Entertainment History

The year 1972 saw the beginning of a five-year span in which Stevie Wonder released five groundbreaking, critically acclaimed albums, garnering him more than half a dozen Grammys and more than 10 million albums sold, securing his place as one of the most important American musicians and songwriters in history. For the first time, uncover the untold story of an extraordinary artistic journey that shaped the greatest creative era in popular music history.

When Brian De Palma agreed to allow Julie Salamon unlimited access to the film production of Tom Wolfe's best-selling book The Bonfire of the Vanities, both director and journalist must have felt like they were on to something big. How could it lose? But instead Salamon got a front-row seat at the Hollywood disaster of the decade.

With exclusive insights from the legendary cast, including Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro, and Talia Shire, and commentary from a diverse array of film experts and ardent aficionados, we dissect the film’s magnetic allure and its pervasive influence across our culture. Journey alongside Rebecca Keegan, acclaimed senior film editor at The Hollywood Reporter, as she explores the heart of this cinematic masterpiece through a new lens.

Have you ever wondered how off-key you are while singing in the shower? Or if your Bob Dylan albums really sound better on vinyl? Or why certain songs make you cry? Now, scientist and musician John Powell invites you on an entertaining journey through the world of music. Discover what distinguishes music from plain old noise, how scales help you memorize songs, what the humble recorder teaches you about timbre (assuming your suffering listeners don’t break it first), and more.

The blues grew out of the plantations and prisons, the swampy marshes and fertile cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. With original research and keen insights, Ted Gioia - the author of a landmark study of West Coast jazz and the critically acclaimed The History of Jazz - brings to life the stirring music of the Delta, evoking the legendary figures who shaped its sound and ethos: Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and others.

George Harrison and Eric Clapton shared a legendary and tumultuous friendship that shaped not only their respective lives and careers, but the shifting face of rock itself in the early 1970s. All Things Must Pass Away traces that friendship from its earliest roots in 1964, when Beatles-averse blues-rocker Eric met George backstage at the Hammersmith Odeon, through the messy trials of Clapton's affair with Harrison's wife, Pattie Boyd, to the turn of the century, as the two elder statesmen of rock traded honors during Harrison's final days.

These biographies of the great quattrocento artists have long been considered among the most important of contemporary sources on Italian Renaissance art. Vasari, who invented the term "Renaissance", was the first to outline the influential theory of Renaissance art that traces a progression through Giotto, Brunelleschi, and finally the titanic figures of Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and Raphael.

Best-selling author and Sundance award-winning director Questlove harnesses his encyclopedic knowledge of popular music and his deep curiosity about history to examine America over the past 50 years. Choosing one essential track from each year, Questlove unpacks each song’s significance, revealing the pivotal role that American music plays around issues of race, gender, politics, and identity.

When beloved host Johnny Carson announced his retirement after 30 years on The Tonight Show, millions of Americans mourned. But inside the television industry, the news ignited a battle between two amazing talents - Jay Leno and David Letterman - who both yearned to occupy the departing legend's chair. For NBC, it would be a decision with millions of dollars at stake. Soon these two comedians with strikingly different styles, who had once shared a friendship as they worked the clubs together, would be engaged in a fierce competition for the prize.

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives - to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives.

In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out stars' sexual affairs, drug use, and sexuality, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the best-selling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Confidential's spectacular rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall.

The legendary Academy award-winning writer and director takes the listener on a unique joyride of personal memoir, cultural criticism and Hollywood history. For the first time, in his own words, explore the mind, the myth, and the movie magic of the one and only Quentin Tarantino.

Stanley Kubrick, the director of a string of timeless movies from Lolita and Dr. Strangelove to A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, and others, has always been depicted by the media as the Howard Hughes of filmmakers, a weird artist obsessed with his work and privacy to the point of madness. But who was he really?

For video game fans, the name Blizzard Entertainment was once synonymous with perfection. The renowned company behind classics like Diablo and World of Warcraft was known to celebrate the joy of gaming over all else. What was once two UCLA students' simple mission—to make games they wanted to play—launched an empire with thousands of employees, millions of fans, and billions of dollars. But when Blizzard cancelled a buzzy project in 2013, it gave Bobby Kotick, the infamous CEO of corporate parent Activision, the excuse he needed to start cracking down on Blizzard's proud autonomy.

From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented.

And the Roots of the Rhythm Remain is like no other. It shows how personalities, events and politics in Havana, Lagos, Buenos Aires, Soweto, Rio and Seville are as colourful and fascinating as anything that took place in Storyville, Harlem, Laurel Canyon or Liverpool. And, moreover, how jazz, r&b and rock 'n' roll would never have happened if it wasn't for sounds emanating from over the horizon and below the equator.

Although we have heard the music of J. S. Bach in countless performances and recordings, the composer himself still comes across only as an enigmatic figure in a single familiar portrait. As we mark the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, author Christoph Wolff presents a new picture that brings to life this towering figure of the Baroque era. This engaging new biography portrays Bach as the living, breathing, and sometimes imperfect human being that he was, while bringing to bear all the advances of the last half-century of Bach scholarship.

The resurgence of viral clips from the long-running hit reality television show America’s Next Top Model left fans and foes alike wondering–how did a show so outrageous and at times offensive ever get on the air? For years, Americans dutifully watched as contestants faced uncomfortable situations regarding their race and gender, body-shaming, stereotyping, and problematic photoshoots. The show, which first premiered in 2003 and ran for 24 cycles, was helmed by supermodel Tyra Banks–the first Black female host of a smash network reality show.

Grammy winning family hip-hop artist Secret Agent 23 Skidoo’s rhyme-writing workshop will get aspiring rhymers ready for the limelight. Skidoo breaks down song writing and performing basics into easy-to-follow examples alongside short chapters featuring cultures that have songs at their core, including West African griots, Australian indigenous songline culture, and Viking rhyme battling.

Beatleness explains how the band became a source of emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual nurturance in fans’ lives, creating a relationship that was historically unique. Looking at that relationship against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, political assassinations, and other events of those tumultuous years, the audiobook critically examines the often-heard assertion that the Beatles changed everything.