Entertainment Books

A long-overdue treatment of a wonderful star, lovingly rendered and meticulously researched. It's about time this lady gets the attention she so richly deserves.

The book gives a chronological guide to Joan Blondell's career and life. However, the amount of perusal of her private life is limited, perhaps inevitably so. There are some intimations and allusions about Joan's thoughts and opinions but not many. Did her third husband, Michael Todd, take much of her money? It is only alluded to that it was the case. Why did her first husband cruelly insist on serial abortions while he had children with other women? Why did her marriage to Powell end while her love for him didn't? There is a chapter heading quote from Joan concerning the hardships of an acting career, but no further elaboration. On the other side of the coin, working for Warner Bros. in the 1930's was no day at the beach, and this is adequately detailed. Perhaps, any deep examination of personal issues cannot be expected in any biography.

And that was my major issue with this autobiography. What we get is a fairly straight-forward recitation of events, which is fine, but it reads as very bland. If you want facts, you'll get them, if you want some interesting quotes you'll get them, but this isn't an enjoyable read. If you want that, seek out Center Door Fancy which positively bubbles, much like Joan herself did.

I found the omission of practically everything about the documented friendship that Cagney and Blondell shared to be frustrating and somewhat evasive, as it's been said elsewhere that Joan was in love with James, but that said love may or may not have been returned as Cagney was a faithful husband. Being an ardent fan of them in films together, I was hoping this book might shed some light on the topic but it does not. Ah well!

Matthew Kennedy does an excellent job in bringing to life this lovely, but now largely unsung, Hollywood star. He writes, not uncritically, but also with great affection, of her career and her life, with all its ups and downs. His research is impeccable and he makes the reader wish that he or she had had the chance to meet and know Miss Blondell.

Joan Blondell was a perfectly serviceable actress who played by the rules, obeyed the studios, had an incredibly long career and is largely forgotten today. Matthew Kennedy's new book is well written and extremely well-titled. As illustrated in the biography, Blondell lived for her work, and then lived for her family. Neither was particularly rewarding. From singing her heart out in the early '30s with the Warner Brothers musicals co-starring with Ruby Keeler, James Cagney and future husband Dick Powell, through dishing malts in Allan Carr's Grease, she was a fixture in films for more than 50 years. Yet, by never complaining and doing everything the studios threw at her - and never demanding, let alone getting, a memorable role - she did herself an enormous disservice. Television ultimately offered the actress the best roles, but unfortunately these now exist chiefly in memory. Blondell's selfless personal life was likewise marked by what could be called a loving complacency, resulting in failed marriages with selfish, self-consumed husbands. She seemed almost to be a starter wife, as Dick Powell married June Allyson and Mike Todd married Elizabeth Taylor immediately after being wed to Blondell. If the story lacks intrigue, sex and violence, well, the author is being true to the material. Kennedy is able to tell Blondell's story "between takes" by piling up fact upon anecdote of what was a truly fascinating time. This isn't the most salacious Hollywood read of recent years, obviously, but nonetheless an interesting illustration of how luck and choices contribute to, and create, a career.

This was a Christmas gift for my sister who happens to be extremely religious and has a fondness of word search puzzles. She found this to be a very nice gift.

A very nice compilation of Capcom art. A must have for true Capcom fighting game and action series fans. Lots of content

This is a great book with lots of beautiful artwork of the Capcom universe, including Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, Rival Schools, and more. My only complaint is that I'm not incredibly fond of the choice for the cover, I love the picture but just don't like looking at it all the time. If you love Capcom and fantastic artwork, then this book is a must have!!!

This book is full of colorful illustrations, I really enjoyed it. My only qualm is that it had very few pictures of game titles like Onimusha. Still, it is a really cool book.

UDON's Art of Capcom is a great purchase for any fan of the Capcom Video game series. It features covers from video games such as Street Fighter, UDON's Street Fighter Graphic novel/comic series, and other famed fighting game series'. If you are a collector of Videogame artbooks, be aware that this is actually made by and from UDONs artists themselves and does not feature any of the Art from Capcom's own Graphic Artists. This book is drawn extremely well, has rich details, and amazing colors.

Ok, the other reviews are correct in saying not all of Capcom's art is contained into this book. BUT it's UDON's art and not all of Capcom, Udon is just one of the many contributers to Capcom's artworks. If you want something that encompasses more of Capcom's titles you may want to check out "Capcom Design works" it's kind of hard to find in the US and about 3x the price of Udon's title, but it's a good buy.

As for Udon's book, as soon as I took it out of the box I was in a good mood. Raised printing, glossy pages, and an impressive 4 page spread of the Street Fighter characters inside. I also enjoyed how they showed their process of creating the cover in the back of the book (even though it's not extremely detailed). If you fallow Udon this is a great book and the fact that it doesn't have many of Capcom's title should not subtract in you buying a copy... After all it is UDON'S Art of Capcom... not Art of Capcom.

As with every relationship there are two sides to each story, however, in this book, Cynthia provides a candid portrait of her life with Lennon. At times, it is very sad and difficult to read, her feelings and love for Lennon really came through the book even after so many years. The beginning of the book is extremely well written and touching especially how she met John, and how their relationship started.
I read it in one weekend, and would certainly recommend it to every Lennon/Beatles fan. If only John were still alive to write his side of the story.....

While I love the Beatles and have most of their albums, my interest doesn't extend much beyond the music. I decided to read this book after viewing "The US vs. John Lennon" (which was awfully shoddy as documentaries go). I'm well acquainted with much of the standard Beatles mythology, but the film still piqued my interest as someone who was a small child during the period it covered. I just wanted to know how a simple aspiring rock musician became a revolutionary cultural icon, and a book by a woman who was actually along for the ride seemed to be the best place to start. And, I've decided, to finish.

How any fan, relying on other secondhand information, could feel confident enough to argue against the validity of Cynthia Lennon's personal account of her own life and marriage I can't really understand. She makes very few firm speculations about John Lennon's motives, and sticks pretty much to her own experiences and reactions. I found the book to be entirely reasonable and balanced. There's very little mudslinging, and the mild resentment that comes through is hardly uncommon or surprising. It becomes obvious over the course of the book that she's not exactly skilled at addressing dysfunction in relationships, and not improving at it much with age. Still, I felt some sympathy for her concerning her younger years as I read about them, especially given the picture of a "good wife" and the accompanying virtues and duties that her generation had been inculcated with.

I almost never read biographies, but I felt this was a straightforward account of the rise (and fall, unless you consider becoming an acid head a bump in the road) of John Lennon that satisfied my curiosity around the topic. It seems he was as much an emblem of the glaring hypocrisy of the peace movement as anything else.

JOHN is a good read and provides many insights into the life of John Lennon. It becomes obvious that John loved Cynthia a good deal more than most Beatle fans have believed, but at the same time, Cynthia seems to be in denial about much of John's womanizing and other activities. It is not in dispute that all the Beatles visited prostitutes in their early days in Hamburg, and later went through women recklessly during the height of their fame, especially while on tour. Cynthia prefers to deny and/or downplay this.

As Julian Lennon says in the introduction, however, the book contains many tales never told before, and from his mother's unique perspective. This is refreshing since Cynthia has been silent for too long. She lived through the madness, and she deserves to put forth a valid point of view about her husband and what it was like to live through the chaos of the Beatle years and beyond.

She is at her best when she tells of John's relationships with the other Beatles: enjoying Ringo's humor but treating George with a combination of affection and disdain. He was closest with Paul, although this, of course, would change. We see glimpses of Lennon's life within the group from a unique perspective missing from most other accounts.

John's relationhips with May Pang and Yoko Ono are also described, with Julian's thoughts and reactions to his father's behavior always included. Cynthia is quite candid about the turmoil these relationships produced. She is brutally honest about how LSD and Yoko Ono both changed John's already erratic personality and made him an even more distant father and husband. Indeed, the final paragraph of the book validates its writing, for the author looks back over her life with John and decides whether or not it was all worth it.

Despite Cynthia's honesty, John was a far darker character than the man described in these pages--much has been omitted--but Cynthia's task was to render her own viewpoint, which she has done with courageous candor.

It's hard reading this book in the light of several decades of feminism, because you keep wanting to go back in time and make Cynthia stand up to John, for his own good as well as hers. But to be fair, all the advice books in those days would have told her to put his needs first, "Don't make him angry," etc. People who didn't live through it don't realize how little support women dealing with addicted or abusive men got in those days. I do wish she had given him what he deserved on several occasions: A) the divorce: public opinion was against him, he was desperate to get out of the marriage, and she could and should have taken him to the cleaners, if not for her own sake, then for Julian's. B) when he more or less made her sit in steerage as he she brought Julian for a visit. He could bloody well afford a proper ticket, and she should have turned around and taken Julian right back to England. He didn't need a relationship with someone who treated his mother with such blatant disrespect. C) When John ridiculed Julian's laugh. I wish she'd flown over from England and cracked John's head open like a coconut for that one. But to say all this is to wish a Nice English Girl to act as if she had grown up in Brooklyn, and I know it's unreasonable.
That said, I think she gives a remarkably believable picture of John, certainly more credible than either the pacifist saint of the Ono publicity machine or the drooling loser in several books written by former servants. You can see the sometimes charming, sometimes snotty art student alternating with the verbally abusive boor and the coward scared of his bollock-busting auntie. You can also see how this nicest of nice girls would be attracted to the neighborhood Bad Boy, and Cynthia is one of a very few people who can claim no possible self-interest in her relationship with John: she had no reason to know that John would ever be more than another college kid with a garage band.
I do think she downplays his abusiveness, which was not only described more frankly in some magazine articles during the '70s (Cream, for instance, ran a story subtitled "The Girls They Sandy-Poseyed With"), but by both her and John in Hunter Davies' '60s bio of the Beatles. It's pretty obvious John was violent more than once, and whether the poor woman has simply blocked out her worst memories or has got tired of people criticizing her for being a Co-dependent or Enabler, probably in the same self-righteous tones they'd have used in the '60s to tell her to put His Needs first and don't make him angry, she's pretty much backtracked on what seems to have been a pattern, and now indicates it was an isolated incident. But again, it's unfair to read history backwards--look at old women's magazines, and you'll see how little help women in those situations got.
As to whether John ever really loved her--who knows? He very likely said he did. There's no reason to believe she would lie, and plenty of reason to suppose he would, or at least not be entirely forthcoming. He gave an interview in the '70s during which he repeated the information that he and Cynthia had to get married because she was pregnant, but then added something about lots of babies being conceived over a bottle on a Saturday night, etc., giving the impression that Cynthia was some sort of one-night stand, when it's public knowledge she was his steady girlfriend for several years before they got married. I have no doubt that if she brought up marriage during their dating days, he either grunted non-committally or lied outright that yes of course he intended to marry her even if he secretly didn't or wasn't entirely sure. In those days, nice girls didn't go all the way unless the relationship looked serious, and he wasn't going to talk to her as if she were the neighborhood floozy and tell her he hadn't the slightest intention of marrying her, unless he wanted the relationship to end right there. He had a pattern of cowardice that including letting Cynthia find him with Yoko instead of just telling her he wanted a divorce, letting an employee fire discarded mistress May Pang instead of contacting her and telling her he wasn't coming back. When he wasn't avoiding being up-front with people, he was too up-front on the wrong occasions. Though John no doubt thought he was being "open" by admitting he'd married Cynthia because she was pregnant, he doesn't seem to have thought how much fun it would be for Julian to have to fight schoolmates who dissed his mother based on that info, or be called a coward if he wouldn't fight. John knew damn well what kids are like, and he ought to have kept his mouth shut.
In Cynthia's favor, let us remember that even if the world never considered her as "artistic" as Yoko Ono, John wrote his best work when he was with her--so she certainly did nothing to hamper his astonishing talent. Now compare that to the work he did after. I don't think his artistic decline is solely attributable to leaving the Beatles; I think he left a woman who humbly acknowledged that if she couldn't always inspire him, she could at least get out of his way, in favor of a woman who made a career out of getting in his way and in everybody else's. And in this book's favor, John actually sounds like a real human being here, both admirable and flawed, rather than the cardboard saint/borderline psychotic crash-dieting superstitious reader of trashy tabloids depicted in other books. So even if you suspect she's being too kind to John, and it's clear she frequently is, look what happens when Beatle-ex-wives openly allege abuse and demand proper settlements and child support: Heather Mills McCartney got trashed by the press for doing the very things that Cynthia tried to avoid. People are only too happy to pronounce judgments on marriages, but we weren't there, and I believe that Cynthia as at least trying to give a fair picture of what it was like for someone who *was* there.

This is Cynthia Lennon's second book about her ex-husband. The first, A Twist of Lennon, was short, pointless, and boring. This one is longer, is full of details (about herself), and is still boring in parts.

Cynthia describes her youth and love affair with fellow art student John in a monotone voice, with no emotional fervor whatever. Their long separations as John became famous and his growing drug use caused problems, but you don't feel it from her bland writing. It's only when the hated Yoko Ono enters the story that the narrative heats up, and even then it's fairly tepid. Ono is described as a conniving witch who cast a spell over John and made him abandon not only Cynthia, but their young son as well.

There are many candid photos of Cynthia and John but very little about the Beatles, so if you're looking for inside stuff about the Fab Four, keep looking. When Cynthia does write about Paul, George, or Ringo, she speaks in vague terms as if she didn't know them well. We get much more detail about her family and John's family, and the whole Beatles era is described with less passion than one would read in a newspaper account.

I was hoping for insights about John, but the book is really about Cynthia and her life after him. A better editor or a ghost writer might have brought more life to this story; it should have been engrossing, but instead it's just okay.

I enjoy using this book, paper is great, space is wonderful and the easy is not too easy! I do the puzzles everyday because it is a joy to work with!

I love this one! Each puzzle is big, big, big -- one puzzle per 8 X 10 page. Lots of room to solve in. The quality of the paper is great. And there are 16 by 16 grids in the back -- my favorites. Buy this one, not the so-called "jumbo" puzzles by the same author.

This Sudoku book is both great and a major disappointment at the same time. The great part is that the puzzles are printed nice and big so that you have enough space in the number squares to write down the possibilities. And the paper is strong enough so that you don't make holes in the paper as you write and erase. I had other Sudoku books where I ended up making a copy of each page before working on it.

The disappointment is that some puzzles are not properly formed, and have more than one solution.

If you like to sit and think for a long time this is the product for you. I really enjoy this book.... the only thing is the order. It jumbles around from easy to hard to medium ect. I would also like it more if it had more solution strategies. Overall this is a good first book of sudoku.

This is a fantastic book for sudoku starters everywhere. It has instructions that are really well written and a huge grid that is much easier to use and see than others. Another reviewer said that the levels are spread out, but that is so you can try different levels and work yourself up to levels. In a way it keeps you on a "roll." If you chose any sudoku book let this be the one.

I gave my granddaughter who is an avid "Lucy fan" this book for Christmas and she loved it because it focused on Lucy's movie career.

This book is very well written and has wonderful pictures. The write up about Lucy gives even the biggest fans new insight into her life. It is a great way to find all the movies she was in.

To start off this is a great book and not being much of a reader myself I really love this one. It has great large pictures, hard to find pictures and the words are fairly large in this one also. Not being overly large like a kids reader but being the perfect size! But not only this, it has a lot of informative info aobut all of Lucy's movies that she has appeared in and also a despription of each movie. This is great because if you have never seen any of Lucille Ball's films you will get a thrill out of reading about all of the movies as well as jotting them down and looking online to buy them on DVD. This book has so much more also as well as the biography of Lucille Ball and a whole lot more! This is not a boring book but a nice fun book to read and to also make you want to read as well as some great info about the bright and talented star. The book itself is very large and very well made, as well as being thick. It looks like it costs about $50 it is so big and thick but I bought this through a book store in my local town for $29.99 which on the back of the book is the retail value so Amazon has a GREAT price!

Great large and loaded coffee table book. The photos are gorgeous! Lucille Ball had a real long career. I am in awe of the volume of work Ball had already experienced before "I Love Lucy". She was no doubt a workaholic. From Chorus girl to extra to supporting role to leading lady!
My all time favorite lady of Hollywood did it all. The author of this affordable book, Cindy De La Hoz deserves an award for putting this mother load of Ball's cinema work. Good job!

"Lucy at the Movies" by Cindy De La Hoz is a coffee table sized visual treat displaying the varied movie career of America's beloved red headed comedienne. It spans Lucy's 5 decade career in movies. The text is easy to read and gives the full cast and credits of all her movies. It includes the synopis,notes and comments, and even the reviews of each movie. There are many pictures from her movies dispersed throughout the book. Also, to the delight of her many fans, there are numerous behind the scenes and other personal pictures of Lucy and her castmates.
This book is worth every penny and if you're a Lucy fan it belongs in your collection. Buy it. You'll treasure it always.

Just to be clear, this is JUST THE ACCOMPANIMENT CDS! Even though the name of the product is "Singer's Musical Theatre Anthology Soprano Vol. 5 Accompaniment WITH 2 Cds". I thought I was getting the book and the cds, but i didn't. Now I have to buy the book separately which is a bit annoying. but it does have great songs in it!

My copy arrived today and my girlfriend and I were excited.
I wanted to read it first so i did, I finished quick so she began to read. Very soon right after she opened it she noticed alot of the pages had been half torn out of the book, since they weren't like that at all when I had read it I thought it was just a bit odd. She figured if she was just very gentle with the book they wouldn't come out anymore, but as she turned each page they all fell out, by the time she was finished the entire first half of the pages had come out of the book.
I thought it was weird considering what we paid.
I'm not sure if I will purchase anymore of these books just from the quality, but I would like to read the rest of these stories. If I do get the rest I just hope they don't fall apart especially after only getting to read it once.

I honestly wasn't sure what to expect from this book seeing as I had only limited knowledge of it before purchasing (and that was basically via the art of Al Rio), however I was definitly surprised by the quality of the stories.

Overall, the stories are fun and creative, with a lot of reference to the the original tales they're based upon (i.e. the endings are NOT so happy). My only real complaint, however, is that the stories are WAY rushed, usually skipping over the parts that the writers assume everyone knows, leaving you wanting to know what other portions could have been reimagined, and making for some very quick reads.

I'm also a bit mixed on the how each story is set up, as they each basically begin with a teenager having a moral delima or being in trouble before being told or reading a related fairy tale that gives them pause in their decisions. That's not to say some of the set ups are not fun, but others seem a bit "After School Special". However, overall this is a very solid and fun romp for an older audience (nothing necessarily Adult, but I'd keep it away from young children due to the violence).

Also for those wondering, the following are the tales reimagined in this volume:

Red Riding Hood (3 out of 5 stars)
Cinderella (4 out of 5 stars)
Hansel and Gretel (4 out of 5 stars)
Rumplestiltskin (5 out of 5 stars)
Sleeping Beauty (5 our of 5 stars - Great twist to this one)
Robber Bridegroom (3 out of 5 stars)

As well as a tale called Legacy that gives some backstory on the "story teller" seen throughout the series.

I picked up this trade on a whim after years of being addicted to the vertigo series Fables. I didn't know what to expect and just went with it. The art feels very mid 90s to me style-wise, the girls are all very well endowed and conveniently keep having their clothing ripped. Each story tells the basics, but the reader is required to fill in many blanks and assume characterization. The plots are string thin at best but my fascination with fairy tales made me keep going. Each story follows the same path, modern day event, kid finds the book, story is told, return to modern day for the moral. It is interesting to see how the stories themselves are told, but the execution is sub par for the medium.

If you can, skim through this in a store and don't buy it sight unseen like I did. You'll be disappointed.

The covers by Nick Marks look very good though.

Anyone knowing anything about Katherine Hepburn knows, despite film roles and a public persona, that she was in a groveling and servile relationship with Spencer Tracy, the love of her life. No feminist would want to copy her.

I looked forward to reading this book, largely because I am such a Hepburn fan. However, I was deeply disappointed. Ms. Karbo is a wonderful, breezy writer. However, the lessons in this book aren't much more than her personal opinions backed up by Hepburn anecdotes. While it's clear Ms. Karbo admires Kate Hepburn, I was not inspired nor enlightened by the material. If you are interested in learning about the actress, I suggest one of the other biographies. If you are interested in life lessons, I suggest a different book.

I'm a woman who loves movies, loves Katharine Hepburn, and loves self-help wisdom. So when I picked up How to Hepburn, all 3 of these antennae were waving. I was taken by the Dick Cavett epigram on the very first page hinting at "some secret" of Hepburn's that made her so successful and content, and found myself in that greedy, plundering mode of reading where you look for something that can benefit YOU. I kept finding absolute gems. The first chapter, for example, is called The Importance of Being Brash, and right away you get what Karbo's doing: entertaining us with inside stories about and insights into Hepburn but also genuinely extracting important ideas for all of us. Hepburn started wearing pants and outraging people in grade school when girls and women in pants were unheard-of, and never stopped; she was the first girl to wear pants to class at Bryn Mawr, and in fact "they became her trademark... her baggies were so raggedy she held them up with safety pins, a style that, when combined with Hepburn's devotion to the pursuit of fun (smoking; skinny-dipping in the library fountain; breaking and entering), could best be described as Hobo Flapper." This really makes me want to cut loose. Maybe I will get some black jeans and wear kohl on my eyes like that boy I saw the other day in the museum.

One of my favorite chapters is Fear Management, the Hepburn Way, mainly because it reveals that Hepburn's seeming fearlessness masked horrible stage fright. This is great news. Katherine Hepburn had stage fright? And went and did all that theater acting anyway? What Karbo says is "The flinty truth is that mostly things get worse, including our fears. Solace is found in acclimation: we may not overcome our terror, but we get used to the sensation of being terrified." This is a wonderful nugget that is not unfamiliar to those of us familiar with cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Like Hepburn herself, this book defies categorization. It is bracing and thoughtful and a lot of fun. It's... well, it's inspiring. It would make a great birthday present for a woman of any age.

As I was looking at the biographies section of my local independent bookstore, I noticed this compact book snuggled between much larger books about two screen icons who share the same last name, Audrey and Katharine Hepburn. Given the provocative title, I wanted to venture a guess as to which Hepburn the author was talking about since both women have inspired various levels of imitation and adoration even after their respective deaths. As I suspected, the book turns out to be about Kate on the not-so-coincidental occasion of her centenary. However, author Karen Karbo is not really examining the legendary actress's life in detail but rather taking a more cursory look at the cues in her life and memorable quotes that helped shape her enduring persona. Hepburn obviously lived life on her own terms, and Karbo sets out to define what the guiding principles were behind the actress's 93-year-old life.

Toward that end, the author does a reasonably entertaining job of presenting the Hepburn philosophy, steeped as it is in self-mythologizing, but there is nothing revelatory here that would surprise fans. It's common knowledge that the woman was a difficult personality with a wealth of idiosyncrasies. At the same time, she continues to be a beloved icon for her unmovable sense of self and her non-conformist mindset just as much for her enduring career. Karbo's treatment reads a bit like a manifesto, which I'm sure is intentional, but without the cumulative context of Hepburn's life events, there is a lack of resonance to the life lessons presented. Several comprehensive biographies on the market offer theories on her life, though none more accurately encapsulates her philosophy than the subject herself in Me : Stories of My Life. Even better is the two-part 1973 interview Dick Cavett conducted with a 66-year-old Hepburn (mentioned briefly in the book and available on the first disc of The Dick Cavett Show - Hollywood Greats). With her crackling persona in full bloom, the legend threatens to make Cavett into a whipping boy with her unapologetic honesty and lacerating wit. That will give you a more vivid impression of Hepburn's outlook on life than this book really can.

I must admit I'm still a few pages away from finishing the book, but I had to write to say that I'm loving every page of it. It seems to read part biography, part love letter from a devoted fan, and part amazing graduate thesis in the way each part of Kate's life is analyzed and seen from a feminist's point of view. I so thoroughly enjoyed Karbo's personal comments, and at times comedic footnotes, that I think the author should take the book on the road and do a one woman homage stand up performance of it. If she did, I would be the first in line to offer any help on it in any way. The only reason I couldn't give 5 stars is the lack of any photos that is a must have for Hepburn fans like me, and the fact that it was too short, as I trust I will be sad to come to the ending. Thank you Karen Karbo for a fascinating new look at our never-to-be forgotten Katherine, as well as ourselves.