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The intriguing life of J.B. Collip, whose restless drive fuelled his pioneering studies in endocrinology and sustained a successful research enterprise through the first half of the twentieth century.
A deep—and darkly comic—dive into the nature of disasters, and the ways they shape how we think about ourselves in the world “In this brilliant book, David Thomson tells the story of how we came to make disaster and catastrophe our best friends—how we let terror cocoon and take over our imaginations to avoid seeing the things that really frighten us. Riveting and totally original.”—Adam Curtis, BBC filmmaker and political journalist “Erudite. . . . Engaging. . . . A cri de coeur about art’s struggle to keep up with reality.”—Kirkus Reviews Audiences swell with the scale of disaster; humans have always been drawn to the rumors of our own demise. In this searching treatment...
Does acting matter? David Thomson, one of our most respected and insightful writers on movies and theater, answers this question with intelligence and wit. In this fresh and thought-provoking essay, Thomson tackles this most elusive of subjects, examining the allure of the performing arts for both the artist and the audience member while addressing the paradoxes inherent in acting itself. He reflects on the casting process, on stage versus film acting, and on the cult of celebrity. The art and considerable craft of such gifted artists as Meryl Streep, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis, and others are scrupulously appraised here, as are notions of “good” and “bad” acting. Thomson’s exploration is at once a meditation on and a celebration of a unique and much beloved, often misunderstood, and occasionally derided art form. He argues that acting not only “matters” but is essential and inescapable, as well as dangerous, chronic, transformative, and exhilarating, be it on the theatrical stage, on the movie screen, or as part of our everyday lives.
How does one package and sell confidence in the stability of a nation riven by civil strife? This was the question that loomed before the Philadelphia financial house of Jay Cooke & Company,&8239;entrusted&8239;by the US government with an unprecedented sale of bonds to finance the Union war effort in the early days of the American Civil War.&8239;How the government and its agents marketed these bonds revealed a version of the war the public was willing to buy and buy into, based not just in the full faith and credit of the United States but also in the success of its armies and its long-term vision for open markets. From Maine to California, and in foreign halls of power and economic influe...
In this wholly original work of film criticism, David Thomson, celebrated author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, probes the many ways in which sexuality has shaped the movies—and the ways in which the movies have shaped sexuality. Exploring the tangled notions of masculinity, femininity, beauty, and sex that characterize our cinematic imagination—and drawing on examples that range from advertising to pornography, Bonnie and Clyde to Call Me by Your Name—Thomson illuminates how film as art, entertainment, and business has historically been a polite cover for a kind of erotic séance. In so doing, he casts the art and the artists we love in a new light, and reveals how film can both expose the fault lines in conventional masculinity and point the way past it, toward a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be a person with desires.
A history of Europe since Napoleon, covering all of the main topics of that period.
Behind the scenes at the legendary Warner Brothers film studio, where four immigrant brothers transformed themselves into the moguls and masters of American fantasy Warner Bros charts the rise of an unpromising film studio from its shaky beginnings in the early twentieth century through its ascent to the pinnacle of Hollywood influence and popularity. The Warner Brothers—Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack—arrived in America as unschooled Jewish immigrants, yet they founded a studio that became the smartest, toughest, and most radical in all of Hollywood. David Thomson provides fascinating and original interpretations of Warner Brothers pictures from the pioneering talkie The Jazz Singer throug...
In little more than a century of cinema - Birth of a Nation was one hundred years old in 2015 - our sense of what a film director is, or should be, has shifted in fascinating ways. A director was once a functionary; then an important but not decisive part of an industrial process; then accepted as the person who was and should be in charge, because he was an artist and a hero. But the world has changed. In a nutshell, the change takes the form of a question: Who directed The Sopranos or Homeland? Hardly anyone knows, because we don't tend to read TV credits and the director has returned to a more subservient and anonymous role. Directors now try to be efficient, the deliverers of profitable films, and are often involved as producers, like Steven Spielberg. David Thomson's brilliant A Light in the Dark personalises each chapter through an individual: Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Jane Campion, Stephen Frears and Quentin Tarantino. Through these characters (and other directors not mentioned here), David Thomson relates an imaginative new history of a medium that has changed the world.
"Including masterpieces, oddities, guilty pleasures, and classics (with just a few disasters)"--Cover.