The history of modern music was forever altered when in a few years after 1925 talent scouts and engineers were busy recording regional musicians and their styles, like hula, fado, beguine, calypso, marabi and many other musics. What decades later was repacked, remastered and resold as “folk,” and “roots” music, actually was local popular music; […]
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Author: Dr. A. Ebert
Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology by Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka (eds.) (2012)
There are probably many millions of people worldwide awaiting the new Star Wars episode to be presented in December 2015, including your reviewer here. So even if the book at hand came out some months ago, now is the time to devote some lines to it. The topics of this volume are subsumed under the […]
American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz (2014)
What actually was the idea of Englishman Allen Lane during WWII found its way to the United States: the invention of a small, affordable book format, available almost anywhere where you could buy chewing gum and cigarettes. Lane, after unsuccessfully searching for small-sized books to read on his daily train rides, in 1935 founded Penguin […]
RKO Radio Pictures Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films, 1929-1956 by Michael R. Pitts (2015)
The American moviegoers of the 1940s and the decades afterwards never really had to worry about a shortage of new films hitting their neighborhood cinemas. There were plenty of movie companies, studios, and distribution organizations. Some movie companies are still in business, while others just disappeared or were sold and sold and sold again, while […]
Lonesome Melodies: The Lives and Music of the Stanley Brothers by David W. Johnson (2014)
“… In constant sorrow, all through his days….” Now, if that passage sounds familiar to you, you will probably like David Johnson’s deep and solid book on The Stanley Brothers. For that chorus is from a recording of the song “Man of Constant Sorrow,” originally done by Ralph Stanley in 1951 and the composition (which […]
Gene D. Phillips. Gangsters and G-Men on Screen. Crime Cinema … (2014)
When the first (real) talking movie was introduced in 1928 (Lights of New York) it was a gangster movie. The use of gangster lingo, and the sound of gunshots made the genre even more successful. The short, brisk exchanges of the underground characters added more to the illusion of authenticity; the first full-length gangster movie […]
The Book Cover in the Weimar Republic by Jürgen Holstein (ed.) (2015)
Berlin between the wars was a prospering and innovative capital unlike any other in the world. In 1927 alone Berlin was home to 929 publishing houses and put out a fourth of Germany’s entire book production. Book printing was also promoted by the many local newspapers and their respective hardware; to tap the full potential […]
The Hard-Boiled Female Detective Novel: A Study of a Popular … by William R. Klink (2014)
The detective novel/mystery novel is by far not a strictly male genre, meaning that there are not just male authors writing detective fiction about male investigators. Some of the authors of the early British mystery novels were female; there would be no Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple without Agatha Christie; and Dorothy L. Sayers is […]
From Radio to the Big Screen. Hollywood Films Featuring … by Hal Erickson (2014)
When stars like Bob Hope or Bing Crosby started their careers in the movies, they actually started over, since they already were highly successful through their earlier work for radio shows, drama, mystery and comedy. These old shows, home of many superior actors and great voices, today are mostly forgotten, and the programs will only […]