Mr. Rollyson is the author of The Life of William Faulkner and The Last Days of…
Joseph McBride and Scott Eyman approach their subjects from the inside and outside, providing, in the process, a stereoptical view of two filmmakers who turned the world cinematic.
Was Hitchcock a sadist? Laurence Leamer does not say, though his director is certainly a man who seemed to enjoy the suffering of certain actresses, treating them as extensions of his own sexual fantasies.
John Ragosta, in a brilliant recuperation of Henry’s reputation and a nod toward the politics of today, shows that like Washington, Henry feared that partisanship threatened the foundations of the republic.
Whatever their differences, they knew democracy was a fragile form of government, and each of them believed that the people and their parties were susceptible to their leaders’ subversion of democratic principles.
Andersson’s method of cross-examining his sources is helpful in assessing, say, biographies of Hollywood and other famous figures that are replete with precisely the kind of bogus testimony that he demolishes.
The psychology of biography and the tensions between biographers and subjects are given full play in this lucid and insightful book.
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