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BOOKS OF NOTE
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Celluloid Skyline
NEW YORK AND THE MOVIES
James Sanders
Knopf, 2001

A tale of two cities, both called "New York." The first is a real city, an urban agglomeration of millions. The second is a mythic city, so rich in memory and association and sense of place that to people everywhere it has come to seem real: the New York of films such as 42nd Street, Rear Window, King Kong, Dead End, The Naked City, Ghostbusters, Annie Hall, Taxi Driver and Do the Right Thing—a magical city of the imagination that is as complex, dynamic and familiar as its namesake of stone and steel.

As James Sanders shows in Celluloid Skyline, the dream city of the movies—created by more than a century of films, since the very dawn of the medium itself—may hold the secret to the glamour of its real counterpart. Here are the cocktail parties and power lunches, the subway chases and opening nights, the playground rumbles and observation deck romances. Here is an invented Gotham, a place designed specifically for action, drama and adventure, a city of bright avenues and mysterious sidestreets, of soaring towers and intimate corners, where remarkable people do exciting, amusing, romantic, scary things. Sanders takes us from the tenement to the penthouse, from New York to Hollywood and back again, from 1896 to the present, all the while showing how the real and mythic cities reflected, changed and taught each other.

Lavishly illustrated with scores of rare and unusual production images culled from Sanders‚ decade-long research in studio archives and private collections around the country, Celluloid Skyline offers a new way to see not only America's greatest metropolis but also cities the world over.
 
The Keystone Kid
TALES OF EARLY HOLLYWOOD
Coy Watson, Jr.
Santa Monica Press, 2001
 
Coy Watson, Jr. made his motion picture debut in 1913 when he was nine months old. Before he could walk or talk, Watson had appeared in several of Mack Sennett's popular "Keystone Cop" comedies, earning him the nickname "The Keystone Kid" and establishing him as Hollywood's first child star. From 1913 to 1930, Watson acted in over 60 movies, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Dark Angel, Show People, Puttin' on the Ritz, I'm No Angel, State's Attorney and many other classics.

In The Keystone Kid, Watson shares his memories of the idyllic early days of Hollywood and of being raised as a member of "The First Family of Hollywood." Watson's father, Coy, Sr., acted alongside the biggest stars of popular Westerns before becoming the first special effects man in Hollywood. Watson, his father and his brothers and sisters went on to appear in over 1,000 movies, including many classics with some of Hollywood's biggest stars. In 1999, the Watson Family was honored with a "Star" on Hollywood Boulevard's "Hollywood Walk of Fame" for their unique contributions to the film industry.

The Keystone Kid is nicely packaged, with some amazing photographs. This is a great piece of Hollywood history.
 
Sean Connery
A BIOGRAPHY
Bob McCabe
Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001
 
Bob McCabe captures the life and times of this talented and much-respected actor in his biography of the legendary Sean Connery. This first photographic tribute biography contains great pictures and tells the story of the complex and compelling appeal of one of the world's greatest masculine actors. Voted the sexiest man alive and knighted on New Year's Eve, 1999, by Queen Elizabeth, the Oscar Award-winning actor continues to entertain us—even though he has never really matched his work as James Bond. With the recent release of Finding Forrester and the upcoming Indiana Jones 4 in the summer of 2003, Connery remains one of Hollywood's leading men. This biography is a celebration of Connery's achievements both on and off the big screen, a revealing look at the man we all know as the real "007."

Somewhere For Me
A BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD RODGERS
Meryle Secrest
Knopf, 2001

Everywhere regarded as one of our most brilliant composers—more than 900 published songs, 40 Broadway musicals, numerous films, every award conceivable—Richard Rodgers, the man, has nonetheless been consistently misunderstood—seen as the almost stolid opposite of what he really was.

Now Meryle Secrest—biographer of Frank Lloyd Wright, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein—rings her skills to this full-scale life of Rodgers. She shows us for the first time the complexities of his nature, his emotional fault lines and, most important, the wellsprings of his art.

Secrest writes of his childhood and how he learned at an early age to mask his feelings, escaping into the world of operetta. She follows his close and productive working relationship with Lorenz Hart—a collaboration that resulted in more than 30 Broadway and West End musicals, including Babes in Arms and Pal Joey, but was ultimately undone by Hart's drinking. She evokes Rodgers‚ triumphant second collaboration with the gifted—and happily stable—Oscar Hammerstein, which gave us Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and more. She explores Rodgers' own problems with alcohol, as well as his periodic breakdowns; and she illuminates the deep-rooted tensions that underlay his 49-year marriage to Dorothy Feiner.

Somewhere for Me is both a lively portrait of American musical theatre and a revelation of the brilliant, passionate, moody and mercurial artist who was one of its greatest figures.

Uncle Tungsten
MEMORIES OF A CHEMICAL BOYHOOD
Oliver Sacks
Knopf, 2001

From his earliest days, Oliver Sacks—the distinguished neurologist who is also one of the best storytellers of our time—was irresistibly drawn to understanding the natural world. Born into a large family of doctors, metallurgists, chemists, physicists and teachers, his curiosity was encouraged and abetted by aunts, uncles, parents and older brothers. But soon after his sixth birthday, the Second World War broke out and he was evacuated from London—as were hundreds of thousands of children—to escape the bombing. Exiled to a school that rivaled Dickens‚ grimmest, fed on a steady diet of turnips and beetroots, tormented by a sadistic headmaster and allowed home only once in four years, he felt desolate and abandoned.

When he returned to London in 1943 at the age of ten, he was a changed, withdrawn boy, one who desperately needed order to make sense of his life. He was sustained by his secret passions: for numbers, for metals and for finding patterns in the world around him. Under the tutelage of his "chemical" uncle, Uncle tungsten, Sacks began to experiment with "the stinks and bangs that almost define a first entry into chemistry": tossing sodium off a bridge to see it take fire in the water below; producing billowing clouds of noxious-smelling chemicals in his home lab. As his interests spread to investigations of batteries and bulbs, vacuum tubes and photography, he discovered his first great scientific heroes—men and women whose genius lay in understanding the hidden order of things and disclosing the forces that sustain and support the tangible world. There was Humphry Davy, the boyish chemist who delighted in sending flaming globules of metal shooting across his lab; Marie Curie, whose heroic efforts in isolating radium would ultimately lead to the unlocking of the secrets of the atom; and Dmitri Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table, whose pursuit of the classification of elements unfolds like a detective story.

Uncle Tungsten vividly evokes a time when virtual reality had not yet displayed a hands-on knowledge of the world. It draws us into a journey of discovery that reveals, through the enchantment and wonder of a childhood passion, the birth of an extraordinary and original mind.

Temperament
THE IDEA THAT SOLVED MUSIC'S GREATEST RIDDLE
Stuart Isacoff
Knopf, 2001

From the time of the ancient Greeks, the creation of music was thought to be governed by immutable and divine mathematical certainties. But, over time, skeptics came to believe that those rules limited harmonic possibilities. In Temperament, we see the traditionalists and the innovators battling across the centuries, engaging great thinkers like Newton, Kepler and Descartes as well as musicians, craftsmen, church leaders and heads of state. At the heart of their dispute is the question of how the tones of a musical scale should be selected.

The breakthrough came in the 18th century, when the modern keyboard was given perfect symmetry through a tuning of equal temperament, each pitch reliably equidistant from the ones that precede and follow it. This tuning allows a musical pattern begun on one note to be duplicated when starting on any other; it creates a musical universe in which the relationships between tones are reliably, uniformly consistent—a universe of greatly expanded possibility, one that allowed Liszt, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy and all those who followed to compose the piano music we listen to day.

Stuart Isacoff relates the story of the reinvention of the piano—a story that encompasses social history, religion, philosophy and science as well as musicology—in a concise and clear narrative.

The Legend Of The Planet Of The Apes
OR HOW HOLLYWOOD TURNED DARWIN UPSIDE DOWN
Brian Pendreigh
Boxtree/Trafalgar, 2001
 

Award-winning Scottish film journalist Brian Pendreigh traces the story of Planet of the Apes, from the original French novel, through the struggle to turn it into a film, to smash box-office success, before considering the sequels and the new version from director Tim Burton. Pendreigh pays personal tribute to the writers, asks leading scientists "Could it happen?"—and gets some surprising answers. And, for the first time, he reveals the truth about how writers, producers and the director conspired to keep the film's political meaning from studio bosses and from a conservative star. Brian Pendreigh's books include On Location: The Film Fan's Guide to Britain and Ireland, Mel Gibson and His Movies, Ewan McGregor and The Scot Pack.

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