The immediacy and perceived truth of the visual image, as well as film and television's ability to propel viewers back into the past, place the genre of the historical film in a special category. War films--including antiwar films--have established the prevailing public image of war in the twentieth century. For American audiences, the dominant image of trench warfare in World War I has been provided by feature films such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory

One of the great American iconoclasts holds forth on politics, war, books and writers, and his personal life in a series of conversations—including his last published interview.During his long career Kurt Vonnegut won international praise for his novels, plays, and essays. In this new anthology of conversations with Vonnegut—which collects interviews from throughout his career—we learn much about what drove Vonnegut to write and how he viewed his w...

Originally published in 1962, The Silence on the Shore is considered by many critics to be Hugh Garners best, most ambitious novel. Truly, in the person of Grace Hill, the landlady of the Toronto rooming house where most of the books events take place, Garner has created a fictional character never to be forgotten. Grace is a middle-aged snoop and an overweight nudist whose sexual release comes from watching wrestling matches at a hockey arena that is a thinly disguised Maple Leaf...

To continue doing business in Germany, Hollywood studios agreed not to make films attacking Nazis or condemning persecution of Jews. Ben Urwand reveals this collaboration and the cast of characters it drew in, ranging from Goebbels to Louis B. Mayer. At the center was Hitler himself--obsessed with movies and their power to shape public opinion.

A "smart and fascinating" reassessment of postwar American culture and the politics of the 1960s from the author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture ( Reason Magazine).We tend to think of the sixties as an explosion of creative energy and freedom that arose in direct revolt against the social restraint and authoritarian hierarchy of the early Cold War years. Yet, as Fred Turner reveals in The Democratic Surround, the decades that brough...

The books altered the course of history; the lives behind them have the dark fascination of fiction.The subject of The Anti-Communist Manifestos is four influential books that informed the great political struggle known as the Cold War: Darkness at Noon (1940), by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian journalist and polymath intellectual; Out of the Night (1941), by Jan Valtin, a German sailor and labor agitator; I Chose Freedom (1946), b...

"This passionate, carefully researched, richly detailed, well-written study" reveals the political motives behind WWII Hollywood's portrayal of Poles ( Choice).During World War II, Hollywood studios supported the war effort by making patriotic movies designed to raise the nation's morale. Often the characterizations were as black and white as the movies themselves: Americans and their allies were heroes, while everyone else was a villain.The people...

The ability to view recorded moving pictures has had a major impact on human culture since the development of the necessary technologies over a century ago. For most of this time people have gone to the movies to be entertained and perhaps edified, but in the meantime television, the videocassette recorder (VCR), the digital versatile disk (DVD) player, the personal computer (desktop and laptop), the internet and other technologies have made watching moving pictures possible at home, in th...

Some say that telling the story of the Holocaust is impossible, yet, artists have told the story thousands of time since the end of World War II in novels, dramas, paintings, music, sculpture, and film. Over the past seven decades, hundreds of documentaries, narrative shorts and features, and television miniseries have confronted the horrors of the past, creating an easily recognized iconography of persecution and genocide. While it can be argued that film and television have a tendency to...

Mythologized as the era of the “good war” and the “Greatest Generation,” the 1940s are frequently understood as a more heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of dread, alienation, and the haunting specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They probed the darkness that the war opened up and confronted bigotry, exis...

Exiled In Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present by Anthony Heilbut (Second, 1997 revised edition; 173,000 words)The fascinating story of émigré intellectuals, writers, artists, scientists, movie directors, and scholars — including Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, George Grosz, Erik Erikson, Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang — who fled Nazi Germany and chan...

Most Holocaust scholars and survivors contend that the event was so catastrophic and unprecedented that it defies authentic representation in feature films. Yet it is precisely the extremity of "the Final Solution" and the issues it raised that have fueled the cinematic imagination since the end of World War II. Recognizing that movies reach a greater audience than eyewitness, historical, or literary accounts, Lawrence Baron argues that they mirror changing public perceptions of the Holoca...