Here are 100 books that Bette Davis Black and White fans have personally recommended if you like
Bette Davis Black and White.
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I have loved classic Hollywood movies since childhood, especially the legendary actresses of the era. My grandmother nurtured this love, taking me to the video stores to rent movies and the library to read biographies and books about actresses and Old Hollywood. Now, I am a professor of film history at Chapman University, where I teach classes on American cinema and women in film. Still, my passion for female-centered classic Hollywood movies remains strong. I have compiled a list showing the multi-faceted ways that women have participated in Hollywood cinema during its first century.
When I first read this book over twenty years ago, I thought, finally, someone who sees what I see in classic Hollywood films—dynamic and exciting women. She traces American women onscreen: from the flappers of the 1920s (It girl Clara Bow) to the European goddesses Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich to the sultry Mae West in the 1930s, to the fast-talking Dames Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, and to Marilyn Monroe and her postwar millionaire-seeking pals.
Her multi-decade analysis contemplates what changed in the 1970s-80s; as American women earned greater equity in real life, their onscreen representation paled compared to their pre-WWII sisters. A quarter into the twenty-first century, female star-driven Hollywood films remain an anomaly. Read this book to find out why it was the inverse more than ninety years ago.
A revolutionary classic of feminist cinema criticism, Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape remains as insightful, searing, and relevant as it was the day it was first published. Ranging across time and genres from the golden age of Hollywood to films of the late twentieth century, Haskell analyzes images of women in movies, the relationship between these images and the status of women in society, the stars who fit these images or defied them, and the attitudes of their directors. This new edition features both a new foreword by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis and a new introduction…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I have loved classic Hollywood movies since childhood, especially the legendary actresses of the era. My grandmother nurtured this love, taking me to the video stores to rent movies and the library to read biographies and books about actresses and Old Hollywood. Now, I am a professor of film history at Chapman University, where I teach classes on American cinema and women in film. Still, my passion for female-centered classic Hollywood movies remains strong. I have compiled a list showing the multi-faceted ways that women have participated in Hollywood cinema during its first century.
When you think of Method acting—which actors come to mind? Marlon Brando, James Dean, Robert De Niro…in other words, all men? This is where Keri Walsh’s landmark book comes in, challenging the cultural presumption that Method acting is a male craft.
This book is a revelation for both my teaching and research. Walsh argues that actresses like Kim Stanley, Shelley Winters, and Jane Fonda developed a feminist Method of acting that synthesized with second-wave feminism. Even more striking is their omission from American cinema histories because Walsh underscores how critics praised these women and their films, won Oscars, and/or they were popular with audiences in their contemporary moment.
This book sets the historical record straight by showing that Method acting was equally the domain of Hollywood women and men.
Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film is the first study dedicated to understanding the work of female Method actors on film.
While Method acting on film has typically been associated with the explosive machismo of actors like Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, this book explores an alternate tradition within the Method-the work that women from the Actors Studio did in Hollywood. Covering the period from the end of the Second World War until the 1970s, this study shows how the women associated with the Actors Studio increasingly used Method acting in ways that were compatible with their burgeoning…
I have loved classic Hollywood movies since childhood, especially the legendary actresses of the era. My grandmother nurtured this love, taking me to the video stores to rent movies and the library to read biographies and books about actresses and Old Hollywood. Now, I am a professor of film history at Chapman University, where I teach classes on American cinema and women in film. Still, my passion for female-centered classic Hollywood movies remains strong. I have compiled a list showing the multi-faceted ways that women have participated in Hollywood cinema during its first century.
When I read this book, I was relieved—at long last, a book that underscored the behind-the-scenes contributions of working women in the 1930s and 1940s. J.E. Smyth’s fascinating study brings to light new dimensions to screen legends Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, and fashion designer Edith Head, but also women less known to the greater public—the intrepid editors like Barbara McLean and Margaret Booth, three-time Screenwriter Guild president Mary J. McCall, and producers like Joan Harrison and Virginia Van Upp.
I like how this book provides a counter-history to the male-dominated narratives of Hollywood. Smyth shows that women found other ways outside of directing to leave their mark on Hollywood in the twentieth century.
Looking back on her career in 1977, Bette Davis remembered with pride, "Women owned Hollywood for twenty years." She had a point. Between 1930 and 1950, over 40% of film industry employees were women, 25% of all screenwriters were female, two women supervised all studio feature output and could order retakes on any director's work, one woman ran MGM behind the scenes, over a dozen women worked as producers, a woman headed the Screen Writers Guild three times, and press claimed Hollywood was a generation or two ahead of the rest of the country in terms of gender equality and…
Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, drought-stricken, and ready to catch fire. It’s 1967, and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war.
Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he…
I have loved classic Hollywood movies since childhood, especially the legendary actresses of the era. My grandmother nurtured this love, taking me to the video stores to rent movies and the library to read biographies and books about actresses and Old Hollywood. Now, I am a professor of film history at Chapman University, where I teach classes on American cinema and women in film. Still, my passion for female-centered classic Hollywood movies remains strong. I have compiled a list showing the multi-faceted ways that women have participated in Hollywood cinema during its first century.
In my teen years, I was a voracious reader of star biographies. I still love them, and the late Cari Beauchamp’s book is a page-turning, spellbinding biography that details the life of pioneering screenwriter Frances Marion, the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood for nearly three decades.
Beauchamp also introduces readers to the early Hollywood sisterhood network that furnished Marion and other powerful women in American film at the time (Mary Pickford, Adela Rogers St. John, Hedda Hopper). I recommend this book as a historical backdrop for understanding the current gender parity issues plaguing Hollywood.
Cari Beauchamp masterfully combines biography with social and cultural history to examine the lives of Frances Marion and her many female colleagues who shaped filmmaking from 1912 through the 1940s. Frances Marion was Hollywood's highest paid screenwriter--male or female--or almost three decades, wrote almost 200 produced films and won Academy Awards for writing "The Big House" and "The Champ."
Born and raised in Poland during the Cold War, I learned that writers and intellectuals could be jailed, exiled, or even killed for their ideas. I came to James Baldwin over two decades ago in search of literature that told of freedom and humanism beyond national borders and simplistic binaries. As a Black queer man driven away from his homeland, Baldwin linked his personal pain, heartbreak, and torment to his public life, authorship, and activism. His art and life story have both inspired my labors as a bilingual and bicultural literary critic and biographer and provided a template for my own journey as an immigrant, mother of a Black child, teacher, writer, and scholar.
This book grew out of the labor of love both scholarly and personal. It brings together three generations of scholars and diverse, interdisciplinary approaches to this complex and still largely misunderstood and underappreciated Black queer writer and theorist of 20th-century US identity. Michele Elam’s introduction deftly reevaluates and situates Baldwin as a 20th-century master for contemporary readers here and now, while the essays collected here provide cutting-edge scholarship and much nuance and fresh insight. Theoretically rich and with several exquisitely written essays, it touches upon all of the major aspects of the writer’s fascinating life and works.
This Companion offers fresh insight into the art and politics of James Baldwin, one of the most important writers and provocative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Black, gay, and gifted, he was hailed as a 'spokesman for the race', although he personally, and controversially, eschewed titles and classifications of all kinds. Individual essays examine his classic novels and nonfiction as well as his work across lesser-examined domains: poetry, music, theatre, sermon, photo-text, children's literature, public media, comedy, and artistic collaboration. In doing so, The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin captures the power and influence of his work during the…
In the 1960s, inspired by the civil rights and antiwar movements, the women's and environmental movements, and the counterculture, I became an activist and political organizer. Eventually, I called myself a revolutionary and helped found a militant underground organization. Out of anger and youthful naiveté, and being in too much of a hurry to think clearly, I made some superficial choices and did some things I now regret. Ever since, I have been hypersensitive to the nuances and contradictions in what motivates people to become radicals and to flirt with—or embrace—violence as a legitimate action.
Rereading it made me angry all over again. Much about U.S. race relations has improved since Baldwin's essay was published in 1963. But rereading it now, after six decades when I myself have sometimes been active in anti-racist efforts, I was stunned by how penetrating and accurate his critique remains, and how enduring the depredations he described back then have proven to be.
And yet! And yet, the writing is suffused with empathy and, disarmingly, even with love. Discrimination and inequality made Baldwin a militant, but he never turned mean and never embraced violence. He is a model of how to stay humane.
'A seminal meditation on race by one of our greatest writers' Barack Obama
'We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation'
James Baldwin's impassioned plea to 'end the racial nightmare' in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice.
Homeless following the death of his adoptive parents in a car crash and the subsequent loss of their farm tenancy, Seb decides to enrol as a residential student at the Asklepios Foundation, a College of Natural Medicine, boasting a sanctuary modelled on an ancient Greek healing temple. Spending a night…
I have been an activist working on issues relating to human rights and youth protection for over fifteen years and during that time I worked as a lawyer and was lucky enough to make films and write two novels. Eventually, I would concentrate solely on activism and my reading would become very specific and as the focus of my activism changed and I directed my energies to corporate accountability my reading changed course again. The list I offer is from talented writers on important subjects, all write extremely well about things that matter to a human rights activist.
Baldwin writes both fiction and non-fiction beautifully and intimately and if you don’t know his non-fiction work then this is a very good place to start. Across a number of essays, he elegantly sets out the deep struggle faced by Black Americans and articulates how a different humanity, in America and beyond, and a different future can be realized.
#26 on The Guardian's list of 100 best nonfiction books of all time, the essays explore what it means to be Black in America
In an age of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin's essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. With films like I Am Not Your Negro and the forthcoming If Beale Street Could Talk bringing renewed interest to Baldwin's life and work, Notes of a Native Son serves as a valuable introduction.
Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was…
I have taught history at the University of Alabama since the year 2000, and I have been working and writing as a historian of American slavery for more than twenty-five years. It is not an easy subject to spend time with, but it is also not a subject we can afford to turn away from because it makes us uncomfortable. Slavery may not be the only thing you need to understand about American history, but you cannot effectively understand American history without it.
Because the buying and selling of enslaved people was enormously profitable and entirely legal in the United States before the Civil War, even free Black people lived in fear that they might be kidnapped, sold illegally as slaves, and never heard from by their friends and families again. Though many Americans are familiar with the experience of Solomon Northup, as relayed in his memoir Twelve Years a Slave and the film of the same name, Richard Bell demonstrates how kidnapping was widespread in the nineteenth century and how thin the line could be between freedom and slavery.
This “superbly researched and engaging” (The Wall Street Journal) true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South—and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice belongs “alongside the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edward P. Jones, and Toni Morrison” (Jane Kamensky, Professor of American History at Harvard University).
Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are…
I am a multi-award-winning African Australian writer, and have a deep passion for stories by people of colour, stories that engage with difference. I write across genres and forms, and my award-winning works are mostly Afrocentric. I am especially curious about unique voices in black speculative fiction in transformative stories of culture, diversity, climate change, writing the other, and betwixt.
The tales in Tananarive Due’s The Wishing Pool and Other Stories have a certain linger and enchantment that touch the reader across many levels.
It casts Black protagonists with revolutionary focus in the everyday, in poignant tellings deeply engraved with humanity and what else. Due journeys the reader across a personal odyssey infused with Black horror real as touch.
In her first new book in seven years, Tananarive Due further cements her status as a leading innovator in Black horror and Afrofuturism; featuring the 2023 World Fantasy Award–winning story, “Incident at Bear Creek Lodge”!
“In these 14 powerhouse stories, Due probes history, the grim present moment, and not so far-flung futures, delivering an expansive collection that still hits close to home . . . There are no false notes; every piece is a study in tension, showcasing Due's mastery at balancing action, suspense, and emotion. Centering Black characters and often Black experiences, this is a standout in both Black…
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
by
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
Paul D. Escott is the author of thirteen books focused on the Confederacy or the Union, is co-author of other volumes, and has written many articles and book chapters. He won research fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Whitney M. Young Jr. Foundation and is the Reynolds Professor of History Emeritus from Wake Forest University.
The decision to recruit Black soldiers made an enormous difference in the war and in politics. Black recruits to the U.S. Army equaled all the northern men lost in the first two years of fighting and proved themselves on many battlefields. Their sacrifice also made an irrefutable case for Black rights. Joseph Glatthaar’s book admirably tells the story of these soldiers and their white officers.
Sixteen months after the start of the American Civil War, the Federal government, having vastly underestimated the length and manpower demands of the war, began to recruit black soldiers. This revolutionary policy gave 180,000 free blacks and former slaves the opportunity to prove themselves on the battlefield as part of the United States Colored Troops. By the end of the war, 37,000 in their ranks had given their lives for the cause of freedom.
In Forged in Battle, originally published in 1990, award-winning historian Joseph T. Glatthaar re-creates the events that gave these troops and their 7,000 white officers justifiable…
