Issue: Winter 2023

WINTER READING

For more than 28 years, Bernard Hiller’s revolutionary techniques and exercises have produced unprecedented success for actors, artists, and performers all around the world. Acting is always evolving and it’s crucial to learn new skills and techniques. Bernard’s unique method in The Revolutionary Guide to Acting leads the actor to discover their true authenticity and cultivate the tools necessary for a long-lasting career.

Everyone now has a camera in their pocket. Adam Pratt, professional photo organizer, software trainer and photographer with more than 25 years at the intersection of creativity and technology, takes aim at visual chaos. Whether you’re a professional photographer or a casual shooter, with Declutter Your Photo Life, Pratt has created the ultimate “how to” to help you organize and enjoy your photos..

The Paul Neuman memoir is an extraordinary memoir, culled from thousands of pages o transcripts. The book is insightful and revealing. Newman’s voice is powerful: sometimes funny, sometimes painful. Revelatory and introspective, it’s loving and candid, complex and profound, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, based on interviews conducted by Stewart Stern, compiled and edited by David Rosenthal, provides a new understanding of perhaps the greatest movie star of our time, a man many admired but few really knew—from the perspective of the man himself.

Mary Rogers (1931-2014), the daughter of Richard Rodgers, perhaps the greatest American melodist, was also a composer, whose musical Once Upon a Mattress remains one of the rare revivable Broadway hits written by a woman. Both an eyewitness report from the golden age of American musical theatre and a tale of a woman striving for a meaningful life, her book Shy is the story of how it all happened: how Mary became a major theater figure in her own right and, in a final grand turn, a doyenne of philanthropy.

Prior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music-hall diva renowned for her singing and dancing, her beauty and sexuality; she was the highest paid female performer in Europe. When the Nazis seized Paris, her adopted city,  she was banned from the stage, along with all “negroes and Jews.” Yet instead of returning to America, she vowed to stay and fight. Overnight she went from performer to Resistance spy. In Agent Josephine, Damien Lewis uncovers this little-known history of the famous singer’s life.

Lara Gabrielle’s comprehensive critical biography Captain of Her Soul: The Life of Marion Davies deftly moves from the silent-screen star’s humble days in Brooklyn to her rise to fame alongside publishing baron William Randolph Hearst. Her life story plays like a modern fairy tale shaped by gossip columnists, fan magazines and biopics. Yet the real Marion Davis remained largely hidden from view—until now. What’s revealed is the story of a complex and fiercely independent woman, ahead of her time, who carved her own path. DH