Ivan R. Dee – serie

In an age when the American public relies more on television for its news than any other medium, Edward Jay Epstein's detailed, probing analysis of the decision-making process in network news organizations has achieved the status of a classic. Mr. Epstein shows how internal corporate policy and budget requirements shape the direction of television news coverage. What we see on the network evening news, he demonstrates, does not mirror reality because TV's essential aim is not to inform but to excite viewers enough to induce them to "stay tuned." "The best book ever written about any aspect of television."—Richard Schickel. "The book is burnished with insights on virtually every page. Epstein's analysis seems to me incontestable, and is offered with great cogency, elegance, and sophistication."—Stephen J. Whitfield, Brandeis University. "A complex, fascinating book....Mr. Epstein shows that no educated citizen should rely exclusively or principally on TV news, but also that none should fail to watch it."—Wall Street Journal.

“The history of poetry and of Poetry in America are almost interchangeable, certainly inseparable,” wrote A. R. Ammons. Founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry magazine established its reputation immediately by printing T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago Poems,” Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” and the first important poems of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and many other then unknown, now classic authors. Publishing monthly without interruption, Poetry has become America’s most distinguished magazine of verse, presenting, often for the very first time, virtually every notable poet of the last nine decades—an unprecedented record. Decade by decade, this bountiful ninetieth-anniversary anthology from Poetry includes the poems of the major talents—along with several lesser known—in all their variety: William Butler Yeats, Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teasdale, D. H. Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Graves, May Sarton, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Hart Crane, Robert Penn Warren, Dylan Thomas, e. e. cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Anne Sexton, Thom Gunn, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Maxine Kumin, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and Galway Kinnell. In recent decades, Poetry has presented Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, Eavan Boland, Stephen Dunn, Mary Oliver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jane Kenyon, James Tate, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Marilyn Hacker, and many, many others. T. S. Eliot called Poetry “an American institution.” The Poetry Anthology is sure to be an American keepsake.

In surveys of the plays that will help readers and viewers follow the action with ease and understanding, Robert Fallon opens a window to Shakespeare's time while illuminating the timelessness of his works. Mr. Fallon examines the most frequently staged plays scene by scene, and those less frequently performed act by act. He provides intelligent readers with incisive and engaging commentary on character, theme, setting, poetry, and stage history. Wonderfully reader-friendly. —William Kerrigan, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

In an unprecedented television program last year, Woody Allen spoke to the camera for the first time about the entire range of his work, in an interview with Richard Schickel, the distinguished film critic and historian. Mr. Allen talked about how he does it, why he does it, its roots in his early life, and his current thinking about the state of his art. The result Woody Allen: A Life in Film, was one of the most popular and critically acclaimed programs in the history of Turner Classic Movies. But the presentation contained only a small fraction of Mr. Schickel's four-hour interview with the famed writer-director-actor. This new book reprints the complete conversation between the two men and includes a long essay of introduction by Mr. Schickel, which places Woody Allen's entire career in critical perspective. Readers will find Mr. Allen's reflections on his major preoccupations—the battle of the sexes; the conflict between reality and fantasy in his major films; mortality, religion, and the role that chance plays in the unfolding of our lives. The book also offers insights into Mr. Allen's working methods as a writer and the growth of his skills as a director, as well as his assessment of himself as an actor and his surprising views of his long life in the public eye. Brief but sharply honed, Woody Allen: A Life in Film is an essential book for anyone seeking to understand the life and times of one of the most important and least understood American filmmakers of our era.

One of the most accomplished novelists and screenwriters of our time (What Makes Sammy Run?, On the Waterfront), Budd Schulberg is a master of the art of the short story, as he proved in his early collection Some Faces in the Crowd. The crowd is the American landscape: indelible characters drawn coast-to-coast from the teeming streets of New York to tables at Hollywood's legendary nightclub, Ciro's. In these sparkling stories, Schulberg brings us vivid, restless people haunted by abrupt failure in the wake of rapid success. In "The Arkansas Traveler" he gives us Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes's down-home stories of Riddle, Arkansas, which later became the stuff of the celebrated movie A Face in the Crowd. "Schulberg's characters have to take the responsibility for what they do. They have to pay moral costs and face defeats."—New York Times. "Packed with verisimilitude.

At a crucial point in the twentieth century, as Nazi Germany prepared for war, negotiations between Britain, France, and the Soviet Union became the last chance to halt Hitler’s aggression. Incredibly, the French and British governments dallied, talks failed, and in August 1939 the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. Michael Carley’s gripping account of these negotiations is not a pretty story. It is about the failures of appeasement and collective security in Europe. It is about moral depravity and blindness, about villains and cowards, and about heroes who stood against the intellectual and popular tides of their time. Some died for their beliefs, others labored in obscurity and have been nearly forgotten. In 1939 they sought to make the Grand Alliance that never was between France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. This story of their efforts is background to the wartime alliance created in 1941 without France but with the United States in order to defeat a demonic enemy. 1939 is based upon Mr. Carley’s longtime research on the period, including work in French, British, and newly opened Soviet archives. He challenges prevailing interpretations of the origins of World War II by situating 1939 at the end of the early cold war between the Soviet Union, France, and Britain, and by showing how anti-communism was the major cause of the failure to form an alliance against Hitler. 1939 was published on September 1, the sixtieth anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland and the start of the war.