Entertainment History

Ronald Reagan today is a conservative icon, celebrated for transforming the American domestic agenda and playing a crucial part in ending communism in the Soviet Union. In his masterful new biography, H. W. Brands argues that Reagan, along with FDR, was the most consequential president of the 20th century. Reagan took office at a time when the public sector, after a half century of New Deal liberalism, was widely perceived as bloated and inefficient, an impediment to personal liberty.

Washington Post staff writer Geoff Edgers takes a deep dive into the story behind "Walk This Way", Aerosmith and Run-DMC's legendary, groundbreaking mashup that forever changed music.

No Crying in Baseball is a rollicking, revelatory deep dive into a one‑of‑a‑kind film. Before A League of Their Own, few American girls could imagine themselves playing professional ball. But Penny Marshall's genre outlier became an instant classic and significant aha moment for countless young women who saw that throwing like a girl was far from an insult. Part fly‑on‑the‑wall narrative, part immersive pop nostalgia, No Crying in Baseball is for those who love stories about subverting gender roles as well as fans of the film who remain passionate thirty years after its release.

Brimming with insights from a veritable Who's Who of Broadway Babies and complemented by more than two hundred color and black-and-white images, Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy offers a witty, multidimensional look at the musical genius behind Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, and the landmark West Side Story and Gypsy.

In a book that inspired the Amazon original series starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Malcolm McDowell, oboist Blair Tindall recounts her decades-long professional career as a classical musician, from the recitals and Broadway orchestra performances to the secret life of musicians who survive hand to mouth in the backbiting New York classical music scene, trading sexual favors for plum jobs and assignments in orchestras across the city.

What do we hope to get out of seeing a famous piece of art? Jeannie Marshall asked that question of herself when she started visiting the Sistine Chapel frescoes. She wanted to understand their meaning and context—but in the process, she also found what she didn’t know she was looking for. All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel tells the story of Marshall’s relationship with one of our most cherished artworks.

With his now-legendary store on 125th Street in Harlem, Dapper Dan pioneered high-end streetwear in the 1980s, remixing classic luxury-brand logos into his own innovative, glamorous designs. But before he reinvented haute couture, he was a hungry boy with holes in his shoes, a teen who daringly gambled drug dealers out of their money, and a young man in a prison cell who found nourishment in books. In this remarkable memoir, he tells his full story for the first time.

In Elvis Presley: A Southern Life, one of the most admired Southern historians of our time takes on one of the greatest cultural icons of all time. The result is a masterpiece: a vivid, gripping biography, set against the rich backdrop of Southern society - indeed, American society - in the second half of the 20th century.

The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities. This entertaining book charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth of compact discs to resurgence among independent music makers.

From award-winning journalist and children’s book author Mary Cronk Farrell comes the inspiring and fascinating story of the woman who gave a human face to the Vietnam War. Close-Up on War tells the story of French-born Catherine Leroy, one of the war’s few woman photographers, who documented some of the fiercest fighting in the 20-year conflict. Although she had no formal photographic training and had never before traveled more than a few hundred miles from Paris, Leroy left home at age 21 to travel to Vietnam and document the faces of war.

Grammy winning family hip-hop artist Secret Agent 23 Skidoo’s rhyme-writing workshop will get aspiring rhymers ready for the limelight. Skidoo breaks down song writing and performing basics into easy-to-follow examples alongside short chapters featuring cultures that have songs at their core, including West African griots, Australian indigenous songline culture, and Viking rhyme battling.

March 1294. Ireland is at a crossroads. The different factions - Irish, Danish, and English - are tearing the country apart with their constant warfare. Hoping to hammer out a treaty, David calls the Irish Parliament into session. Unfortunately, some lords are far more interested in fighting than talking, and it isn't long before the conference goes awry. With the future of Ireland at stake, David finds himself caught up in a far-reaching conspiracy that puts not only his own life on the line, but his family's as well.

Frémeaux & Associés, label de référence historiographique du jazz avec la Collection Quintessence d'Alain Gerber, édite dans le cadre de la collection "Une histoire expliquée par" avec les Presses Universitaires de France, une histoire du jazz racontée par Laurent Cugny, professeur à la Faculté des Lettres de Sorbonne Université et ancien directeur de l'ONJ (Orchestre national de jazz).

A 13th-century toxic jungle, a bathhouse for tired gods, a red haired fish girl, and a furry woodland spirit - what do these have in common? They all spring from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki, one of the greatest living animators, known worldwide for films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises. Japanese culture and animation scholar Susan Napier explores the life and art of this extraordinary Japanese filmmaker to provide a definitive account of his oeuvre.

Down and Dirty Pictures chronicles the rise of independent filmmakers and of the twin engines - the Sundance Film Festival and Miramax Films - that have powered them. Peter Biskind profiles the people who took the independent movement from obscurity to the Oscars, most notably Sundance founder Robert Redford and Harvey Weinstein, who with his brother, Bob, made Miramax an indie powerhouse.

The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse–a fear of corruption or contamination through color–lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge color, either by making it the property of some "foreign body"–the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological–or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic.

The girl group sound, made famous and unforgettable by acts like The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Supremes, and The Vandellas, took over the airwaves by capturing the mixture of innocence and rebellion emblematic of America in the 1960s. But while the songs are essential to the American canon, many of the artists remain all but anonymous to most listeners. But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?: An Oral History of 60s Girl Groups tells a national coming-of-age story that gives particular insight into the experiences of the female singers and songwriters who created the movement.

Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to this music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet music is an overlooked part of our origin story. The Musical Human takes us on an exhilarating journey across the ages - from Bach to BTS and back - to explore the vibrant relationship between music and the human species.

In this widely praised book, Annik LaFarge presents a very different Frédéric Chopin from the melancholy, sickly, Romantic figure that has predominated for so long. The artist she discovered is, instead, a purely independent - and endlessly relevant - spirit: an innovator who created a new musical language; an autodidact who became a spiritually generous, trailblazing teacher; a stalwart patriot during a time of revolution, pandemic, and exile.

In this elegant and compelling biography, best-selling writer Shawn Levy writes of these many De Niros - the characters and the man - seeking to understand the evolution of an actor who once dove deeply into his roles as if to hide his inner nature, and who now seemingly avoids acting challenges, taking roles which make few apparent demands on his overwhelming talent.