Neal Gabler

Este libro explora la fascinante cuestión de cómo Hollywood fue creado principalmente por un notable grupo de hombres que encajan en una demarcación demográfica muy pequeña y concreta: inmigrantes judios europeos, la mayoria de ellos pobres, la mayoria de ellos del lado este de Manhattan, ninguno de ellos practicante del judaismo, la mayoria de ellos procedentes de familias con figuras paternas debiles. Pero juntos se mudaron a una ciudad casi completamente protestante y crearon la el modo mas exitoso de entretenimiento popular en Estados Unidos, la presentacion de una version idealizada de la vida americana para una nacion en una constante busqueda de nuevos mitos nacionales. Lo mas fascinante de este libro es la brecha entre el mundo mitico que se les presentan y su propia realidad.

NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK One of the truly great biographies of our time.Sean Wilentz, New York Times bestselling author of Bob Dylan in America and The Rise of American Democracy A landmark study of Washington power politics in the twentieth century in the Robert Caro tradition.Douglas Brinkley, New York Times bestselling author of American MoonshotThe epic, definitive biography of Ted Kennedyan immersive journey through the life of a complicated man and a sweeping history of the fall of liberalism and the collapse of political morality. Catching the Wind is the first volume of Neal Gablers magisterial two-volume biography of Edward Kennedy. It is at once a human drama, a history of American politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and a study of political morality and the role it played in the tortuous course of liberalism. Though he is often portrayed as a reckless hedonist who rode his fathers fortune and his brothers coattails to a Senate seat at the age of thirty, the Ted Kennedy in Catching the Wind is one the public seldom sawa man both racked by and driven by insecurity, a man so doubtful of himself that he sinned in order to be redeemed. The last and by most contemporary accounts the least of the Kennedys, a lightweight. He lived an agonizing childhood, being shuffled from school to school at his mothers whim, suffering numerous humiliationsincluding self-inflicted onesand being pressed to rise to his brothers level. He entered the Senate with his colleagues lowest expectations, a show horse, not a workhorse, but he used his ninth-childs talent of deference to and comity with his Senate elders to become a promising legislator. And with the deaths of his brothers John and Robert, he was compelled to become something more: the custodian of their political mission. In Catching the Wind, Kennedy, using his late brothers moral authority, becomes a moving force in the great liberal hour, which sees the passage of the anti-poverty program and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Then, with the election of Richard Nixon, he becomes the leading voice of liberalism itself at a time when its power is waning: a shadow president, challenging Nixon to keep the American promise to the marginalized, while Nixon lives in terror of a Kennedy restoration. Catching the Wind also shows how Kennedys moral authority is eroded by the fatal auto accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969, dealing a blow not just to Kennedy but to liberalism. In this sweeping biography, Gabler tells a story that is Shakespearean in its dimensions: the story of a star-crossed figure who rises above his seeming limitations and the tragedy that envelopes him to change the face of America.

ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTERS 100 GREATEST FILM BOOKS OF ALL TIME The definitive portrait of one of the most important cultural figures in American history: Walt Disney. Walt Disney was a true visionary whose desire for escape, iron determination and obsessive perfectionism transformed animation from a novelty to an art form, first with Mickey Mouse and then with his feature filmsmost notably Snow White, Fantasia, and Bambi. In his superb biography, Neal Gabler shows us how, over the course of two decades, Disney revolutionized the entertainment industry. In a way that was unprecedented and later widely imitated, he built a synergistic empire that combined film, television, theme parks, music, book publishing, and merchandise. Walt Disney is a revelation of both the work and the manof both the remarkable accomplishment and the hidden life.Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and USA Today Biography of the Year

A provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of Americas motion picture industry. The names Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of contemporary Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream. Even to this day, the American values defined largely by the movies of these emigres endure in American cinema and culture. Who these men were, how they came to dominate Hollywood, and what they gained and lost in the process is the exhilarating story of An Empire of Their Own.

New York Times Book Review Editors Choice From the author of Catching the Wind comes the second volume of the definitive biography of Ted Kennedy and a history of modern American liberalism.Magisterial . . . an intricate, astute study of political power brokering comparable to Robert A. Caros profile of Lyndon Johnson in Master of the Senate.Publishers Weekly (starred review)Against the Wind completes Neal Gablers magisterial biography of Ted Kennedy, but it also unfolds the epic, tragic story of the fall of liberalism and the destruction of political morality in America. With Richard Nixon having stilled the liberal wind that once propelled Kennedysand his fallen brotherspolitical crusades, Ted Kennedy faced a lonely battle. As Republicans pressed Reaganite dogmas of individual freedom and responsibility and Democratic centrists fell into line, Kennedy was left as the most powerful voice legislating on behalf of those society would neglect or punish: the poor, the working class, and African Americans.Gabler shows how the fault lines that cracked open in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam were intentionally widened by Kennedys Republican rivals to create a moral vision of America that stood in direct opposition to once broadly shared commitments to racial justice and economic equality. Yet even as he fought this shift, Ted Kennedys personal moral failures in this erathe endless rumors of his womanizing and public drunkenness and his bizarre behavior during the events that led to rape accusations against his nephew William Kennedy Smithwould be used again and again to weaken his voice and undercut his claims to political morality.Tracing Kennedys life from the wilderness of the Reagan years through the compromises of the Clinton era, from his rage against the craven cruelty of George W. Bush to his hope that Obama would deliver on a lifetime of effort on behalf of universal health care, Gabler unfolds Kennedys heroic legislative work against the backdrop of a nation grown lost and fractured. In this outstanding conclusion to the saga that began with Catching the Wind, Neal Gabler offers his inimitable insight into a man who fought to keep liberalism alive when so many were determined to extinguish it. Against the Wind sheds new light both on a revered figure in the American Century and on Americas current existential crisis.

The story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, and melodrama has turned everythingnews, politics, religion, high cultureinto one vast public entertainment. Neal Gabler calls them "lifies," those blockbusters written in the medium of life that dominate the media and the national conversation for weeks, months, even years: the death of Princess Diana, the trial of O.J. Simpson, Kenneth Starr vs. William Jefferson Clinton. Real Life as Entertainment is hardly a new phenomenon, but the movies, and now the new information technologies, have so accelerated it that it is now the reigning popular art form. How this came to pass, and just what it means for our culture and our personal lives, is the subject of this witty, concerned, and sometimes eye-opening book. "A thoughtful, in places chilling, account of the way entertainment values have hollowed out American life." --The New York Times Book Review

The definitive biography of this remarkable man

Walt Disney: o triunfo da imaginação americana", de NEAL GABLER, é o retrato definitivo de uma das mais importantes figuras da história cultural e do entretenimento dos Estados Unidos no século XX.Ap