Inventing Elsa Maxwell
Author: Sam Staggs
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-10-16
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 0312699441
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Chronicles the life and career of Elsa Maxwell, who was an actress, socialite and the queen of party giving.
Lanterna Rally
eBook PDF Download Digital Library
R.S.V.P.
Author: Elsa Maxwell
Publisher:
Published: 1954
Total Pages: 362
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"She has been a pianist in a nickelodeon; an accompanist for a vaudeville star; a song writer; a partner in two Paris night clubs; a consultant to a dressmaker; a press agent for Monte Carlo; an actress in the movies, theater, radio and television; a script writer; a newpaper columnist; a contributor to magazines; and a lecturer. Recognized as an arbiter of international society and one of the world's most famous hostesses, the first party she ever gave for royalty cost seven dollars for a dozen guests... When she was twelve in San Francisco she was told she wouldn't be invited to a certain party because her family was too poor. 'I swore to myself I would give great parties all over the world to which everyone would want to come, but the rich would be invited only if they had something more important to offer than money'"--from jacket flaps.
All About "All About Eve"
Author: Sam Staggs
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Published: 2001-06-23
Total Pages: 505
ISBN-13: 1466830433
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →To millions of fans, All About Eve represents all that's witty and wonderful in classic Hollywood movies. Its old-fashioned, larger-than-life stars--including Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, and Celeste Holm--found their best roles in Eve and its sophisticated dialogue has entered the lexicon. But there's much more to know about All About Eve. Sam Staggs has written the definitive account of the making of this fascinating movie and its enormous influence on both film and popular culture. Staggs reveals everything about the movie--from who the famous European actress Margo Channing was based on to the hot-blooded romance on-set between Bette Davis and costar Gary Merrill, from the jump-start the movie gave Marilyn Monroe's career and the capstone it put on director Joseph L. Mankeiwicz's. All About "All About Eve" is not only full of rich detail about the movie, the director, and the stars, but also about the audience who loved it when it came out and adore it to this day.
Born to Be Hurt
Author: Sam Staggs
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Published: 2009-02-17
Total Pages: 287
ISBN-13: 1429942088
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In a passionate and witty behind-the-scenes expose, the author of All About "All About Eve" takes on the classic 1959 Douglas Sirk film starring Lana Turner Few films inspire the devotion of Imitation of Life, one of the most popular films of the '50s--a split personality drama that's both an irresistible women's picture and a dark commentary on ambition, motherhood, racial identity, and hope lost and found. Born to be Hurt is the first in-depth account of director Sirk's masterpiece. Lana Turner, on the brink of personal and professional ruin starred as Lora Meredith. African-American actress Juanita Moore played her servant and dearest friend, and Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner their respective daughters, caught up in the heartbreak of the black-passing-for-white daughter in the 1950s. Both Moore and Kohner were Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actress. Sam Staggs combines vast research, extensive interviews with surviving cast members, and superb storytelling into a masterpiece of film writing. Entertaining, saucy, and incisive, this is irresistible reading for every film fan.
Partnership for the Americas: Western Hemisphere Strategy and U.S. Southern Command
Author: James G. Stavridis
Publisher: NDU Press
Published: 2014-02-23
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Since its creation in 1963, United States Southern Command has been led by 30 senior officers representing all four of the armed forces. None has undertaken his leadership responsibilities with the cultural sensitivity and creativity demonstrated by Admiral Jim Stavridis during his tenure in command. Breaking with tradition, Admiral Stavridis discarded the customary military model as he organized the Southern Command Headquarters. In its place he created an organization designed not to subdue adversaries, but instead to build durable and enduring partnerships with friends. His observation that it is the business of Southern Command to launch "ideas not missiles" into the command's area of responsibility gained strategic resonance throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America, and at the highest levels in Washington, DC.
Empire of the Air
Author: Tom Lewis
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2021-09-15
Total Pages: 607
ISBN-13: 1501759345
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Empire of the Air tells the story of three American visionaries—Lee de Forest, Edwin Howard Armstrong, and David Sarnoff—whose imagination and dreams turned a hobbyist's toy into radio, launching the modern communications age. Tom Lewis weaves the story of these men and their achievements into a richly detailed and moving narrative that spans the first half of the twentieth century, a time when the American romance with science and technology was at its peak. Empire of the Air is a tale of pioneers on the frontier of a new technology, of American entrepreneurial spirit, and of the tragic collision between inventor and corporation.
Inventing Disneyland
Author: Alastair Dallas
Publisher: Theme Park Press
Published: 2018-12
Total Pages: 416
ISBN-13: 9781683901716
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"Meet the cadre of six men who imagined and described the specifics of Walt Disney’s vision for a new kind of family entertainment park—the men of WED Enterprises, who began the process of inventing Disneyland. Enter the bustling 'Disneyland Plans Room' at Walt Disney’s custom-designed studio. Disney drew upon the talents of tinkerers and hobbyists, artists, writers, engineers, architects, builders, and—especially—Hollywood art directors to realize his dream. See the site transformed from moonscape to wonderland and struggle along with the park’s management as they rush headlong toward an opening day that seems impossible to achieve. Based on years of original research and interviews, this is the true but unauthorized story—complete with vintage photos—of just what it took to invent the happiest place on earth and make Walt Disney's dream come true"--Back cover.
Walking Through Walls
Author: Philip Smith
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-09-16
Total Pages: 497
ISBN-13: 1416579656
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Running with Scissors meets Bewitched in this irresistible memoir, as Philip Smith describes growing up in 1960s Miami with his decorator father, who one day discovers he has the miraculous power to talk to the dead and heal the sick. After a full day of creating beautiful interiors for the rich and famous, Lew Smith would come home, take off his tie, and get down to his real work as a psychic healer who miraculously cured thousands of people. For his son, Philip, watching his father transform himself, at a moment's notice, from gracious society decorator into a healer with supernatural powers was a bit like living with Clark Kent and Superman. Walking Through Walls is Philip Smith's astonishing memoir of growing up in a household where séances, talking spirits, and exorcisms were daily occurrences, and inexplicable psychic healings resulted in visitors suddenly discarding their crutches and wheelchairs or being cured of fatal diseases. While there are benefits to having a miracle man in the house, Philip soon discovers the downside of living with a father who psychically knows everything he is doing. Surrounded by invisible spirits who tend to behave like nagging relatives, Philip looks for ways to escape his mystical home life—including forays into sex, surfing, and even Scientology. By turns hilarious and profound, Walking Through Walls recounts Philip Smith's often bizarre but always magical coming of age in a household that felt like a cross between Lourdes and the set of Rosemary's Baby, and shows how he managed to map out his own identity in the shadow of a father who, truly, loomed larger than life itself.
Antifragile
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-11-27
Total Pages: 545
ISBN-13: 0679645276
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call “efficient” not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. Praise for Antifragile “Ambitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining.”—The Economist “A bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives.”—Newsweek
Habeas Viscus
Author: Alexander Ghedi Weheliye
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2014-08-20
Total Pages: 335
ISBN-13: 0822376490
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of "racializing assemblages," taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye's argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the "bare life and biopolitics discourse" exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity.
