Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend, by Graham Russell Gao Hodges Anna May Wong was the first internationally acclaimed Asian American actor, with a career that spanned decades, from 1919 to 1961, and Hodges’ biography is a meticulously researched and carefully constructed account of one of early […]
Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend, by Graham Russell Gao Hodges Don’t be misled by the tabloid nature of the title. Hodges’ biography is a meticulously researched and carefully constructed account of one of early cinema’s most notable icons. You could be forgiven for not knowing the […]
Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend, by Graham Russell Gao Hodges Don’t be misled by the tabloid nature of the title. Hodges’ biography is a meticulously researched and carefully constructed account of one of early cinema’s most notable icons. You could be forgiven for not knowing the […]
A Definitive study of Alfred Hitchcock, by Francois Truffaut (trans. by Helen Scott). Before he began directing, Francois Truffaut was a film critic, and before that, a voracious viewer of films. The director’s habit of movie-going reportedly began at the age of eleven, and coincided with his habit of skipping […]
Out of the Shadow of Leprosy: The Carville Letters and Stories of the Landry Family Claire Manes University Press of Mississippi ISBN: 978-161703-776-4 Few people these days give much thought to leprosy. True, it’s a rare disease – only 150-250 documented new cases in the U.S. each year. It’s very […]
Everything is Perfect When You’re a Liar Kelly Oxford itbooks – an imprint of HarperCollins ISBN: 978-0-06-210222-5 In this humorous memoir, comedienne Kelly Oxford writes chapter-long anecdotes from her own life, starting when she was six years old and attempted to direct the neighborhood kids in a Star Wars theater […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.