Entertainment History

What if the most powerful lessons about leadership, innovation, and resilience didn’t come from business school—but from music? In 'What Music Teaches You About Everything', award-winning musician and keynote speaker Michael Kollwitz explores how a lifetime of creative work reveals universal principles for navigating challenge, change, and uncertainty. Drawing on decades of performing, problem-solving, and building a career around the unconventional Chapman Stick®, Michael shows how the habits of successful artists mirror those of effective leaders and innovators.

Drawing on Daphne du Maurier's short story and contemporary newspaper reports of bird attacks in California, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) featured Tippi Hedren in her first starring role. Camille Paglia's compelling study considers the film's aesthetic, technical and mythical qualities, and analyses its depiction of gender and family relations. A film about anxiety, sexual power and the violence of nature, it is quintessential Hitchcock.

Unearth a piece of music history with this definitive, no-holds-barred biography of John Entwistle, The Who's legendary bass guitarist. It is an unequivocal fact that in terms of rock bands, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who represent Year Zero, the beginning of all things...

This book is a comprehensive history of the most successful straight-to-video horror franchise of all time: Puppet Master. It provides an in-depth exploration of all 14 films to date—including a made-for-TV crossover and a theatrical reboot—and the action figures, comics, and other merchandise that have helped to keep the brand alive for the past 30 years.

The official behind-the-scenes look at the powerful new musical based on Alanis Morissette's cult classic album Jagged Little Pill. Celebrating its 25-year anniversary in 2020, singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette's Grammy-Award winning album Jagged Little Pill has come to define a generation. In...

In The Pied Pipers of Rock 'n' Roll, Wes Smith examines the phenomenon of the AM deejays who captivated a generation and helped define the counterculture that has forever changed the landscape of American youth. Smith takes a close look at nine of the men who made this happen and explores the reasons for their influence and its lasting effects on the generation whose lives still unfold to the soundtrack laid down by these platter-spinners of their youth.

Is The Wire better than Breaking Bad? Is Cheers better than Seinfeld? What's the best high school show ever made? Why did Moonlighting really fall apart? Was the Arrested Development Netflix season brilliant or terrible? For twenty years-since they shared a TV column at Tony Soprano's hometown...

Continuing the pitch-perfect critiques begun in The Great Movies, Roger Ebert's The Great Movies II collects 100 additional essays, each one of them a gem of critical appreciation and an amalgam of love, analysis, and history that will send readers back to films with a fresh set of eyes and...

What was it about a small, humble folk instrument that allowed it to become an American icon? The guitar represents freedom, the open road, protest and rebellion, the blues, youth, lost love, and sexuality. Tim Brookes explores with adoration these ideas and how they became entwined with the history of America.

Martin Torgoff details the rise of early drug culture in America by weaving together the disparate elements that formed this new segment of the American fabric. Channeling his decades of writing experience, Torgoff connects the birth of jazz in New Orleans, the first drug laws, Louis Armstrong, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, swing, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, the Savoy Ballroom, Charlie Parker, the birth of bebop, the rise of the Beat Generation, and the launch of heroin in Harlem.

Acclaimed biographer William Mann follows Elizabeth Taylor publicly as she makes her ascent at MGM, falls into (and out of) marriages, wins Oscars, fights studio feuds, and combats America's conservative values with her decidedly modern love affairs. But he also shines a light on Elizabeth's rich private life, revealing a love for her craft and a loyalty to the underdog that fueled her lifelong battle against the studio system.

Few songs have captured the contradictions and ambiguities of the 1960s as memorably as "California Dreamin'," the iconic folk music single that catapulted the Mamas & the Papas into rock and roll history. In All the Leaves Are Brown, author Scott Shea details how John Phillips, Denny Doherty, Michelle Phillips, and "Mama Cass" Elliot became standard-bearers for California counterculture, following their transformation from folk music wannabes to rock sensations and chronicling the tumultuous events that followed their unexpected success.

Steadfast in fighting crime, but operating outside the police force - and sometimes even the law - is the private detective. Driven by his own moral code, he is a shadowy figure in a trench coat standing on a street corner, his face most likely obscured by a tilted fedora, a lit cigarette dangling from his hand. The hard-boiled detective is known by his dark past, private pain, and powers of deduction. He only asks questions - never answers them. In his stories he is both the main character and the narrator.

Brilliant, short-lived, incredibly prolific—Schubert is one of the most intriguing figures in music history. While his music attracts a wide audience, much of his private life remains shrouded in mystery, and significant portions of his work have been overlooked. In this major new biography, Lorraine Byrne Bodley takes a detailed look into Schubert's life, from his early years at the Stadtkonvikt to the harrowing battle with syphilis that led to his death at the age of thirty-one.

The Police have sold more than 50 million albums, made Rolling Stone's Greatest Artists of All Time list, and finished a triumphant world reunion tour in 2008. Now British journalist Chris Campion draws on extensive research and new interviews to trace the inside saga of this iconic group, including the unorthodox business strategies employed by manager Miles Copeland that took them to the top and the intense rivalry that drove Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland to split at the height of their success in the 1980s.

For the first time, learn what really happened inside the walls of Hotel des Mille Collines. In Inside the Hotel Rwanda, survivor Edouard Kayihura tells his own personal story of what life was really like during those harrowing days within the walls of that infamous hotel and offers the testimonies of others who survived there, from Hutu and Tutsi to UN peacekeepers. Kayihura writes of a divided society and his journey to the place he believed would be safe from slaughter.

Now featuring exclusive new material including excerpts from Desi Arnaz’s unpublished second memoir and commentary by daughter Lucie Arnaz, here is the expanded edition of the New York Times bestselling memoir of Cuban American entertainment legend, TV pioneer, and I Love Lucy star Desi Arnaz...

Dean Martin was a natural entertainer, known not only for his singing ability but also for his great showmanship on the stage. With Martin, it wasn’t just about the song—it was about the whole package. With songs such as “That’s Amore” and movies like Rio Bravo, he took the world by storm. Later, Dean Martin, along with other famous entertainers such as Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr., forged the ultimate group of performers: The Rat Pack. No one could keep Dean Martin’s spirit down for long. This is his life—this is his story.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER An NPR Best Book of the Year In this spectacular, newsmaking exposé that has the entertainment industry abuzz and on its heels, Vanity Fair's Maureen Ryan blows the lid off patterns of harassment and bias in Hollywood, the grassroots...

A scathing reexamination of the lives of nine female celebrities in the 2000s, and the sexist, exploitative culture that took them down Welcome to celebrity culture in the early aughts: the reign of Perez Hilton, celebrity sex tapes, and dueling tabloids fed by paparazzi who were willing to do...