On more than 300 pages the reader of Into the Dark most of all acquires one thing: a very strong visual impression of what film noir looked like. For the high-quality prints selected by Mark Vieira hold a powerful, dark beauty and tell of the fascination with film noir. Here is a good balance of […]
75 Years of DC Comics. The Art of Modern Mythmaking by Paul Levitz (2017)
Any superhero comic book fan will know about the previous three huge books celebrating the Golden Age, the Silver Age and the Bronze Age of DC Comics. Those three volumes, big as they are, were merely a small part of what the current new edition of 75 Years of DC Comics The Art of Modern […]
Alice in Transmedia Wonderland: Curiouser and Curiouser … by Anna Kerchy (2016)
There are many, many texts, societies, journals and studies that deal with nothing but Lewis Carroll‘s Alice stories. This one, however, researches how the original story (or its texts) has transformed into many other forms of media, virtually designing various forms of a “Transmedia Wonderland.” Anna Kérchy follows adaptations of the tales “across a variety […]
Vaudeville Melodies: Popular Musicians and Mass Entertainment in American Culture… by Nicholas Gebha
While in the last part of the 19th century so-called “high art,” opera, theater, classical music and the like were deemed “too good” for the average working audience, these forms of entertainment ended up being controlled by the elite in the US. Controlled namely by those who wanted to solidify their own standing by attending […]
The Jan & Dean Record by Mark A. Moore (2016)
Jan Berry, one half of the mid-sixties pop duo “Jan and Dean” (Torrence) possessed a very precious and rich talent for arranging pop tunes and producing records, a fact that too often has been overlooked, as the band was known for its surf sound and maybe songs about teenage activities firstly. Their competitors in this […]
Bill Clifton: America’s Bluegrass Ambassador to the World by Bill C. Malone (2016)
The careers of most classical bluegrass musicians in the US more or less resemble each other, except for a few details. The typical biography finds them raised essentially in poverty, born into a family of four or five children, equipped only with the most basic schooling and after some amateur nights in between shifts in […]
Cowboys and Gangsters: Stories of an Untamed Southwest by Samuel K. Dolan (2016)
While most American historical books concentrate on just one period of time, one group of individuals or precisely one cultural event in American history, in Cowboys and Gangsters, we encounter quite a gripping set of bygone and cultural crossroads. Author Samuel K. Dolan, a movie director, documentary writer and producer, tells of both the last […]
Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture by David Kaiser and W. Patrick Mc...
Even if today many fans (and critics) of the 1960s and 1970s and the “counterculture” hold the believe that this generation, and those involved in social change were mostly anti-scientific and anti-technology, this view of the era is largely wrong. We know for a fact that back then many alternative ways of coping with life, philosophy, […]
Vinyl Records and Analog Culture in the Digital Age: Pressing Matters by Paul E. Winters (2016)
Not just the die-hard fans and collectors of vinyl recordings will be interested in this new book by Paul E. Winters. Since actually the whole idea of conserving the products of popular culture (which includes recorded sound and music) is carefully examined here. This goes along with analysis of the marketing ideas and promises used […]