Hanna and Barbera: Conversations presents a lively portrait of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, the influential producers behind Tom and Jerry, the Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, the Smurfs, and hundreds of other cartoon characters who continue to entertain the world today. Encompassing more than fifty years of film and television history, the conversations ......
Robert Dance's new evaluation of Joan Crawford looks at her entire career and-while not ignoring her early years and tempestuous personal life-focuses squarely on her achievements as an actress, and as a woman who mastered the studio system with a rare combination of grit, determination, beauty, and talent. Crawford's remarkable forty-five-year ......
Peter Weir: Interviews is the first volume of interviews to be published on the esteemed Australian director. Although Weir (b. 1944) has acquired a reputation of being guarded about his life and work, these interviews by archivists, journalists, historians, and colleagues reveal him to be a most amiable and forthcoming subject. He talks about ......
One Tough Dame: The Life and Career of Diana Rigg offers a sweeping portrait of the revered performer's life and career. Deemed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1994, Diana Rigg (1938-2020) initially found fame as super sleuth Mrs. Emma Peel in the 1960s BBC/ABC-TV espionage series, The Avengers. A classically trained and ......
Young Adult Literature and Transgender Representation
The first book-length work of its kind, In Transition: Young Adult Literature and Transgender Representation examines the shift in the young adult book market towards increased representation of transgender characters and authors. Through a comprehensive exploration of historical conventions, genres, character diversity, and ideologies of trans ......
Contributions by Yoshiko Akamatsu, Carol L. Beran, Rita Bode, Lesley D. Clement, Allison McBain Hudson, Kate Lawson, Jessica Wen Hui Lim, Lindsey McMaster, E. Holly Pike, Katharine Slater, Margaret Steffler, and Anastasia Ulanowicz Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) was a Canadian author best known for writing the wildly popular Anne of Green ......
George Floyd and the Resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement
In the wake of George Floyd's murder in May 2020, protests broke out in Minneapolis and quickly spread across the United States. National unrest led to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and added to calls for justice in other American cities, including Los Angeles, Atlanta, Tulsa, and Louisville, Kentucky, where only months ......
Out of the Blue: Life on the Road with Muddy Waters begins with a moment lifted from a young musician's dreams. Brian Bisesi, a guitarist barely out of his teens, is invited on stage to fill in for a missing member of the band backing blues legend Muddy Waters. This life-changing quirk of fate opens the door into a world of challenges and ......
Long before anyone had heard of alien cookbooks, gremlins on the wings of airplanes, or places where pig-faced people are considered beautiful, Rod Serling was the most prestigious writer in American television. As creator, host, and primary writer for The Twilight Zone, Serling became something more: an American icon. When Serling died in 1975, ......