Celebrated scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler explain the amazing power of social networks and our profound influence on one another's lives.Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her. A happy neighbor has...

It was made like a television movie, and completed in less than three months. It killed off its star in forty minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to date in American film, punctuated by shrieking strings that seared...

The process of translating works of literature to the silver screen is a rich field of study for both students and scholars of literature and cinema. The fourteen essays collected in this 2007 volume provide a survey of the important films based on, or...

"The fullest account yet of the rise of one of the most profitable, most powerful, and oddest businesses the world has ever seen."-San Francisco ChronicleJust eleven years old, Google has profoundly transformed the way we live and work-we've all been...

News Dissectorbrings together Schechter’s writings on human rights, politics, and the media over a span of four decades of activism and reporting.“Danny Schechter, a kind of journalist without borders, has shaken up public broadcasting, among many other...

Why do Americans mistrust the news media? It may be because show like "The McLaughlin Group" reduce participating journalists to so many shouting heads. Or because, increasingly, the profession treats issues as complex as health-care reform and foreign...

Anna Deveare Smith's award-winning one-woman shows were borne of her uniquely brilliant ability to listen. In Talk to Me she applies her rare talent to the language of political power in America.Believing that character and language are inextricably...

The movement known as neorealism lasted seven years, generated only twenty-one films, failed at the box office, and fell short of its didactic and aesthetic aspirations. Yet it exerted such a profound influence on Italian cinema that all the best postwar...

Using the media's coverage of the death of Princess Diana as a departing point, Wheeler Dixon presents a sharply critical assessment of the current state of movies--from the cult of celebrity, to the nature of public surveillance, to the role of print...

Walt Whitman spent twenty-five years as a journalist before he published his first book of poems. Mark Twain pursued a twenty-year career as a journalist before the publication of his first novel. The list of great imaginative writers whose careers began...

For more than three decades the Catholic Church through its Legion of Decency controlled the content of Hollywood films. Studios submitted their films to the Legion for a rating, which varied from general approval to condemnation. Documenting the inner...

French critic and composer Michel Chion argues that watching movies is more than just a visual exercise—it enacts a process of audio-viewing. The audiovisual makes use of a wealth of tropes, devices, techniques, and effects that convert multiple...

In the Heat of the Sun and Devils on the Doorstep are two of the finest and most honored Chinese films ever made. Body in Question is the first book to thoroughly examine these groundbreaking works and one of the first books in English to study...

Employing a wide range of examples from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Zelig and Personal Best, Janet Staiger argues that a historical examination of spectators' responses to films can make a valuable contribution to the history, criticism,...

Taken as a whole, the sixteen remarkable films discussed in this provocative new volume of essays represent the brilliant creativity that flourished in the name of German cinema between the wars. Encompassing early gangster pictures and science fiction,...

First published in 1986, this standard account of Hitchcock's British films and film-making is now available again in a Second Edition with a new Introduction and Bibliography. It will be welcomed by all students of the film and admirers of Hitchcock.

"Gender is an absolute ground zero for most human societies," writes David William Foster, "an absolute horizon of social subjectivity." In this book, he examines gender issues in thirteen Brazilian films made (with one exception) after the 1985 return...

This book focuses on the relationship between Charlie Chaplin and American society. Maland traces the ups and downs of Chaplin's star image from 1913, when he began his movie career, to the 1980s, when his "Charlie" figure emerged in an ad for personal...

The career of Wisconsin-born Joseph Losey spanned over four decades and several countries. A self-proclaimed Marxist and veteran of the 1930s Soviet agit-prop theater, he collaborated with Bertholt Brecht before directing noir B-pictures in Hollywood. A...

While the actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886–1973) is perhaps best known today for his Oscar-nominated turn as a Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in the early twentieth century he was an internationally renowned silent film...