Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography — there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. We picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine
Adapting the argument of French critics that the director is the author of a film, Sarris proposed that all American cinema, too, could be defined through the men with the megaphones. The Galileo of film critics, he constructed a Hollywood cosmology of 200 directors, who were listed with titles either honorific (Pantheon for Howard Hawks) or proscriptive (Less than Meets the Eye for John Huston, Strained Seriousness for Stanley Kubrick). If The American Cinema‘s readers came for the stats, they stayed for the insights, rendered in epigrams (“Billy Wilder is too cynical to believe even his own cynicism”) and in declarations of love. A romantic poet whose subject happened to be cinema, Sarris believed that “the world [could] be remade in the moonbeams of a movie projector.” As his masterwork proved, the film world could also be enlightened by one man’s passion and eloquence.
Ben Hecht’s daughter Teddy once introduced her dad as “the author of my being and other dubious works.” These works included the plays The Front Page and Twentieth Century, the films Scarface, Nothing Sacred, Spellbound and Notorious, plus a nonstop seven-day rewrite of the first half of Gone with the Wind for producer David O. Selznick. His movies and plays only hint at the scope of his rich, raffish career: he was cub reporter, columnist, foreign correspondent, poet, novelist, talk-show host on infant TV and so relentless a proponent for Zionism that his name was taken off films when they played in Britain. A Child of the Century packs all nine lives into 600 pages of glamorous prose snapshots of the famous (Mencken and the Marx brothers) and infamous (the Capote and Hitler mobs). It’s the un-put-downable testament of the era’s great multimedia entertainer.
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Melissa
Reblogged this on Swamp of Boredom and commented:
I’m reblogging this for my own reference and also to share with my readers (all 34 of you;)). Since the release of the 1001 Books App on Tuesday, I’ve been book list crazy. Since I like non-fiction – especially non-fiction centered on historical events and people, not so much current people – and have read a couple of excellent non-fiction books in the last year (Only Yesterday, Empire of the Summer Moon) I wondered if there was a list of recommended non-fiction books. Of course there is. I found one from the Guardain (UK) that is, obviously, geared towards British readers and that, unlike Time’s list, encompasses all non-fiction ever written. This list from Time consists of books only since Time began publishing, 1923. There are a few that don’t interest me at all and the biography choices focus too heavily on women and African Americans, IMO, but overall the list is excellent.
Enjoy!
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages