The Notorious Ben Hecht

The Notorious Ben Hecht PDF Author: Julien Gorbach
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1612495958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
2019 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Biography. Ben Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe. In 1932, Hecht solidified his legend as "the Shakespeare of Hollywood" with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his Jewish bosses at the movie studios when they refused to make films about the Nazi menace. Leveraging his talents and celebrity connections to orchestrate a spectacular one-man publicity campaign, he mobilized pressure on the Roosevelt administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe’s Jews. Then after the war, Hecht became notorious, embracing the labels “gangster” and “terrorist” in partnering with the mobster Mickey Cohen to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state. The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is a biography of a great twentieth-century writer that treats his activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. It details the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at this pivotal moment in history, about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media, and about the consequences. Who else but Hecht could have drawn the admiration of Ezra Pound, clowned around with Harpo Marx, written Notorious and Spellbound with Alfred Hitchcock, launched Marlon Brando’s career, ghosted Marilyn Monroe’s memoirs, hosted Jack Kerouac and Salvador Dalí on his television talk show, and plotted revolt with Menachem Begin? Any lover of modern history who follows this journey through the worlds of gangsters, reporters, Jazz Age artists, Hollywood stars, movie moguls, political radicals, and guerrilla fighters will never look at the twentieth century in the same way again.

The Notorious Ben Hecht

The Notorious Ben Hecht PDF Author: Julien Gorbach
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1612495958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 504

Get Book Here

Book Description
2019 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Biography. Ben Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe. In 1932, Hecht solidified his legend as "the Shakespeare of Hollywood" with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his Jewish bosses at the movie studios when they refused to make films about the Nazi menace. Leveraging his talents and celebrity connections to orchestrate a spectacular one-man publicity campaign, he mobilized pressure on the Roosevelt administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe’s Jews. Then after the war, Hecht became notorious, embracing the labels “gangster” and “terrorist” in partnering with the mobster Mickey Cohen to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state. The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is a biography of a great twentieth-century writer that treats his activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. It details the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at this pivotal moment in history, about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media, and about the consequences. Who else but Hecht could have drawn the admiration of Ezra Pound, clowned around with Harpo Marx, written Notorious and Spellbound with Alfred Hitchcock, launched Marlon Brando’s career, ghosted Marilyn Monroe’s memoirs, hosted Jack Kerouac and Salvador Dalí on his television talk show, and plotted revolt with Menachem Begin? Any lover of modern history who follows this journey through the worlds of gangsters, reporters, Jazz Age artists, Hollywood stars, movie moguls, political radicals, and guerrilla fighters will never look at the twentieth century in the same way again.

Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread

Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread PDF Author: Lydia Goehr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197572448
Category : Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 721

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Book Description
A profoundly original philosophical detective story tracing the surprising history of an anecdote ranging across centuries of traditions, disciplines, and ideas Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows the long history of a short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale? Designed as a philosophical detective story, Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread follows the extraordinary number of thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth. Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème, and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures? Lydia Goehr explores these narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red?

The Player and the Pretender

The Player and the Pretender PDF Author: Erin McCarthy
Publisher: Erin McCarthy
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Don’t fall in love with your boss, or onto his head, lap, or any other body parts… Miles Williams was not my target. So when I fall off a balcony and land on his head the last thing I expect is for him to hire me. I may be a private investigator, but the hot, sexy, pro football player wants me to be his girlfriend. Fake girlfriend, that is. He wants to be free of female attention for the last few games of his career before he retires, and certain women in his life haven’t gotten the message. It’s not my usual job, but I’m game. Only certain people don’t seem to believe we are actually a couple, which is ironic, because my plan to stay professional and not let Miles touch me is an epic failure. Worst. Plan. Ever. Not only am I deliciously ensconced in the player’s bed, I might just have broken through both our defenses and fallen off more than the balcony. I might have fallen head over heels (literally) into love…

Bad Rabbi

Bad Rabbi PDF Author: Eddy Portnoy
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503603970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl—in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.

Fearless

Fearless PDF Author: Don Dahler
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1648961312
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In the spirit of the bestseller Fly Girls comes the definitive and compelling true story of Harriet Quimby, the first American woman to receive a pilot's license. In the early twentieth century, headlines declared that "the era of women has dawned." Against this changing historical backdrop, Harriet Quimby's extraordinary life stands out as the embodiment of this tumultuous, exciting era—when flight was measured in minutes, not miles. This untold piece of feminist history unveils Quimby's incredible story: rising from humble beginnings as a dirt-poor farm girl to become a globe-trotting journalist, history-making aviator, and international celebrity. With her tragic death in 1912 at the age of thirty-seven, her story faded, with her many accomplishments—the first woman to fly solo over the English Channel among them—overshadowed by major events, including the sinking of the Titanic. With black and white illustrations throughout, Fearless is the definitive biography of the first licensed female American pilot: one of the most inspiring hidden figures of history.

The Pretender

The Pretender PDF Author: HelenKay Dimon
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062692194
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
“Sexy, emotional, funny . . . Dimon gives it all to her readers.” —New York Times Bestselling Author Jill Shalvis They say it takes a thief to catch a thief, and Harrison Tate is proof. Once a professional burglar, he now makes a lawful living tracking down stolen art. No one needs to know about his secret sideline, “liberating” artifacts acquired through underhanded methods. At least until one of those jobs sees him walking in on a murder. Gabrielle Wright has long been estranged from her wealthy family, but she didn’t kill her sister. Trouble is, the only person who can prove it is the sexy, elusive criminal who shouldn’t have been at the island estate on that terrible night. She’s not expecting honor among thieves—or for their mutual attraction to spark into an intense inferno of desire. Under the guise of evaluating her family’s art, Harris comes back to the estate hoping to clear Gabby’s name. But returning to the scene of the crime has never been riskier, with their hearts and lives on the line.

Anything That Burns You

Anything That Burns You PDF Author: Terese Svoboda
Publisher: IPG
ISBN: 193618298X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 684

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Book Description
The first full-length biography of Lola Ridge, a trailblazer for women, poetry, and human rights far ahead of her time This rich and detailed account of the life and world of Lola Ridge, poet, artist, editor, and activist for the cause of women's rights, workers' rights, racial equality and social reform. From her childhood as a newly arrived Irish immigrant in the grim mining towns of New Zealand to her years as a budding poet and artist in Sydney, Australia, to her migration to America and the cities of San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. At one time considered one of the most popular poets of her day, she later fell out of critical favor due to her realistic and impassioned verse that looked head on at the major social woes of society. Moreover, her work and appearances alongside the likes of Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Will Durant, and other socialists and radicals put her in the line of fire not only of the police and government, but also the literary pundits who criticized her activism as being excessive and melodramatic. This lively portrait gives a veritable who's who of all the key players in the arts, literature, and radical politics of the time, in which Lola Ridge stood front and center.

The Pretender One the Intender

The Pretender One the Intender PDF Author: Ignaziano Lafluer Garnier
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1664136932
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
“The Pretender Series’ of fictional books are a book series of characters and the book has CIA trained government killers’ who themselves’ are assets to the United States Government, Military, and law enforcement. They help with population downsizing in The United States and other countries’ by helping to eliminate, eradicate, and exterminate, sex-offenders from society and are America’s and The World’s first globally celebrated, and embraced avengers of violent crimes. I, Lafluer Garnier, want to also take a moment to say thank you to our United States of America’s Military, and all our veterans, especially those of foreign and domestic wars for their brave, courageous, and valorous acts, and the blanket of freedoms’ that we are afforded by those brave, courageous, and valorous acts. Also, I’d also like to thank the brave men, and women, women, and men, of law enforcement for protecting and serving day in, and day out, and the sacrifices they make on the job for the safety of all our citizens’. Total Truth!”

Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Volume VI

Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Volume VI PDF Author: Walt Whitman
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814794408
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America’s most important poets. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts gathers Whitman’s autobiographical notes, his views on contemporary politics, and the writings he made as he educated himself in ancient history, religion and mythology, health (including phrenology), and word-study. Included is material on his Civil War experiences, his love of Abraham Lincoln, his descriptions of various trips to the West and South and of the cities in which he resided, his generally pessimistic view of America’s prospects in the Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, and his reminiscences during his final years and his preoccupation with the increasing ailments that came with old age. Many of these notes served as sources for his poetry—first drafts of some of the poems are included as they appear in the notes—and as the basis for his lectures.

American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siecle

American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siecle PDF Author: Kirsten MacLeod
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442695579
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
In American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siecle, Kirsten MacLeod examines the rise of a new print media form – the little magazine – and its relationship to the transformation of American cultural life at the turn of the twentieth century. Though the little magazine has long been regarded as the preserve of modernist avant-gardes and elite artistic coteries, for whom it served as a form of resistance to mass media, MacLeod’s detailed study of its origins paints a different picture. Combining cultural, textual, literary, and media studies criticism, MacLeod demonstrates how the little magazine was deeply connected to the artistic, social, political, and cultural interests of a rising professional-managerial class. She offers a richly contextualized analysis of the little magazine’s position in the broader media landscape: namely, its relationship to old and new media, including pre-industrial print forms, newspapers, mass-market magazines, fine press books, and posters. MacLeod’s study challenges conventional understandings of the little magazine as a genre and emphasizes the power of “little” media in a mass-market context.