Grant Wood
A Life
Written by R. Tripp Evans

Format: Hardcover, 432 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: October 5, 2010
Price: $37.50
ISBN: 978-0-307-26629-3 (0-307-26629-X)

He claimed to be “the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done, or experienced,” said Grant Wood, “that’s been even the least bit exciting.”

Wood was one of America’s most famous regionalist painters; to love his work was the equivalent of loving America itself... Read more >

One Nation Under Goods
Malls and the Secuctions of American Shopping
Written by James J. Farrell

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
On Sale: July 6, 2010
Price: $26.95
ISBN: 978-1-58834-292-8 (1-58834-292-1)

Loved and hated, visited and avoided, seemingly everywhere yet endlessly the same, malls occupy a special place in American life. What, then, is this invention that evokes such strong and contradictory emotions in Americans? In many ways malls represent the apotheosis of American consumerism and this synthetic and wide-ranging investigation is... Read more >

Richistan
A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich
Written by Robert Frank

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
On Sale: June 24, 2008
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-34145-7 (0-307-34145-3)

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

RICH-I-STAN n. 1. a new country located in the heart of America, populated entirely by millionaires, most of whom acquired their wealth during the new Gilded Age of the past twenty years. 2. a country with a population larger than Belgium and Denmark; typical citizens include “spud... Read more >

A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers

Written by Will Friedwald

Format: Hardcover, 832 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: November 2, 2010
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-42149-5 (0-375-42149-1)

These illuminating, opinionated essays–provocative, funny, and personal–on the lives and careers of more than three hundred singers anatomize the work of the greatest popular vocalists of the twentieth century, from giants like Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland to lesser-known artists whose work still pleases and inspires.
 
Will... Read more >

Stardust Melodies
The Biography of Twelve of America's Most Popular Songs
Written by Will Friedwald

Format: Hardcover, 416 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: April 23, 2002
Price: $27.50
ISBN: 978-0-375-42089-4 (0-375-42089-4)

Each chapter gives us an extended history of one song—the circumstances under which it was written and first performed—and then explores its musical and lyric content. Drawing on his vast knowledge of records and the careers of performing artists, Friedwald tells us who was responsible for making these songs famous and... Read more >

An Empire of Their Own
How the Jews Invented Hollywood
Written by Neal Gabler

Format: Trade Paperback, 512 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: August 8, 1989
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-26557-7 (0-385-26557-3)

Winner of the Theater Library Association Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for history, this “wonderful history of the golden age of the movie moguls” (Chicago Tribune) is a provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of... Read more >

Life: The Movie
How Entertainment Conquered Reality
Written by Neal Gabler

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 29, 2000
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70653-0 (0-375-70653-4)

From one of America's most original cultural critics and the author of Winchell, the story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, glamour, and melodrama has turned everything of importance-from news and politics to religion and high culture-into one vast public entertainment.

Neal Gabler calls them "lifies," those blockbusters written in... Read more >

Walt Disney
The Triumph of the American Imagination
Written by Neal Gabler

Format: Trade Paperback, 912 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 9, 2007
Price: $22.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-75747-4 (0-679-75747-3)

The definitive portrait of one of the most important cultural figures in American history.
Walt Disney was a true visionary whose desire for escape, iron determination and obsessive perfectionism transformed animation from a novelty to an art form, first with Mickey Mouse and then with his feature films—most notably Snow White... Read more >

Winchell
Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity
Written by Neal Gabler

Format: Trade Paperback, 704 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 26, 1995
Price: $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76439-7 (0-679-76439-9)

Hailed as the most important and entertaining biography in recent memory, Gabler’s account of the life of fast-talking gossip columnist and radio broadcaster Walter Winchell “fuses meticulous research with a deft grasp of the cultural nuances of an era when virtually everyone who mattered paid homage to Winchell” (Time). Read more >

"There Are Things I Want You to Know" about Stieg Larsson and Me

Written by Eva Gabrielsson
Contribution by Marie-Francoise Colombani
Translated by Linda Coverdale

Format: Hardcover, 224 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: June 21, 2011
Price: $23.95
ISBN: 978-1-60980-363-6 (1-60980-363-9)

Eva Gabrielsson and Stieg Larsson shared everything, starting when they were both eighteen until his untimely death thirty-two years later at the age of fifty. In “There Are Things I Want You to Know” about Stieg Larsson and Me, Eva Gabrielsson accepts the daunting challenge of telling the story of their... Read more >

Sex and Real Estate
Why We Love Houses
Written by Marjorie Garber

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: September 18, 2001
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-72039-7 (0-385-72039-4)

Real estate has become a form of “yuppie pornography.” Hopes of summer romance have given way to hopes of summer homes, and fantasies of Romeo have been replaced by fantasies of remodeling. Even real estate ads are flirtatious in their offers of bedrooms that are sensuous and sinks that are seductive... Read more >

Sixty Feet, Six Inches
A Hall of Fame Pitcher & a Hall of Fame Hitter Talk About How the Game Is Played
Written by Bob Gibson, Reggie Jackson and Lonnie Wheeler

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: April 5, 2011
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-7679-3110-6 (0-7679-3110-6)

Bob Gibson and Reggie Jackson offer a candid and unfiltered look at America's pastime, discussing the art of pitching, the art of hitting, and all things baseball.

Full of brush-backs, walk-off homeruns, high stakes, cold stares, epic battles, and a little chin music here and there, Sixty Feet, Six Inches is a... Read more >

Night Beat
A Shadow of Rock & Roll
Written by Mikal Gilmore

Format: Trade Paperback, 496 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: February 16, 1999
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-48436-7 (0-385-48436-4)

Few journalists have staked a territory as definitively and passionately as Mikal Gilmore in his twenty-year career writing about rock and roll. Now, for the first time, this collection gathers his cultural criticism, interviews, reviews, and assorted musings. Beginning with Elvis and the birth of rock and roll, Gilmore traces the... Read more >

Faster
The Acceleration of Just About Everything
Written by James Gleick

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 5, 2000
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-77548-5 (0-679-77548-X)

This is the heyday of speed.

If one quality defines our modern, technocratic age, it is acceleration. We are making haste. Our computers, our movies, our sex lives, our prayers -- they all run faster now than ever before. And the more we fill our lives with time-saving devices and time-saving strategies... Read more >

Reading Lyrics
More Than 1,000 of the Century's Finest Lyrics--a Celebration of Our Greatest Songwriters, a Rediscovery of Forgotten Masters, and an Appreciation of an
Edited by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball

Format: Hardcover, 736 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: November 21, 2000
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-40081-0 (0-375-40081-8)

Reading Lyrics is a collection of the finest American and British song lyrics written between 1900 and 1975.  More than one hundred lyricists are represented:  from Irving Berlin and "Alexander's Ragtime Band" to the greats of Broadway and Hollywood, including Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein, Yip Harburg, Dorothy Fields, Frank... Read more >

Good Stuff
A Reminiscence of My Father, Cary Grant
Written by Jennifer Grant

Format: Hardcover, 192 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: May 3, 2011
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-26710-8 (0-307-26710-5)

Jennifer Grant is the only child of Cary Grant, who was, and continues to be, the epitome of all that is elegant, sophisticated, and deft. Almost half a century after Cary Grant’s retirement from the screen, he remains the quintessential romantic comic movie star. He stopped making movies when his daughter... Read more >

Art and Culture
Critical Essays
Written by Clement Greenberg

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: June 1, 1971
Price: $24.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6681-2 (0-8070-6681-8)

“Clement Greenberg is, internationally, the best-known American art critic popularly considered to be the man who put American vanguard painting and sculpture on the world map. . . . An important book for everyone interested in modern painting and sculpture.” -The New York Times Read more >

Gaga Feminism
Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal
Written by J. Jack Halberstam

Format: Hardcover, 192 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: September 18, 2012
Price: $26.95
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1098-3 (0-8070-1098-7)

Why are so many women single, so many men resisting marriage, and so many gays and lesbians having babies?

In Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, J. Jack Halberstam answers these questions while attempting to make sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and... Read more >

The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II

Written by Oscar Hammerstein II
Edited by Amy Asch
Foreword by Alice Hammerstein Mathias
Introduction by Ted Chapin

Format: Hardcover, 448 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: November 25, 2008
Price: $65.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-41358-2 (0-375-41358-8)

From every “beautiful mornin’” to “some enchanted evening,” the songs of Oscar Hammerstein II are part of our daily lives, his words part of our national fabric.

Born into a theatrical dynasty headed by his grandfather and namesake, Oscar Hammerstein II breathed new life into the moribund art form of operetta by... Read more >

The Fan Who Knew Too Much
Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations
Written by Anthony Heilbut

Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: June 19, 2012
Price: $30.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-40080-3 (0-375-40080-X)

In The Fan Who Knew Too Much, Heilbut writes about art and obsession, from country blues singers and male sopranos to European intellectuals and the originators of radio soap opera–figures transfixed and transformed who helped to change the American cultural landscape.

Heilbut writes about Aretha Franklin, the longest-lasting female star of... Read more >

Team Rodent
How Disney Devours the World
Written by Carl Hiaasen

Format: Trade Paperback, 96 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: May 5, 1998
Price: $9.95
ISBN: 978-0-345-42280-4 (0-345-42280-5)

"Disney is so good at being good that it manifests an evil; so uniformly efficient and courteous, so dependably clean and conscientious, so unfailingly entertaining that it's unreal, and therefore is an agent of pure wickedness. . . . Disney isn't in the business of exploiting Nature so much as striving... Read more >

Seabiscuit
An American Legend
Written by Laura Hillenbrand

Format: Trade Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: March 26, 2002
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-449-00561-3 (0-449-00561-5)

Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. But his success was a surprise to the racing establishment, which had written off the crooked-legged racehorse with the sad... Read more >

Amusement Parks

Written by Jim Hillman

Format: Trade Paperback, 64 pages
Publisher: Shire
On Sale: May 21, 2013
Price: $9.95
ISBN: 978-0-7478-1209-8 (0-7478-1209-8)

America’s amusement industry emerged from simple swimming ponds, family picnic areas, and community gathering spots. Although the first major entrepreneurial-driven amusement resort, known as Jones Woods, grew from the banks of New York’s East River in the 1800s, the Golden Age of American amusement parks began with the mid-1800s development of... Read more >

Shades of Glory
The Negro Leagues & the Story of African-American Baseball
Written by Lawrence D. Hogan
Foreword by Jules Tygiel

Format: Hardcover, 448 pages
Publisher: National Geographic
On Sale: January 31, 2006
Price: $26.00
ISBN: 978-0-7922-5306-8 (0-7922-5306-X)

Celebrating African America's contribution to our great national pastime, this comprehensive, lively history combines vivid narrative, visual impact, and a unique statistical component, to recreate the excitement and passion of the Negro Leagues. Packed with stories, biographical essays, scores of archival photographs and other evocative artifacts, it is an important contribution... Read more >

Confederates in the Attic
Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
Written by Tony Horwitz

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 22, 1999
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-75833-4 (0-679-75833-X)

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again, this time from... Read more >