Windy City Blues
Windy City Blues. Polish brothers, Black musicians and entertainers, and a record company you won’t soon forget. Rosen’s novel has it all. Renée Rosen seamlessly blends fiction with fact in a fascinating novel titled Windy City Blues. The true parts of the story center on a pair of Polish Americans, the Chess brothers. Their mid-twentieth-century […]
The Girls in the Picture
The Girls in the Picture Ordinarily, before reading The Girls in The Picture I focus a review of a biographical novel on the lives and times of the characters, most often considering how effectively the author managed to fictionalize known facts and to extrapolate scenes and conversations. While I was reading Melanie Benjamin’s The Girls […]
The Witch of Lime Street, the spirit world revisited
The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World The “Roaring Twenties” have a reputation, deserved or not, for being a decade of excess in everything except the consumption of legal booze. Set in the 1920s, David Jaher’s The Witch of Lime Street chronicles excess on nearly every page. It is […]
Off Mike
Off Mike, A Memoir of Talk Radio Michael Krasny always wanted to be a writer like his idols Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow, but other things kept getting in the way. Instead he became a tenured professor of English and creative writing at San Francisco State University, a job he loved. In 1976 Krasny was asked […]
Mantan the Funnyman
Mantan the Funnyman, The Life and Times of Mantan Moreland Mantan Moreland was a comedian and actor in old-time movies and was usually seen playing a porter, chauffeur, valet, or general servant. These roles are not much different from those played by other African-American actors at the time, such as Stepin Fetchit (Lincoln Perry), Willie […]
The Making of Some Like it Hot
THE MAKING OF SOME LIKE IT HOT Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot is listed as No. 14 of the hundred greatest movies and the No. 1 funniest movie of all time. These ratings were compiled by the American Film Institute. In its day Some Like It Hot challenged long-standing taboos on subject-matter by various […]
Flappers
Flappers: Six Women in Search of a Dangerous Generation Judith Mackrell, author of Flappers, presents a wealth of meticulous research in lively, vivacious prose. She traces the follies and fortunes of six precocious young women as they navigated the shoals of the 1920s. Together, the six epitomize what we recognize as “flappers.” Mackrell describes them […]