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  Cecil B DeMille's Hollywood

  Robert S. Birchard

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  A look at the wide-ranging work of the Golden Age genius who made The Ten Commandments and other blockbusters—and helped found the American film industry.  Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood is a detailed and definitive chronicle of the director’s screen work that changed the course of film history—and a fascinating look at how movies were actually made in Hollywood’s Golden Age. Drawing extensively on DeMille’s personal archives and other primary sources, Robert S. Birchard offers a revealing portrait of DeMille the filmmaker that goes behind studio gates and beyond DeMille’s legendary persona.   In his forty-five-year career DeMille’s box-office record was unsurpassed, and his swaggering style established the public image for movie directors. He had a profound impact on the way movies tell stories, and brought greater attention to the elements of decor, lighting, and cinematography. Best remembered today for screen spectacles such as The Ten Commandments and Samson and Delilah, DeMille also created Westerns, realistic “chamber dramas,” and a series of daring and highly influential social comedies—while setting the standard for Hollywood filmmakers and demanding absolute devotion to his creative vision from his writers, artists, actors, and technicians.   “Far and away the best film book published so far this year.” —National Board of Review

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  Fifty Fast Facts About Napoleon

  Middle Grade Guide

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  Short? Nope. French? Not exactly. There is a lot to discover about France's only emperor. Impress your teachers, students, friends and family with these Fifty Fast Facts about Napoloen. Support your studies with stories that are sure to amaze. Teachers, Fifty Fast Facts gives you easy-to-follow, curriculum-based facts covering what you really need to know to write your next paragraph, project, unit test, or essay for Social Studies, Humanities, History, or English class. These Fifty Fast Facts link up to the core curriculum and include categories like critical thinking, perspective-taking, and the social, political, and economic impact of world events. With sample paragraphs, timelines, a bibliography, and quick quizzes to test your knowledge, you're sure to ace your next assignment using these Fifty Fast Facts. 
    
  Fifty Fast Facts are produced by Middle Grade Guide. Bringing together teachers, writers, researchers, and school administrators from all over the world, Middle Grade Guide brings a global perspective to education. Middle school is hard -- Middle Grade Guide makes it easier.

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  Wait for Me! - Memoirs

  Deborah Mitford Duchess of...

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  Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire, is the youngest of the famously witty brood that includes the writers Jessica and Nancy, who wrote when Deborah was born, "How disgusting of the poor darling to go and be a girl." Deborah's effervescent memoir  Wait for Me! chronicles her remarkable life, from an eccentric but happy childhood in the Oxfordshire countryside, to tea with Adolf Hitler and her controversially political sister Unity in 1937, to her marriage to the second son of the Duke of Devonshire. Her life would change utterly with his unexpected inheritance of the title and vast estates after the wartime death of his brother, who had married Kick Kennedy, the beloved sister of John F. Kennedy. Her friendship with that family would last through triumph and tragedy. With its intense warmth and charm, Wait for Me! is a unique portrait of an age and an unprecedented look at the rhythms of life inside one of the great aristocratic families of England. It is irresistible listening and will join the shelf of Mitford classics to delight audiences for years to come.

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  Sunrise on the Southbound...

  Michael Kerr

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  “An exceptionally well-chosen collection . . . the book itself amounts to a pleasurable journey . . . punctuated by pithy, profound anecdotal nuggets.” —Time Out 
   
  “Railway termini,” wrote E. M. Forster, “are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine.” 
   
  Now, in this new collection of great journeys from the pages of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, Michael Kerr follows up his bestselling anthology, Last Call for the Dining Car, with another feast for the armchair rail traveller. The train sliding out of the station can take you back into the past—in the company of John Betjeman on the Great Western—or into an ominous future, now that China has a line across the permafrost to Tibet. The sunshine may be the late-afternoon glow on a freight train between LA and Seattle, or the sea light bathing the Cornish coast alongside the branch line to St Ives. The adventure may even be dodging death on the train itself, as Dervla Murphy does on the antiquated rolling stock of Cuba. Sometimes, too, the train tracks people’s lives, on a journey into their deepest secrets. Nicholas Shakespeare, travelling around France, pieces together the story of what happened to his aunt, who was stranded there on the brink of war in 1937. Pamela Petro, rattling down the Pacific coast of the US, confronts the demons that have been haunting her since a train crash a quarter of a century ago. From Sandi Toksvig’s commuter train to Alexander McCall Smith’s night train; from the Indian Pacific to the Maharajas’ Express; Sunrise on the Southbound Sleeper is a first-class ticket to ride all the best trains in the world. 
   
  “Sublime . . . Michael Kerr has chosen some great writers, and they whisk you to the four corners of the earth. The romance and excitement of train travel is captured on each page. This is a treasure of travel writing.” —Patrick Neale, The Bookseller 
   
  “A serendipitous collection for rainy nights, fuelling sleep with dreams of escape.” —The Scotsman

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  Lou Harrison - American Musical...

  Brett Campbell, Bill Alves

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  A biography on the legendary gay American composer of contemporary classical music. 
   
  American composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003) is perhaps best known for challenging the traditional musical establishment along with his contemporaries and close colleagues: composers John Cage, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Leonard Bernstein; Living Theater founder, Judith Malina; and choreographer, Merce Cunningham. Today, musicians from Bang on a Can to Björk are indebted to the cultural hybrids Harrison pioneered half a century ago. His explorations of new tonalities at a time when the rest of the avant-garde considered such interests heretical set the stage for minimalism and musical post-modernism. His propulsive rhythms and ground-breaking use of percussion have inspired choreographers from Merce Cunningham to Mark Morris, and he is considered the godfather of the so-called “world music” phenomenon that has invigorated Western music with global sounds over the past two decades. 
   
  In this biography, authors Bill Alves and Brett Campbell trace Harrison’s life and career from the diverse streets of San Francisco, where he studied with music experimentalist Henry Cowell and Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, and where he discovered his love for all things non-traditional (Beat poetry, parties, and men); to the competitive performance industry in New York, where he subsequently launched his career as a composer, conducted Charles Ives’s Third Symphony at Carnegie Hall (winning the elder composer a Pulitzer Prize), and experienced a devastating mental breakdown; to the experimental arts institution of Black Mountain College where he was involved in the first “happenings” with Cage, Cunningham, and others; and finally, back to California, where he would become a strong voice in human rights and environmental campaigns and compose some of the most eclectic pieces of his career. 
   
  “Lou Harrison’s avuncular personality and tuneful music coaxed affectionate regard from all who knew him, and that affection is evident on every page of Alves and Campbell’s new biography. Eminently readable, it puts Harrison at the center of American music: he knew everyone important and was in touch with everybody, from mentors like Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Ives and Harry Partch and Virgil Thomson to peers like John Cage to students like Janice Giteck and Paul Dresher. He was larger than life in person, and now he is larger than life in history as well.” —Kyle Gann, author of Charles Ives’s Concord: Essays After a Sonata

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  The Woman's Prize or the Tamer...

  John Fletcher

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  John Fletcher's comedy (probably written and performed around 1611) is a sequel to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, in which, as the title suggests, the tamer will be tamed. Petruchio, the shrew-tamer, has been widowed, and marries a second wife, Maria, a "chaste witty lady." At the instigation of her cousin Bianca, and with the fellowship of her sister Livia, Maria decides to go on strike for equal rights, refusing to behave as a proper 17th century wife.  Fletcher's play addresses the issue of men and women's roles within marriage, a controversial issue for his day. (Summary by Elizabeth Klett) 
   
  CastNarrator/Bianca: Elizabeth KlettMoroso: Leonard WilsonTranio: mbSophocles: DublinGothicJaques: Cliff ThompsonRowland: Libby GohnLivia: Charlotte DuckettMaria: Arielle LipshawPetruchio: Kevin GreenPetronius: Algy PugPedro: Timothy FergusonFirst Maid/Country Wife/Doctor: Caprisha PageSecond Maid/City Wife/Second Watch: Amanda FridayThird Maid/First Watch/Servant: Grace GarrettAudio edited by Elizabeth Klett

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