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Interviews with the director of Dont Look Back, The War Room, and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Collected interviews with the British director of such films as Welcome to Sarajevo, Butterfly Kiss, and The Killer Inside Me

Interviews with one of the great early film directors, maestro of The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and Hearts of the World

Interviews with the director of such films as Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, Verboten!, and Pickup on South Street

Collected interviews with the British director of such films as Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting, and 28 Days Later

In Contested Kingdom: Fan Attachment and Corporate Control at Disneyland, William McCarthy presents a groundbreaking study centered on the history of Disneyland and Disney theme park enthusiasts. Focusing on two unexplored yet interconnected phenomena--the dynamic relationship between the Disney corporation and Southern Californian fans in both online and physical park settings over a span of more than three decades--this volume sheds new light on the meaning and purpose of Disneyland. Through a comprehensive analysis of the interwoven dimensions of individuals, place, and cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes, McCarthy explores the fervent sense of place attachment experienced by the approximately one million annual passholders who visit the park. McCarthy's analysis extends beyond the physical world of Disneyland by delving into the evolution of Disney fandom, discourse, commerce, and social formations in online social platforms like Usenet, web discussion boards, and social media. By employing a mixed-methods approach incorporating interviews, participant observation, surveys, and data analysis, this study establishes a novel analytical framework for comprehending the interrelationships between the Disney corporation, its fan communities, and online social platforms. As the first in-depth longitudinal analysis of the ongoing struggle on successive social platforms between fan users and a corporate entity, Contested Kingdom will also provide valuable insights for scholars and future investigations.

The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature theorizes the child gaze as a narrative strategy for social critique in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US literature for children and adults. Through a range of texts, including James Baldwin's Little Man, Little Man, Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, and more, Amanda M. Greenwell focuses on children and their literal acts of looking. Detailing how these acts of looking direct the reader, she posits that the sightlines of children serve as signals to renegotiate hegemonic ideologies of race, ethnicity, creed, class, and gender. In her analysis, Greenwell shows how acts of looking constitute a flexible and effective narrative strategy, capable of operating across multiple points of view, focalizations, audiences, and forms. Weaving together scholarship on the US child, visual culture studies, narrative theory, and other critical traditions, The Child Gaze explores the ways in which child acts of looking compel readers to look at and with a child character, whose gaze encourages critiques of privileged visions of national identity. Chapters investigate how child acts of looking allow texts to redraw circles of inclusion around the locus of the child gaze and mobilize childhood as a site of resistance. The powerful child gaze can thus disrupt dominant scripts of power, widening the lens through which belonging in the US can be understood.

Despite Hollywood's recent efforts to appeal to more racially diverse audiences, mainstream movies routinely present a limited view of nonwhites generally, and Black women specifically, in stark contrast to the broadly developed spectrum of white characters. Black women characters are frequently rendered invisible, and even in films featuring their image, Black women characters too often fall prey to historically stereotypical patterns. These consistently marginalized Black female images serve to reflect and reinforce messages of racial imbalance distributed worldwide. In Double Crossed: Black Female Intersectionality in Hollywood, author Frederick W. Gooding Jr. chronicles the Black female experience through the lens of Hollywood. Gooding begins by contextualizing the origins of early Black female imagery onscreen, largely restricted to the domestic mammy figure, then traces how these images have shifted over time. Through close readings of such films as Gone with the Wind, Bringing Down the House, The Princess and the Frog, and The Help, as well as case studies looking at Oprah Winfrey and Shonda Rhimes, Gooding considers not only the image the Black woman creates, but also the shadow she casts. In other words, he argues, these consistent patterns of racial imagery reflect and reinforce messages of racial imbalance distributed worldwide. Overall, the volume demonstrates the historical, economic, and social consequences of Hollywood's distorted representation of Black women onscreen and in real life.

Between 1937 and 1940 fieldworkers in the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project interviewed around 3,500 formerly enslaved people in North America, resulting in roughly 20,000 pages of still unedited and inadequately indexed typescript. These accounts--the WPA ex-slave narratives--are the most substantial collection by far of folklore and oral history gathered directly from enslaved people in America. It is arguably the single greatest body of African American folklore extant, and a significant portion is devoted to folk music and song. This book considers this treasure trove in all its relevant social, cultural, and historical contexts. Nineteenth-century Black folk music developed against the backdrop of North American slavery, the American Civil War, Emancipation, the Federal occupation of the South, and a successful white supremacist paramilitary and political insurgency that led to Federal withdrawal, officially sanctioned racial terror, and Southern apartheid. The WPA ex-slave narratives describe that history in remarkable detail. Despite their inestimable value, most of the ex-slave narratives remained unpublished until the late 1970s, being almost unknown except to folklorists. Even after publication, the collection's sheer size was a barrier. Quoting extensively from the narratives and exhaustively annotated and indexed, this volume provides readers with detailed explanations and full references for every musical item or tradition featured in the ex-slave narratives. John Minton covers instrumental music and social dancing, spirituals and hymns, singing games and lullabies, ring plays and reels, worksongs, minstrel songs, ballads, war songs, slavery laments, and much, much more. Written for both specialists and general readers, with 134 illustrations, the book also offers a general overview of the ex-slave narratives, their contents, creation, and relation to the field of African American folklore as a whole.

In contemporary Western society, childhood appears more protected than ever to the casual onlooker. Yet, we are increasingly fascinated by narratives in which children are depicted as unsettling beings, both dangerous and endangered, sometimes chaotic or even evil. In Grotesque Progeny: The Commodification of Dangerous and Endangered Children, author Mark Heimermann argues that these representations reflect cultural anxiety regarding a shifting conception of youths from emotional assets to economic ones. In the early to mid-twentieth century, children, who had previously been viewed in part as economic investments, were largely moved out of the work force. For decades, children were instead valued primarily as emotional assets. However, the rise of neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s, and its eventual proliferation throughout our politics and our lives, has led to the widespread commodification of social arenas previously kept separate from the capitalist quest for profit. Not even children have escaped being objectified and dehumanized in this manner. Heimermann examines a variety of texts that center on children and adolescents who are marked as different from the adult characters and consequently viewed as grotesque. Chapters cover Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth, M. R. Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, Richard Starkings's Elephantmen, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and more. Because the young characters are not viewed as equal members of society, they must either strike back at those who commodify them or risk facing a lifetime of dehumanization. Grotesque Progeny argues that these monstrous depictions reveal societal unease over shortsighted economic and political thinking, the exploitation of children, and the changing nature of childhood. The book addresses a growing concern over which spaces ought to be excluded or removed from the harsh valuations of neoliberalism.

Booker "Bukka" White (1905-1977) was one of the most important blues musicians of the twentieth century. The twelve songs he recorded in Chicago in 1940 are considered to be among the finest in country blues. In The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White: Recalling the Blues, David W. Johnson traces the trajectory of White's life from his early years in Chickasaw and Grenada Counties, Mississippi, through his imprisonment in the notorious Mississippi State Penal Farm in the late 1930s, to making a new life for himself in Memphis, Tennessee. For years only a name on old 78 records--and believed by some to be dead--White was "rediscovered" by John Fahey and ED Denson in the summer of 1963. He went on to have a productive second career, playing venues and festivals throughout the United States and in Canada, and touring Europe and Great Britain with the American Folk Blues Festival. In 1975, he was invited to Bremen, Germany, for a solo concert that was released as his final album. In July 1976, the author interviewed White shortly before his discharge from a Massachusetts hospital where he was recovering from a stroke. After spending eight days in the intensive care unit and three weeks in rehabilitation, White was ready to talk about his life. Recalling stories of "slavery time," White told the author, ". . . some of the [formerly enslaved] guys were wise enough to hold that in their head where they could tell a young pants, where it would go down in history, you know. Just like you doing that now--something happen to you, somebody else will carry that on." The product of years of research, The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White is the first full-length biography of this remarkable country blues performer. Interviewing those who knew White, including his second cousin B.B. King, Johnson has written a detailed and sometimes surprising account of how a young Black man born in the first decade of the twentieth century--the grandson of a slave--found a way to rise above his circumstances and maintain a decades-long career as a musician.

The southern climate, with its heat, oppressive humidity, and stagnant marshland, accentuated disease and suffering for inhabitants of the Old South, from its early settling through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Vicious illnesses--from malaria and yellow fever to dysentery, cholera, typhoid fever, typhus, and smallpox--beleaguered those dwelling in the South and was blamed on the particular combination of air, earth, and water characteristic of those southern territories. As the rhetoric of southern sectionalism blossomed in the early nineteenth century, so did a growing feeling of southern distinctiveness in health issues. Sickly Vapors: Disease and Doctoring in the Old South is an examination of the unique circumstances of health and disease that shaped southern living and culture before, during, and after the Civil War. Through archival records, contemporary anecdotes, and scientific literature, Thomas Helling, MD, explores the intricacies of health and healthcare for an agrarian population which, by virtue of its location, was inordinately vulnerable to sicknesses and epidemics. With the influx of enslaved Africans, a new set of healthcare issues were introduced. Given the region's peculiar climate, ethnic makeup, and customs, southern doctors adopted an attitude of distinctiveness themselves. As a result, southern medical progress became increasingly isolated from northern colleagues. The destructiveness of the Civil War finally provided the impetus for true integration with northern practices in the rapidly changing science of medicine and surgery. Yet, with the regeneration of a medical elitism in postbellum years, southern doctors clung to nostalgic notions of southern culture and southern medical distinctiveness. In this compelling volume, Helling explains how the predominant mindset of southern particularity guided regional interpretation of illness, therapeutic decisions, and medical education, foreboding a healthcare system embedded, still, with institutional racism.

In the early twentieth century, white-controlled magazines and Black magazines told very different stories about the dynamics of race, sex, and power in the United States. Memory Work: White Ignorance and Black Resistance in Popular Magazines, 1900-1910 examines how popular magazines employed rhetorical strategies to remember, forget, and frame America's racist past. White-controlled magazines such as the Independent, Outlook, Arena, and McClure's carried stories of southern nostalgia, union reconciliation, and white purity. Relying on willful ignorance to misremember past experiences of suffering, these texts severed violent histories from present-day policies and often simply remained silent. Meanwhile, in Black magazines such as the Colored American Magazine and the Voice of the Negro, women writers leveraged countermemory. Bringing Black women's accomplishments into focus, these writers inverted popular white narratives that erased and obscured Black women's experiences, including those of sexual violence. Mary E. Triece traces how white and Black magazines--often in dialogue with one another--differently engaged memory work to either reinforce or upend white supremacy during a period of both Black advancement and white backlash. Further, the book suggests lines of connection between the construction of public memory in the past to those taking place today across an array of media platforms. Popular debates--whether appearing in early 1900s magazines or on twenty-first-century social media sites--shape a culture's collective knowledge of what counts as true, important, and worthy of attention.

Soca music, an offspring of older Trinidadian calypso, emerged in the late 1970s and is now recognized as one of the English-speaking Caribbean's most distinctive styles of popular vocal music. Frankie McIntosh and the Art of the Soca Arranger tells a story of Caribbean music in the diaspora through the eyes and ears of a pioneering soca arranger. A fascinating collaboration between Frankie McIntosh and music scholar Ray Allen, this cowritten memoir places the music arranger at the center of several overlapping narratives of immigration and musical diaspora. The book begins with McIntosh's personal voyage from St. Vincent to Brooklyn and his efforts to hammer out a career in music while raising a family in his newly adopted home. His immigrant tale is intertwined with his musical journey, from popular Caribbean dance bands through formal studies in Western classical music and jazz to his work as a gigging jazz pianist and calypso/soca arranger. Along the way he embraced the varied musics of New York's African American and West Indian communities, working with such iconic calypsonians as the Mighty Sparrow, Lord Kitchner, Calypso Rose, and Alston Becket. His story provides a unique lens for viewing Brooklyn Carnival music and brings into focus the borough's rise to prominence as the transnational hub of the soca music industry in the 1980s. An alternative to traditional scholarship that tends to focus on calypso and soca singers, this work explores the instrumental dimensions of the art form through the life and music of one of the most celebrated soca arrangers and keyboardists of all time.

Known internationally for his Japanese-style poetry, Lenard D. Moore (b. 1958) has published eight poetry collections over the course of his career. Moore has distinguished himself especially in such forms as jazz poetry, haiku, tanka, renga, sequence, and haibun, expressing moments of aesthetic delight as well as a voice enriched with African American culture. Conversations with Lenard D. Moore is a fundamental collection of sixteen interviews with the esteemed writer and former president of the Haiku Society of America. To Moore, jazz is a joyful celebration of American life and culture. The impacts of great jazz musicians such as Max Roach, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Ray Charles are clear in his poetry. The conversations collected here lead the reader into Moore's creative mind, demonstrating his fusion of African American music, culture, and history into poetry, especially his jazz poetry, jazzku, and bluesku. In interviews that range from 1995 to 2022, Moore reveals his capabilities and responsibilities as a contemporary poet, professor, mentor, editor, and organizer. This volume serves as an indispensable source for writers and readers of poetry and African American literature.

Contributions by Cassandra D. Chaney, Shannon M. Cochran, Samuel P. Fitzpatrick, Judson L. Jeffries, Zada Johnson, Tony Kiene, Aaron J. Kimble, Jerod Lockhart, Molly Reinhoudt, Paul N. Reinsch, Laurel Westrup, and Sherman M. White Prince (1958-2016) looms large in contemporary music history. Despite universal acclaim for his artistry, few scholars and writers have thoroughly treated the underlying ideas expressed in his work or examined his profound impact on popular culture. The Purple One: Prince, Race, Gender, and Everything in Between positions Prince in his proper cultural, political, and social place in history. Contributors employ a diverse range of approaches to explore the intricate facets of this cultural icon, illuminating the many dimensions of his creative output and legacy. The collection is organized around two central themes that shed light on Prince's artistry and lasting influence. Moving beyond conventional discussions about Prince and masculinity, Part I, "Black Masculinity and Gender Performativity," delves into less-explored aspects of the artist's gender-bending persona. Essays in this section cover a slew of fascinating subjects, including Prince's re-scripting of Black masculinity in the cult classic Under the Cherry Moon, and an autoethnographic study of African American father-son relationships in the film Purple Rain. Another essay examines the subversive gender performativity of Prince and frequent collaborator Sheila E. Part II, "Beauty, Race, and Spirituality," explores a range of topics present in Prince's oeuvre, from the sociopolitical contours of his work to his overlooked but significant projects and protégés. Contributors in this section examine Prince's representations of female beauty, his articulations of urban rage and protest, and his commercially successful but critically overlooked Batman soundtrack. This second installment of the ongoing scholarly project, PrincEnlighteNmenT: A Study of Society through Music, continues to center Prince as a focal point in music scholarship and enhance our understanding of his complex life and work.

Contributions by Janet Allured, Craig E. Colten, Marcus Cox, Pearson Cross, John Bel Edwards, Adam Fairclough, Keith Finley, Samuel C. Hyde Jr., John Lopez, and Robert Mann In the fall of 2022, a diverse group of scholars including scientists, historians, political scientists, geographers, and journalists, along with Governor John Bel Edwards, gathered to present views on the challenges that define life in Louisiana. Born out of the symposium, Bayou Dilemma: Louisiana in Crisis and Change is an unprecedented compilation that examines the social, political, environmental, and economic hurdles pervasive to the Gulf South and especially the Bayou State. The essays collected in the volume illuminate pressing problems confronting Louisiana and its surrounding environs, as well as some of the least known and most frequently misunderstood issues that have affected the state in the past. Topics include the problems of flood control, unequal treatment for African Americans and women, political corruption, endemic violence, and partisan applications of justice, as well as the crisis of coastal erosion, the dilemma of special interests shaping legislation, and the corresponding drain of talent from the state to regions offering improved opportunities. The anthology is a provocative and essential guide that reveals how such trials emerged, how they were overcome or managed, and how they continue to shape the Gulf South's regional identity. Concentrating on the future well-being of the state and its occupants, the volume suggests fresh pathways for addressing these lingering concerns.

Desi Divas: Political Activism in South Asian American Cultural Performances is the product of five years of field research with progressive activists associated with the School for Indian Languages and Cultures (SILC), South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), the feminist dance collective Post Natyam, and the grassroots feminist political organization South Asian Sisters. Christine L. Garlough explores how traditional cultural forms may be critically appropriated by marginalized groups and used as rhetorical tools to promote deliberation and debate, spur understanding and connection, broaden political engagement, and advance particular social identities. Within this framework she examines how these performance activists advocate a political commitment to both justice and care, to both deliberative discussion and deeper understanding. To consider how this might happen in diasporic performance contexts, Garlough weaves together two lines of thinking. One grows from feminist theory and draws upon a core literature concerning the ethics of care. The other comes from rhetoric, philosophy, and political science literature on recognition and acknowledgment. This dual approach is used to reflect upon South Asian American women's performances that address pressing social problems related to gender inequality, immigration rights, ethnic stereotyping, hate crimes, and religious violence. Case study chapters address the relatively unknown history of South Asian American rhetorical performances from the early 1800s to the present. Avant-garde feminist performances by the Post Natyam dance collective appropriate women's folk practices and Hindu goddess figures make rhetorical claims about hate crimes against South Asian Americans after 9/11. In Yoni ki Bat (a South Asian American version of The Vagina Monologues) a progressive performer transforms aspects of the Mahabharata narrative to address issues of sexual violence, such as incest and rape. Throughout the volume, Garlough argues that these performers rely on calls for acknowledgment that intertwine calls for justice and care. That is, they embed their testimony in traditional cultural forms to invite interest, reflection, and connection.

A unique analysis of the media, literature, and pop culture that shaped Sylvia Plath's literary achievement

John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of Kerouac's life they were-in Holmes's words-"e;Brother Souls."e; Both were neophyte novelists, hungry for literary fame but just as hungry to find a new way of responding to their experiences in a postwar American society that for them had lost its direction. Late one night as they sat talking, Kerouac spontaneously created the term "e;Beat Generation"e; to describe this new attitude they felt stirring around them. Brother Souls is the remarkable chronicle of this cornerstone friendship and the life of John Clellon Holmes. From 1948 to 1951, when Kerouac's wanderings took him back to New York, he and Holmes met almost daily. Struggling to find a form for the novel he intended to write, Kerouac climbed the stairs to the apartment in midtown Manhattan where Holmes lived with his wife to read the pages of Holmes's manuscript for the novel Go as they left the typewriter. With the pages of Holmes's final chapter still in his mind, he was at last able to crack his own writing dilemma. In a burst of creation in April 1951, he drew all the materials he had been gathering into the scroll manuscript of On the Road. Biographer Ann Charters was close to John Clellon Holmes for more than a decade. At his death in 1988 she was one of a handful of scholars allowed access to the voluminous archive of letters, journals, and manuscripts Holmes had been keeping for twenty-five years. In that mass of material waited an untold story. These two ambitious writers, Holmes and Kerouac, shared days and nights arguing over what writing should be, wandering from one explosive party to the next, and hanging on the new sounds of bebop. Through the pages of Holmes's journals, often written the morning after the events they recount, Charters discovered and mined an unparalleled trove describing the seminal figures of the Beat Generation: Holmes, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and their friends and lovers.

Contributions by Robert Adams Jr., Shenita Brazelton, Donathan L. Brown, Owen Brown Jr., Michael L. Clemons, Daphne Cooper, LaTasha Chaffin Dehaan, William H. L. Dorsey, Bertis D. English, Precious D. Hall, Beverly Johnson, Natasha Altema McNeely, Maurice Mangum, Amardo Rodriguez, Randall Swain, Edward V. Wallace, Ingrid P. Whitaker, and Mark M. Whitaker Beginning early in his career, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized the moral and humanitarian need to pursue social justice and equity for marginalized Americans, those for whom the American dream had proven to be an elusive ideal. In Dream and Legacy, Volume II: Revisiting King in the Post-Civil Rights Era, contributors sift through the historical record, engaging one of America's most consequential, radical historical traditions. Despite robust reform efforts since the 1930s, a wide range of policy-related challenges plague the lives of African Americans, other persons of color, women, and the poor in the twenty-first century. This anthology, like the first from coeditors Michael L. Clemons, Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey, applies the ideology and activism of Dr. King to its analysis of contemporary sociopolitical issues in the United States and abroad. The project begins with a foreword that situates the subsequent essays within the context of contemporary social developments. Grouped into themed sections, the essays cover such topics as voting rights, public protest, police brutality, poverty and wage discrimination, healthcare, and more. The epilogue concludes with a discussion of the timeless impact of Dr. King's philosophy and activism, as well as the implications of his work for the future of domestic and global leadership. Dream and Legacy, Volume II identifies a variety of practical lessons that can help resolve contemporary social problems.

In the 1970s, British filmmaker Ken Russell (1927-2011) quickly gained a reputation as the enfant terrible of British cinema. His work, like the man himself, was regarded as flamboyant, excessive, and unrestrained. Inheriting and yet subverting the venerable mantle of British documentary, Russell did not fit comfortably in the context of a national cinema dominated by sober realism. His distinct style combined realism with fictional devices, often in audacious ways, to create the biographical "docudrama." In Ken Russell: Interviews, the filmmaker discusses his colorful life and career, from his youth fascinated by movies to his early work in television through his feature films and his retreat to home movies. Russell first drew notice in the early 1960s for a series of unorthodox biographical films about artists and composers. In these early television films, Russell was already exhibiting an unconventional approach to biography that combined historical fact, aesthetic interpretation, and outlandish personal vision. After the critical and commercial success of his adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, Russell continued to explore the related themes of art, sexuality, and music in The Music Lovers, The Boy Friend, Mahler, Tommy, and Lisztomania. His career foundered after Valentino, however, and he found it increasingly difficult to get funding. Toward the end of his career, Russell was restricted to making movies with his own equipment, using family and friends as actors, with virtually no budget. Throughout the ups and downs of his career, Russell alternately embraced and resented his characterization as an enfant terrible. While Russell's comments are often meant to provoke and shock, he is articulate when discussing his films, his approach to cinema, music and composers, and, of course, his critics.

Contributions by Sandra Bartlett Atwood, Nathan E. Bender, London Brickley, Eric A. Eliason, Noah D. Eliason, Tim Frandy, Robert Glenn Howard, Jay Mechling, Annamarie O'Brien Morel, Raymond Summerville, Tok Thompson, and Megan L. Zahay Guns are a ubiquitous part of life in the United States. Arguably more pervasive than physical guns is "gunlore," which refers to the many folklore genres related to firearms. Gunlore: Firearms, Folkways, and Communities is the first book to engage with the many narratives, rituals, folk-speech, customs, art, and handicraft encompassed by gunlore. Like most expressive cultures, gunlore emerges from specific communities. Groups with a shared interest around firearms may form for many reasons--self-protection, hunting, crime, work, political or social identity signaling, the desire to creatively modify guns, and even the resolve to oppose gun use and ownership. This collection explores a range of gunlore genres and the "gunfolk" groups that give rise to them. Contributors examine topics that include the fetishization of firearms, "Moms Who Carry," online discussion boards, alternative history cosplay, survivalist communities, gunsmiths and gun craft, and more. Gun owners and gun enthusiasts, in all their varieties, are one of the largest avocational groups in America. The essays in Gunlore seek to expand our understanding of these communities by looking at the various roles firearms play, have played, and can play in our world. Gunlore, for better or worse, is a powerful and pervasive method of self-expression. In examining the folklore around these controversial and politically charged tools, weapons, and symbols, we can begin to understand aspects of American culture that will remain prominent for the foreseeable future.

Legal legend Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer once stated that there were "only two people in the world who really understood the Constitution" and its impact on American lives. One was Hugo Black, deceased Supreme Court justice. The other was William Benson Bryant Sr. (1911-2005), who in the early 1950s became the first Black assistant US attorney to try cases in Washington, DC's federal court, and became that same court's first Black chief judge in 1977. Written by award-winning author Tonya Bolden, this biography presents the story of Bryant's remarkable, pioneering life in the law--one that began in a segregated DC and included many years as an extraordinary criminal defense attorney, most notably as the dogged defender of Andrew Mallory, a young poor Black man sentenced to the electric chair for the 1954 rape of a white woman. Bryant fought for Mallory's life all the way to the US Supreme Court, chiefly on the grounds that Mallory's confession--the most damning evidence against him--was the fruit of an illegal detention. The High Court overturned Mallory's conviction. Mallory v. United States was among the cases that culminated in the landmark 1966 Miranda rule. Appointed to federal judicial service by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, Bryant's forty-year tenure included cases ranging from overturning a corrupted election of the United Mine Workers and unconstitutional conditions at the DC jail. The biography draws upon an array of documents, newspaper articles, interviews with the judge's friends, colleagues, and family members, as well as oral histories, including Judge Bryant's. Bolden beautifully narrates the story of a life of compassion, unparalleled integrity, and unwavering belief in the dignity of every human being.

Dana Andrews worked with distinguished directors such as john Ford, Otto Preminger, Fritz Lang, William Wyler, Jean Renoir, and Elia Kazan. He played romantic leads alongside the great beauties of the screen: Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Greer Garson, Merle Oberon, Maureen O'Hara, and most notably, Gene Tierney, with whom he shared five films.