The author reopens the unsolved mystery of the most catastrophic library fire in American history. This book chronicles the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) fire, and its aftermath, to showcase the crucial role that libraries play in our lives. The author delves into the evolution of libraries around the world, from their humble beginnings to their status as a cornerstone of the community; brings the departments of the library to life through on-the-ground reporting; reflects on her own experiences in libraries; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL. The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library? In addition to examining the circumstances of the fire, the author delves into the history of the LAPL. The book introduces us to a cast of characters from libraries past and present - from Mary Foy; who in 1880 at eighteen years old was named the head of the LAPL at a time when men still dominated the role, to Dr. C.J.K. Jones, "The Human Encyclopedia," who roamed the library dispensing information. The book introduces readers to Charles Lummis, an eccentric journalist and adventurer who was determined to make the L.A. library one of the best in the world, and to the staff in the twenty-first century, who work every day to ensure that their institution remains a vital part of the city it serves.--adapted from publisher's description and end-papers.

From 1996 through 2004, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal combined-- and collided-- to help bring the Lakers three straight championships and restore the franchise as a powerhouse.

In this riveting popular history, the creator of You Must Remember This probes the inner workings of Hollywood’s glamorous golden age through the stories of some of the dozens of actresses pursued by Howard Hughes, to reveal how the millionaire mogul’s obsessions with sex, power and publicity trapped, abused, or benefitted women who dreamt of screen stardom. In recent months, the media has reported on scores of entertainment figures who used their power and money in Hollywood to sexually harass and coerce some of the most talented women in cinema and television. But as Karina Longworth reminds us, long before the Harvey Weinsteins there was Howard Hughes—the Texas millionaire, pilot, and filmmaker whose reputation as a cinematic provocateur was matched only by that as a prolific womanizer. His supposed conquests between his first divorce in the late 1920s and his marriage to actress Jean Peters in 1957 included many of Hollywood’s most famous actresses, among them Billie Dove, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner. From promoting bombshells like Jean Harlow and Jane Russell to his contentious battles with the censors, Hughes—perhaps more than any other filmmaker of his era—commoditized male desire as he objectified and sexualized women. Yet there were also numerous women pulled into Hughes’s grasp who never made it to the screen, sometimes virtually imprisoned by an increasingly paranoid and disturbed Hughes, who retained multitudes of private investigators, security personnel, and informers to make certain these actresses would not escape his clutches. Vivid, perceptive, timely, and ridiculously entertaining, The Seducer is a landmark work that examines women, sex, and male power in Hollywood during its golden age—a legacy that endures nearly a century later.

The exhortation to “Go West!” has always sparked the American imagination. But for gays, lesbians, and transgendered people, the City of Angels provided a special home and gave rise to one of the most influential gay cultures in the world. Drawing on rare archives and photographs as well as more than three hundred interviews, Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons chart L.A.'s unique gay history, from the first missionary encounters with Native American cross-gendered “two spirits” to cross-dressing frontier women in search of their fortunes; from the bohemian freedom of early Hollywood to the explosion of gay life during World War II to the underground radicalism set off by the 1950s blacklist; and from the 1960s gay liberation movement to the creation of gay marketing in the 1990s.

"In Hooked on Hollywood, Maltin opens up his personal archive to take readers on a fascinating journey through film history. He first interviewed greats of Hollywood as a precocious teenager in 1960s New York City. Early Maltin interviews had literally been stored in his garage for more than 40 years until GoodKnight Books brought them to light for the first time in this volume to entertain readers and inform future film scholars. In addition, key feature articles from Maltin's newsletter Movie Crazy are published here for the first time, providing new perspectives on the Warner Bros. classics Casablanca and Gold Diggers of 1933 as well as many other masterpieces--and bombs--from Hollywood history. Finally, Maltin looks back at what he considers Hollywood's "overlooked" studio, RKO Radio Pictures, which gave us such classics as King Kong and the many dance musicals of Astaire and Rogers. In Leonard's unique and witty style, he looks at dozens of obscure RKO features from the 1930s, including saucy pre-Codes, musicals, comedies, and mysteries. Leonard Maltin's love of movies and vast knowledge about their history shines through from the first page to the last in this unique volume, which includes 150 rare photos and a comprehensive index."--

"Hollywood: The Oral History covers the history of Hollywood from the Silent era up to the 21st century. What makes this book unique from any other survey of Hollywood's history is that it is the history of an art form through the words of those people who created it - from Harold Lloyd to Katharine Hepburn to Warren Beatty to Jane Fonda and beyond, including directors, writers, producers, editors, designers of sets and costumes. As such, the authenticity of the text is irrefutable. The material in the book - gathered over the decades by the American Film Institute - has never been published before, has never been heard before"--Publisher's description.

Isaias Hellman, a Jewish immigrant, arrived in California in 1859 with little money in his pocket and his brother Herman by his side. By the time he died, he had effectively transformed Los Angeles into the modern metropolis we see today. In Frances Dinkelspeil's groundbreaking history, the early days of California are seen through the life of a man who started out as a simple store owner only to become California's premier money man of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Growing up as a young immigrant, Hellman quickly learned the use to which capital could be put, founding Los Angeles's Farmers and Merchants Bank, that city's first successful bank, and transforming Wells Fargo into one of the West's biggest financial institutions. He invested money with Henry Huntington to build trolley lines, lent Edward Doheny the funds that led him to discover California's huge oil reserves, and assisted Harrison Gray Otis in acquiring full ownership of the Los Angeles Times. Hellman led the building of Los Angeles's first synagogue, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, helped start the University of Southern California, and served as Regent of the University of California. His influence, however, was not limited to Los Angeles. He controlled the California wine industry for almost 20 years, and after San Francisco's devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, calmed the financial markets there in order to help that great city rise from the ashes. With all of these accomplishments, Isaias Hellman almost single-handedly brought California into modernity --

Often referred to as the city of the future, Los Angeles is known for its sprawl, its constant change, and its special relationship to the film industry. The twelve contributors to Looking for Los Angeles focus on dramatic shifts in the urban landscape, important moments in the city's architectural history, and the role of the image in this mecca of image makers. Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom searches for Los Angeles's center and finds a city that "breaks itself down, builds itself up again, displaces and regroups itself" and where "freedom of movement" is a basic premise of life. Historian Philip Ethington documents the city's changing character in both text and images, urban studies professor Dana Cuff exposes the demise of once-thriving urban neighborhoods to make way for Modernist housing projects, and anthropologist Susan A. Phillips invites us on a personal journey into "the projects" to meet gang members and their families today. Artist Robbert Flick offers a sixteen-page, full-color photo-essay that takes us on a "drive-by" along Alameda Avenue, architectural historian Thomas S. Hines traces Frank Lloyd Wright's influence on the life and career of photographer Edmund Teske, and film historian Robert L. Carringer examines Los Angeles as a setting for Hollywood feature films.

In Movieland, Jerome Charyn mingles his own life as a moviegoer with the history, romance, and sadness of Hollywood. He meets Paul Newman, Viveca Lindfors, and Mae Clark, the actress who was the original bride of Frankenstein; explores Cinecitta, Mussolini's own Hollywood on the Tiber; recalls his own life as Otto Preminger's house writer (and jester) during Preminger's decline; reinvents the lost years and lost stars of the silent era --Irving Thalberg, Gloria Swanson, and Clara Bow -- and seeks out the hieroglyphics of modern Hollywood; writes of the Nazi officer who saved the Cinematheque Francaise and its library of American films; and pays homage to Hollywood's heroes, victims, goddesses, and neglected lords: Louise Brooks, Raymond Chandler, Carole Landis, Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, and more.

"In the 1920s, bored with teaching art to schoolkids, Edith Head bluffed her way into a job in the Paramount wardrobe department. Soon she rose to the position of Chief Costume Designer, and supervised virtually every Paramount film until the late 1960s. This book traces a career that spanned the history of 20th-century film"--Provided by publisher.

"Los Angeles is a city that runs from its own past" explains historian and Bison Archives owner Marc Wanamaker. Many of Hollywood's legendary sets and props, mansions, theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, and even the studios and the films they produced are now either gone or have been redeveloped, repurposed, or remade beyond recognition. Even more disarmingly, the physical ephemera associated with such items is often MIA as well. Photographs, files, maps, documents, menus, production paperwork, records, manuscripts, everything from matchbooks to movie magazines and entire movie backlots have now been lost in the backwash of dubious progress, short-sighted corporate mindsets, and civic indifference. Fortunately, for the last fifty years, in the very epicenter of Hollywood, thanks to Wanamaker, there has existed a haven where over 70,000 of these items, physically or photographically, have been collected and protected. These artifacts tell the story of Hollywood's glorious past, as well as its uncertain future as the hub of filmmaking in America"--

"The film Casablanca opens with the words, "With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas." Leslie Epstein's Hill of Beans is the story of how one nation, one industry, and in particular one man responded to that desperate hope. That man is Jack Warner. His impossible goal is to make world events--most importantly, the invasion of North Africa by British and American forces in 1942--coincide with the release of his new film about a group of refugees marooned in Morocco. Arrayed against him are Stalin and Hitler, as well as Josef Goebbels, Franklin Roosevelt, a powerful gossip columnist, and above all a beautiful young woman with a terrible secret. His only weapons are his hutzpah and his heroism as he struggles to bring cinema and city, conflict and conference together in an epic command performance. Hill of Beans is the novel that Leslie Epstein--the son and nephew of Philip and Julius Epstein, the screenwriters of Casablanca--was born to write"--

"Songs of Sonderling is the story of Jacob Sonderling's unique contributions to Jewish liturgical music. Rabbi Sonderling was many things: a descendant of Chassidic rebbes, a rationalist, a Reform rabbi, a Zionist, an army chaplain, a celebrated orator, an artistic soul. From his early career at the Hamburg Temple and German Army service in World War I, to his wandering years in the Eastern United States and founding of the Society for Jewish Culture-Fairfax Temple in Los Angeles, Sonderling cultivated a unique aesthetic vision of Judaism, a "five-sense appeal." Jonathan L. Friedmann and John F. Guest document and analyze Sonderling's experience and expression of Judaism through music. Rabbi Sonderling's vision yielded liturgical commissions from exiled Viennese Jewish composers who arrived in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s. Through these musical settings, activities at the Fairfax Temple, and involvement with the Los Angeles campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Sonderling made an indelible mark on the city's Jewish community and the wider musical world. Songs of Sonderling focuses on the commissions Sonderling made from 1938 to 1945: Ernst Toch's Cantata of the Bitter Herbs, Arnold Schoenberg's Kol Nidre, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's A Passover Psalm and Prayer, and Eric Zeisl's Requiem Ebraico. Through musical analyses and an examination of Sonderling's career in Los Angeles, Friedmann and Guest contribute to the study of Jewish liturgical music, to Jewish history in the American West, to Jewish identity in the twentieth century, and to Jewish diaspora writ large"--

This is the story of how the politicians took Tinseltown to task in the late 1940s and 1950s. As the Cold War began in earnest, the search for 'Reds under the bed', later led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, was felt most keenly in Hollywood where the investigations were carried out under the full glare of the flashlights.

Emerge: Putting Southern California on the art world map -- Claim: assemblage and self-possession -- Organize: Building an exhibitionary complex -- In motion: the performative impulse -- Conclusion. Noshun: Black Los Angeles and the global imagination

One of the "top ten women who write superior crime fiction" (Charles Champlin, mystery reviewer for the "Los Angeles Times), Rochelle Krich propels her exceptional sleuth, LAPD homicide detective Jessie Drake, into a deadly maze of rage, revenge, and moral complexities in what is the award-winning author's most gripping and provocative novel to date. At first glance it appears to be a random multiple murder -- a prominent plastic surgeon and his nurse and receptionist shot dead in their plush Century City office. But to Jessie Drake, the savage nature of Dr. Ronald Bushnell's fatal wounds suggests a crime of intense passion...and bitter retribution.Following her suspicions, the conscience-driven detective takes her investigation to the core of the seemingly harmonious family life of the slain surgeon. On the surface, Bushnell had everything: respect, money, a palatial home, a loving wife and daughter. But there is a joker in the deck, Bushnell's foster son, Ethan Meissner -- a troubled young loner with dark periods in his history. And the boy hasn't been seen since the murders.Ethan's unexplained disappearance suggests that the runaway knows something; he may be a material witness in a triple homicide or a premeditated killer...or another victim. The search for the missing teenager takes Jessie across many volatile borders -- those between nations, between families, and the razor-thin one that separates love from hatred. But the truth lies somewhere in a harrowing past of tainted blood and horrific personal tragedy. The deeper Jessie ventures into this shadow world of cruelty and secrets, the more she is haunted by the echoes of a lost soul's unanswered cry for help...and by the mostheinous crime of all, in which the sins of the guilty are visited on the innocent.

Berend's memoir offers an interesting case study, a subjective addition to the "objective" historical works on Central and Eastern European state socialism. It describes the hard choices of intellectuals in a dictatorial state: 1. remain in isolation, concentrate on scholarly works, and exclude politics in your personal life; 2. be in opposition, criticize and unveil the regime, accept discrimination and exclusion; 3. remain within the establishment and work for reforming the country using legal possibilities to criticize the regime and to achieve changes from within. Ivan T. Berend, is Distinguished Professor at the University of California Los Angeles, Director of the European Studies Program. He was one of the masterminds of regime change in Hungary. He made a career in Hungary as a university professor, Rector of the University of Economics (1973-79), and President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1985-90). He was President of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (1995-2000), and Vice-President of the International Economic History Association (1986-1994). His research interests are the complex economic, social, ideological, and cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th-20th century; economic modernization; problems of European backwardness; transition from state socialism to capitalism. He published 26 books and more than 120 studies.--Publisher's description