Entertainment History

In this new audiobook, broadcaster and music writer Alan Cross narrates the definitive history of Green Day. Cross succeeds once again in revealing the fascinating history behind the music in the same compelling way we've come to expect from his long broadcasting career.

From “The Star-Spangled Banner” to “Born in the USA”, Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw take listeners on a moving and insightful journey through eras in American history and the songs and performers that inspired us. Meacham chronicles our history, exploring the stories behind the songs, and Tim McGraw reflects on them as an artist and performer. Their perspectives combine to create a unique view of the role music has played in uniting and shaping a nation.

From the author of The Kite Rider comes another great historical novel, this time set in the American west, where the residents of a new settlement struggle against nature and the railroad to keep their town alive. Pulse-pounding adventure, moments of gut-bustin' humor, and a deeply moving sense of community, make Stop the Train! a must-listen.

Coco Chanel created the look of the modern woman and was the high priestess of couture. She believed in simplicity, and elegance, and freed women from the tyranny of fashion. She inspired women to take off their bone corsets and cut their hair. She used ordinary jersey as couture fabric, elevated the waistline, and created bell-bottom trousers, trench coats, and turtleneck sweaters. In the 1920s, when Chanel employed more than 2,000 people in her workrooms, she had amassed a personal fortune of $15 million and went on to create an empire.

Jon Fine spent nearly 30 years performing and recording with bands that played various forms of aggressive and challenging underground rock music. And, as he writes in this memoir, at no point were any of those bands "ever threatened, even distantly, by actual fame". Yet when members of his first band, Bitch Magnet, reunited after 21 years to tour Europe, Asia, and America, diehard longtime fans traveled from far and wide to attend those shows.

Designing Terry Pratchett's Discworld takes listeners behind the scenes of the amazing partnership between Sir Terry Pratchett and artist Paul Kidby. It shows how the Discworld was brought to visual life - from the earliest sketches to the final magnificent masterpieces - and how Terry and Paul absorbed influences from art and pop culture, fusing them into the Discworld landscape.

Harry Belafonte is not just one of the greatest entertainers of our time; he has led one of the great American lives of the last century. Now, this extraordinary icon tells us the story of that life, giving us its full breadth, letting us share in the struggles, the tragedies, and, most of all, the inspiring triumphs.

England's Dreaming is the ultimate book on punk, its progenitors, the Sex Pistols, and the moment they defined for music fans in England and the United States. Savage brings to life the sensational story of the meteoric rise and rapid implosion of the Pistols through layers of rich detail and exclusive interviews. This fully revised and updated edition of the book covers the legacy of punk 25 years later and provides an account of the Pistols' 1996 reunion as well as a completely new introduction.

When you take the most absurd parts of history, science, economics, and geography, you end up with a pretty confusing picture of humanity. Why do we have borders? What's the furthest you can get from the ocean? And why did Vikings wear those silly helmets? These are just a few of the strange questions that bounce around the head of Joseph Pisenti. In his YouTube channel, Pisenti presents illogical truths in a logical manner. Here, he builds on this nonsensical humor of the universe with in-depth analysis of empires, economies, and ecosystems as he helps answer the ridiculous.

Salka Viertel's autobiography tells of a brilliant, creative, and well-connected woman's pilgrimage through the darkest years of the 20th century, a journey that would take her from a remote province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Hollywood. The Kindness of Strangers is, to quote the New Yorker writer S. N. Behrman, "a very rich book. It provides a panorama of the dissolving civilizations of the 20th century. In all of them the author lived at the apex of their culture and artistic aristocracies."

The author of the critically acclaimed Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me offers an eye-opening and frank assessment of the state of classic rock, assessing its past and future, the impact it has had, and what its loss would mean to an industry, a culture, and a way of life.

From young artists trying to elbow their way in to those working hard at dropping out, White's essential audiobook offers a once-in-a-generation glimpse of the inner workings of the American art world at a moment of unparalleled ambition, uncertainty, and creative exuberance.

In May 2018, former Monty Python stalwart and intrepid globetrotter Michael Palin ventured into the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, camera crew in tow, to gain a glimpse of life in the most notoriously secretive and cut-off nation on earth. His resulting two-part documentary for Channel 5 fascinated millions and won universal plaudits.

Movies (And Other Things) is a book about, quite frankly, movies (and other things). One of the chapters, for example, answers which race Kevin Costner was able to white savior the best, because did you know that he white saviors Mexicans in McFarland, USA, and white saviors Native Americans in Dances with Wolves, and white saviors Black people in Black or White, and white saviors the Cleveland Browns in Draft Day? Another of the chapters creates a special version of the Academy Awards specifically for rom-coms, the most underrated movie genre of all.

For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialised bodies, female bodies, what is their language, what are the materials we need to transcribe it? Exploring the ways in which feminist artists have taken up this challenge, Art Monsters is a landmark intervention in how we think about art and the body, calling attention to a radical heritage of feminist work that not only reacts against patriarchy but redefines its own aesthetic aims.

Women have been instrumental in the success of American cinema since its very beginning. One of the first people to ever pick up a motion picture camera was a woman, as was the first screenwriter to win two Academy Awards, the inventor of the boom microphone, and the first person to be credited with the title film editor. Throughout the entire history of Hollywood women have been revolutionizing, innovating, and shaping how we make movies. Yet their stories are rarely shared. This is what film reporter Alicia Malone wants to change. Backwards and in Heels tells the history of women in film in a different way.

Russell Martin, author of Beethoven's Hair, and his wife, Lydia Nibley, tell the story of how a lock of Ludwig von Beethoven's hair, clipped from the composer's head on his deathbed in Germany in 1827, ended up in Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943 and was later sold at auction in London in 1994. Learn about this incredible journey through history and the mysteries revealed about Beethoven's deafness and death. Correspondence, research, and forensics further inform this fascinating story.

Arthur Briggs's life was Homeric in scope. Born on the the tiny island of Grenada, he set sail for Harlem during the Renaissance, then to Europe in the aftermath of World War I, where he was among the first pioneers to introduce jazz music to the world. During the legendary Jazz Age in Paris, Briggs's trumpet provided the soundtrack while Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the rest of the Lost Generation got drunk. By the 1930s, Briggs was considered "the Louis Armstrong of Paris," and was the peer of the greatest names of his time, from Josephine Baker to Django Reinhardt.

Some women capture our attention like no others. Faith Bacon and Sally Rand were beautiful blondes from humble backgrounds who shot to fame behind a pair of oversize ostrich fans, but with very different outcomes. It was the golden age of American entertainment, and Bacon and Rand fought their way through the competitive showgirl scene of New York with grit and perseverance. They played peek-a-boo with their lives, allowing their audiences to see only slivers of themselves. Little is known about who they really were, until now.

In ten sharply drawn tales, Madison Smartt Bell expands his masterly, inventive, and deftly textured fictional landscape to portray a collection of America's dispossessed characters.