Here are 70 books that Tinseltown fans have personally recommended if you like
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The author, editor, or ghostwriter of more than 100 book titles, GlennStout loves to mine microfilmed newspaper archives and specializes in deeply reported historical narrative non-fiction that brings the past to life. Many of his titles have intersected with the Roaring Twenties, including Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Changed the World, now in development for Disney+ as a major motion picture starring Daisy Ridley. A long-time aficionado of noir and true crime, Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid was the culmination of more than fifteen years of dogged research, a story The Wall Street Journal called “a hell of a yarn--worthy of an HBO hoodlum epic like Boardwalk Empire.”
In 1924 husband and wife team Celia and Ed Cooney, with a new baby on the way and not enough money, turned stick-up artists, with meek-looking, bobbed-hair Celia wielding the gun. The tabloids couldn’t get enough of the “flapper turned bad” storyline and for a time every bobbed-hair flapper and her swain in New York was under suspicion.
Illuminates the life and image of one of New York City's most fashionable criminals-Celia Cooney
Ripped straight from the headlines of the Jazz Age, The Bobbed Haired Bandit is a tale of flappers and fast cars, of sex and morality. In the spring of 1924, a poor, 19-year-old laundress from Brooklyn robbed a string of New York grocery stores with a "baby automatic," a fur coat, and a fashionable bobbed hairdo. Celia Cooney's crimes made national news, with the likes of Ring Lardner and Walter Lippman writing about her exploits for enthralled readers.
The Bobbed Haired Bandit brings to life…
The Beatles are widely regarded as the foremost and most influential music band in history and their career has been the subject of many biographies. Yet the band's historical significance has not received sustained academic treatment to date. In The Beatles and the 1960s, Kenneth L. Campbell uses The…
One of the great job benefits of being a newspaper reporter is the wide array of interesting people I get to meet. Not only getto meet but in fact, get paid to meet and to tell their stories. Some of them are famous, and that’s fine. Much more interesting, I think, are the ordinary folk nobody knows who are doing something extraordinary. And then there is a third category that I find most interesting of all: The people who have something to hide. They are mysteries who don’t want to be cracked, and I find them irresistible.
Before Ponzi was a scheme, Ponzi was a man. His name was Charles Ponzi. He sailed to the US from Europe with nothing – after gambling away his nest egg during the trans-Atlantic crossing – and then made himself an ill-gotten fortune through a swindle so famous it is now named for him. I love learning history, but not through academic texts. I need to learn it through stories. And the critical ingredient that makes compelling narrative nonfiction are the details that enable me to see the characters and their world in my mind. Zuckoff’s book put me in Boston in 1920, with the sights, sounds, and odors to bring Ponzi and his victims to life.
It was a time when anything seemed possible–instant wealth, glittering fame, fabulous luxury–and for a run of magical weeks in the spring and summer of 1920, Charles Ponzi made it all come true. Promising to double investors’ money in three months, the dapper, charming Ponzi raised the “rob Peter to pay Paul” scam to an art form. At the peak of his success, Ponzi was raking in more than $2 million a week at his office in downtown Boston. Then his house of cards came crashing down–thanks in large part to the relentless investigative reporting of Richard Grozier’s Boston Post.…
The author, editor, or ghostwriter of more than 100 book titles, GlennStout loves to mine microfilmed newspaper archives and specializes in deeply reported historical narrative non-fiction that brings the past to life. Many of his titles have intersected with the Roaring Twenties, including Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Changed the World, now in development for Disney+ as a major motion picture starring Daisy Ridley. A long-time aficionado of noir and true crime, Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid was the culmination of more than fifteen years of dogged research, a story The Wall Street Journal called “a hell of a yarn--worthy of an HBO hoodlum epic like Boardwalk Empire.”
The Roaring Twenties wouldn’t have roared quite as loud without Prohibition. And without George Remus, who cornered the bourbon market while enjoying a lifestyle pulled from the pages of The Great Gatsby – and who probably murdered his wife along the way - the era would have been a lot less liquid.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic true crime story of the most successful bootlegger in American history and the murder that shocked the nation, from the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City and Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy
“Gatsby-era noir at its best.”—Erik Larson
An ID Book Club Selection • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST HISTORY BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SMITHSONIAN
In the early days of Prohibition, long before Al Capone became a household name, a German immigrant named George Remus quits practicing law and starts trafficking whiskey. Within two years he's a…
Taiwanese-Language Cinema
by
Ming-Yeh Rawnsley (editor),
This is the first anthology in English about a long-neglected but now rediscovered cinema phenomenon in Taiwan, Taiwanese-language cinema (a.k.a. Taiyupian).
Taiyupian was a substantial commercial film industry that produced over 1,000 films between the 1950s–1970s in Taiwan. Once the industry declined, they were quickly forgotten for many years…
I picked up my first book about Jack the Ripper the summer after college and never looked back. Since then my collection of true crime has grown to overflow my office bookshelves and I’ve written a PhD dissertation and multiple books about true crime, focusing on serial killers. The genre is so much more than Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer and I love talking with people about the less mainstream cases that interest them, and the newer victim-centered approaches that—fingers crossed—mark a change in how we talk about criminals and victims.
Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb set out to commit the perfect crime and ended up in newspapers as the perpetrators of “the crime of the century.” They kidnapped and murdered a teenage boy in Chicago in 1924, but both Leopold and Loeb were still considered boys themselves at the time. Clarence Darrow defended them at trial, arguing that they were guilty but that the situation had extenuating circumstances. Baatz’s book explores how two college students from good families ended up in prison for murder. Leopold’s family even came from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near where I currently live, so even though the case is almost 100 years old, it’s not as distant as it might seem.
It was a crime that shocked the nation: the brutal murder in Chicago in 1924 of a child by two wealthy college students who killed solely for the thrill of the experience. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were intellectuals—too smart, they believed, for the police to catch them. When they were apprehended, state's attorney Robert Crowe was certain that no defense could save the ruthless killers from the gallows. But the families of the confessed murderers hired Clarence Darrow, entrusting the lives of their sons to the most famous lawyer in America in what would be one of the most…
I’m an English nonfiction writer who is, I suppose, best-known for Members Only, my biography of the London strip club owner, theatre impresario, property magnate, and porn baron Paul Raymond, which was adapted into a big-budget movie called The Look of Love. Like many of my books, Members Only strayed into true crime, a genre that has, for all sorts of reasons, been attractive to me as a writer. Probably the most important of those is that it provides the opportunity to tell inherently dramatic stories and to convey a vivid picture of the past, thanks to the wealth of documentation associated with major crimes.
Now that’s a question that can be answered in a few sentences. Here’s goes…
This is among the finest examples of the true-crime genre. It’s an enthralling, pacey, and ingeniously structured account of the murders committed on both sides of the Atlantic by Dr. Neill Cream, a Scottish-born Canadian whose medical career served as camouflage for his psychopathic misogyny.
Macabre though the subject matter is, Jobb never wallows in that side of things, preferring to use the story as a vehicle for his vivid and insightful portrait of late nineteenth-century society.
The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream takes readers to the late nineteenth century as Scotland Yard follows the trail of a cold-blooded serial killer who was as brazen as the notorious Jack the Ripper and who would finally be brought to justice by detectives employing a new science called forensics.
"When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals," Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most baffling investigations. "He has nerve and he has knowledge." In the span of fifteen years, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream poisoned at least ten women in the United States, Britain,…
As a child, finding reality both overwhelming and boring, I was drawn to movies. My father, a New York City disc jockey also at odds with reality, had contacts at a sixteen-millimeter movie rental company. He often brought films home, shown in a makeshift screening room he set up in our basement. Singin’ in the Rain, the classic musical, made a great impression there. Its funny first scene at a movie premiere featured a pompous star’s ennobling account of his early days, comically contradicted by the tacky, scrounging, painfully undignified truth. What lay behind Hollywood's glamor, smiles, and success soon became as interesting to me as what was on the screen.
It lacks the film version’s famous, freakish appeal, including Bette Davis's wild, classic performance. Yet Henry Farrell’s horror novel about a weird, washed-up child star and her wheelchair-bound sister powerfully captures the lazy, languid midday atmosphere of Los Angeles, in which a person’s career and sanity can dry up in the sun.
The literary classic that inspired the iconic film - the story of two sisters and the hell they made their home.
Once an acclaimed child star of vaudeville, Baby Jane Hudson performed for adoring crowds before a move to Hollywood thrust her sister, Blanche, into the spotlight. As Blanche's film career took off, a resentful Jane watched from the shadows as her own career faded into obscurity - until a tragic accident changed everything.
Now, years later, the two sisters live in a decaying mansion, isolated from the outside world. Crippled by the accident, Blanche is helpless under the control…
This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus atUW-Milwaukee, booking thousands of…
I’m an English nonfiction writer who is, I suppose, best-known for Members Only, my biography of the London strip club owner, theatre impresario, property magnate, and porn baron Paul Raymond, which was adapted into a big-budget movie called The Look of Love. Like many of my books, Members Only strayed into true crime, a genre that has, for all sorts of reasons, been attractive to me as a writer. Probably the most important of those is that it provides the opportunity to tell inherently dramatic stories and to convey a vivid picture of the past, thanks to the wealth of documentation associated with major crimes.
The extreme length ofFall and Rise put me off until my agent Matthew Hamilton persuaded me to take the plunge.
Just as he’d promised, I found myself deeply engaged in the lives and ultimate fates of Mitchell Zuckoff’s large cast of real-life characters, whose personalities, back-stories, and ambitions are rendered with impressive immediacy.
Of course we already know the outcome of this tragic story, yet the book possesses remarkable narrative dynamism. Hovering over most of its pages is the unnerving question, “Which of these people will survive?”
'The farewell calls from the planes... the mounting terror of air traffic control... the mothers who knew they were witnessing their loved ones perish... From an author who's spent 5 years reconstructing its horror, never has the story been told with such devastating, human force' Daily Mail
This is a 9/11 book like no other. Masterfully weaving together multiple strands of the events in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Fall and Rise is a mesmerising, minute-by-minute account of that terrible day.
In the days and months after 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff, then…
I’m an English nonfiction writer who is, I suppose, best-known for Members Only, my biography of the London strip club owner, theatre impresario, property magnate, and porn baron Paul Raymond, which was adapted into a big-budget movie called The Look of Love. Like many of my books, Members Only strayed into true crime, a genre that has, for all sorts of reasons, been attractive to me as a writer. Probably the most important of those is that it provides the opportunity to tell inherently dramatic stories and to convey a vivid picture of the past, thanks to the wealth of documentation associated with major crimes.
Like lots of books I’ve ended up loving, I came across this by chance.
It turned out to be an immensely entertaining portrait of a twentieth-century American gambler whose name meant nothing to me until then. Born Alvin Thomas, he ended up being known as Titanic Thompson.
He was a so-called proposition gambler, who challenged wealthy people to all sorts of often bizarre wagers. One of my favourite anecdotes from Kevin Cook’s anecdote-stuffed book involves Titanic betting Al Capone that he could hurl an orange onto the roof of an adjoining multi-story building.
Read Titanic Thompson and you’ll have plenty of what used to be called cocktail party conversation.
Titanic Thompson is the rollicking true story of one of the most charismatic characters in twentieth-century America. Travelling only with his golf clubs, a .45 revolver, and a suitcase full of cash, this is the legendary tale of a man who was married five times to five different girls, all teenagers on their wedding day. He killed five men, though he'd say 'they'd all agree they had it coming to them'. He won and lost millions in a time when being a millionaire still really meant something.
Filled with fascinating facts and famous faces - Harry Houdini, Al Capone, Lee…
I’m an English nonfiction writer who is, I suppose, best-known for Members Only, my biography of the London strip club owner, theatre impresario, property magnate, and porn baron Paul Raymond, which was adapted into a big-budget movie called The Look of Love. Like many of my books, Members Only strayed into true crime, a genre that has, for all sorts of reasons, been attractive to me as a writer. Probably the most important of those is that it provides the opportunity to tell inherently dramatic stories and to convey a vivid picture of the past, thanks to the wealth of documentation associated with major crimes.
It’s become an irritating cliché for dustjacket blurbs on nonfiction books to claim that the book in your hands “reads like a thriller”.
More often than not, I only have to read a couple of dozen pages before realising that the book in question merely reads like theraw material for a thriller. But Howard Blum has the rare, almost alchemical knack of transforming mountains of historical research into nonfiction that really doesfeel like the most exciting of thrillers.
You can see why so many of his books—Dark Invasionamong them—have been optioned by movie producers.
Combining the pulsating drive of Showtime's Homeland with the fascinating historical detail of such of narrative nonfiction bestsellers as Double Cross and In the Garden of Beasts, Dark Invasion is Howard Blum’s gritty, high-energy true-life tale of German espionage and terror on American soil during World War I, and the NYPD Inspector who helped uncover the plot—the basis for the film to be produced by and starring Bradley Cooper.
When a “neutral” United States becomes a trading partner for the Allies early in World War I, the Germans implement a secret plan to strike back. A team of saboteurs—including an…
Adventures in the Radio Trade documents a life in radio, largely at Canada's public broadcaster. It's for people who love CBC Radio, those interested in the history of Canadian Broadcasting, and those who want to hear about close encounters with numerous luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, J. Michael Straczynski, Stuart…
As a child, finding reality both overwhelming and boring, I was drawn to movies. My father, a New York City disc jockey also at odds with reality, had contacts at a sixteen-millimeter movie rental company. He often brought films home, shown in a makeshift screening room he set up in our basement. Singin’ in the Rain, the classic musical, made a great impression there. Its funny first scene at a movie premiere featured a pompous star’s ennobling account of his early days, comically contradicted by the tacky, scrounging, painfully undignified truth. What lay behind Hollywood's glamor, smiles, and success soon became as interesting to me as what was on the screen.
Gavin Lambert adapted the works of D. H. Lawrence and Tennessee Williams for the films Sons and Lovers and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. He directed one interesting, low-budget, Paul Bowles-like movie, Another Sky. His prose work is insightful about the behind-the-scenes world of the movies.
The linked stories in this book memorably spotlight hangers-on and working-class people on the edges of entertainment. Also of interest is Inside Daisy Clover, his novel about a teen tomboy star which became an affected, bombastic, entertaining Natalie Wood movie.
The land along Pacific Palisades is apt to slip away without warning, hence the road-side signs - SLIDE AREA. Narrated by a script-writer, Lambert's widely-acclaimed 1959 Hollywood classic of lonely souls marooned on a glittering wasteland is a perceptive and sensitive study of human emotion.
