ford, Lewis Milestone, Otto Preminger, Fritz Lang, William Wyler, William A. Wellman, Mervyn Le Roy, Jean Renoir, and Elia Kazan. He played romantic leads alongside the great beauties of the modern screen, including Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Greer Garson, Merle Oberon, Linda Darnell, Susan Hayward, Maureen O'Hara, and ... Read more

    $25.99 USD

  • The Big Goodbye

    Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

    by Sam Wasson ...
    From the New York Times bestselling author of Fifth Avenue, Five A.M. and Fosse comes the revelatory account of the making of a modern American masterpieceChinatown is the Holy Grail of 1970s cinema. Its twist ending is the most notorious in American film and its closing line of dialogue the most haunting. Here for the first time is the incredible true story of its making.In Sam Wasson's telling, ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club

    by Anna Kornbluh ...
    Series series Film Theory in Practice
    Anna Kornbluh provides an overview of Marxist approaches to film, with particular attention to three central concepts in Marxist theory in general that have special bearing on film: “the mode of production,” “ideology,” and “mediation.” In explaining how these concepts operate and how they have been used and misused in film studies, the volume employs a case study to exemplify the practice of ... Read more

    $22.99 USD

  • Becoming Nick and Nora

    The Thin Man and the Films of William Powell and Myrna Loy

    by Rob Kozlowski ...
    As Nick and Nora Charles in the six Thin Man movies from 1934 to 1947, the team of William Powell and Myrna Loy showed that marriage didn’t have to mean the end of the romantic comedy. From the comedic delight that was the initial The Thin Man through its five sequels as well as eight other films (including the Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld and Manhattan Melodrama), Powell and Loy were cemented ... Read more

    $20.99 USD

  • Age of Cage

    Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career

    by Keith Phipps ...
    An NPR "Books We Love" 2022“Age of Cage might be the closest we will get to understanding the singular beauty of each of Nic Cage’s always electric performances. You are holding the Rosetta Stone for Cage. Enjoy it.”***—***Paul Scheer, actor, writer and host of the How Did This Get Made? and Unspooled podcastsIcon. Celebrity. Artist. Madman. Genius.Nicolas Cage is many thin... ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • Orson Welles's Last Movie

    The Making of The Other Side of the Wind

    by Josh Karp ...
    Journalist Josh Karp shines a spotlight on the making of The Other Side of the Wind—the final unfinished film from the auteur of Citizen Kane in Orson Welles’s Last Movie, the basis of Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville’s Netflix Original Documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.In the summer of 1970, legendary but self-destructive director Orson Welles returned to Hollywood from years of ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Mae West

    An Icon in Black and White

    by Jill Watts ...
    "Why don't you come up and see me sometime?" Mae West invited and promptly captured the imagination of generations. Even today, years after her death, the actress and author is still regarded as the pop archetype of sexual wantonness and ribald humor. But who was this saucy starlet, a woman who was controversial enough to be jailed, pursued by film censors and banned from the airwaves for the ... Read more

    Was $41.99 USD Now $26.99 USD

  • Alfred Hitchcock

    by Peter Ackroyd ...
    Alfred Hitchcock rigorously controlled his public image, drawing certain carefully selected childhood anecdotes into full focus and blurring out all others. In this gripping short biography, Peter Ackroyd wrests the director’s chair back from the master of control to reveal a lugubriously jolly man fond of practical jokes, who smashed a once-used tea cup every morning to remind himself of the ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • Godzilla on My Mind

    Fifty Years of the King of Monsters

    “A stellar book; an entertaining and vivid look at Japanese pop culture, its globalization, and American encounters with Japan.” —Theodore C. Bestor, author of Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the WorldEver since Godzilla (or, Gojira, as he is known in Japan) crawled out of his radioactive birthplace to cut a swath of destruction through Tokyo, he has claimed a place alongside King Kong ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • The Disaster Artist

    My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

    Series series A Gift for Film Buffs
    **New York Times bestseller—**now a major motion picture directed by and starring James Franco!From the actor who somehow lived through it all, a “sharply detailed…funny book about a cinematic comedy of errors” (The New York Times): the making of the cult film phenomenon The Room.In 2003, an independent film called The Room—starring and written, produced, and directed by a mysteriously wealthy ... Read more

    $23.99 USD

  • Surely You Can't Be Serious

    The True Story of Airplane!

    **NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COMEDY BOOKS OF 2023 AT VULTURESurely You Can't Be Serious is an in-depth and hysterical look at the making of 1980's comedy classic Airplane! by the legendary writers and directors of the hit film.**Airplane! premiered on July 2nd, 1980. With a budget of $3.5 million it went on to make nearly $200 million in sales and has influenced a multitude of comedians on both sides ... Read more

    $16.99 USD

  • Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled

    Series series Film Theory in Practice
    The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of film theory with interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. The third book in the series, Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled, offers a concise introduction to Critical Race Theory in jargon-free ... Read more

    $23.99 USD

  • What Happens Next

    A History of American Screenwriting

    by Marc Norman ...
    Screenwriters have always been viewed as Hollywood’s stepchildren. Silent-film comedy pioneer Mack Sennett forbade his screenwriters from writing anything down, for fear they’d get inflated ideas about themselves as creative artists. The great midcentury director John Ford was known to answer studio executives’ complaints that he was behind schedule by tearing a handful of random pages from his ... Read more

    $6.99 USD

  • Below the Stars

    How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production

    Despite their considerable presence in Hollywood, extras and working actors have received scant attention within film and media studies as significant contributors to the history of the industry. Looking not to the stars but to these supporting players in film, television, and, recently, streaming programming, Below the Stars highlights such actors as precarious laborers whose work as freelancers ... Read more

    $40.99 USD

  • Camp!

    The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World

    by Paul Baker ...
    By the bestselling author of Fabulosa! and Outrageous!, this reappraisal of camp across time and in all its glorious forms shows how this inescapable part of popular culture has also played an important role in equality movements as a form of protest or resistance.'The following things have seemed impossibly camp to me at one point or another: a doll whose body acts as a cover for a toilet roll, a ... Read more

    $12.95 USD

  • Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner

    Series series Film Theory in Practice
    Matthew Flisfeder introduces readers to key concepts in postmodern theory and demonstrates how it can be used for a critical interpretation and analysis of Blade Runner, arguably 'the greatest science fiction film'. By contextualizing the film within the culture of late 20th and early 21st-century capitalism, Flisfeder provides a valuable guide for both students and scholars interested in learning ... Read more

    $23.99 USD

  • Kubrick

    An Odyssey

    The definitive biography of the creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange, presenting the most in-depth portrait yet of the groundbreaking film-maker.The enigmatic and elusive filmmaker Stanley Kubrick has not been treated to a full-length biography in over twenty years.Stanley Kubrick: An Odyssey fills that gap. This definitive book is based on access to the latest ... Read more

    $22.99 USD

  • C'mon, Get Happy

    The Making of Summer Stock

    In their third and final screen teaming, Judy Garland and Gene Kelly starred together in the MGM musical Summer Stock. Despite its riveting production history, charismatic lead actors, and classic musical moments, the movie has not received the same attention as other musicals from MGM’s storied dream factory. In C’mon, Get Happy: The Making of “Summer Stock,” authors David Fantle and Tom Johnson ... Read more

    $17.99 USD

  • The Kindness of Strangers

    A memoir about showbiz in the early 20th century that travels from the theaters of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, to Hollywood during the golden age, complete with encounters with Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, and Greta Garbo along the way.Salka Viertel’s autobiography tells of a brilliant, creative, and well-connected woman’s pilgrimage through the darkest years of the twentieth century, a journey ... Read more

    $11.99 USD