Film Composers in America: A Filmography, 1911-1970 Review

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(More customer reviews)What a wealth of information! If you love lists, you'll love this book, as it comprehensively details the composers (and orchestrators) who wrote the background scores, often anonymously, in the golden age of American motion pictures. It ends at 1970, which may seem arbitrary, but you can't complain about the author's resourcefulness in researching the extant archives of the major Hollywood studios. Invaluable for libraries and fact-collectors who want to know "who really wrote that score".

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Film Composers in America is a landmark in the history of film. Here, renowned film scholar Clifford McCarty has attempted to identify every known composer who wrote background musical scores for films in the United States between 1911 and 1970. With information on roughly 20,000 films, the book is an essential tool for serious students of film and a treasure trove for film fans. It spans all types of American films, from features, shorts, cartoons, and documentaries to nontheatrical works, avant-garde films, and even trailers. Meticulously researched over 45 years, the book documents the work of more than 1,500 composers, from Robert Abramson to Josiah Zuro, including the first to score an American film, Walter C. Simon. It includes not only Hollywood professionals but also many composers of concert music--as well as popular music and other genres--whose cinematic work has never before been fully catalogued. The book also features an index that lets readers quickly find the composer for any American film through 1970. To recover this history, much of which was lost or never recorded, McCarty corresponded with or interviewed hundreds of composers, arrangers, orchestrators, musical directors, and music librarians. He also conducted extensive research in the archives of the seven largest film studios--Columbia, MGM, Paramount, RKO, 20th Century-Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros.--and wherever possible, he based his findings on the most reliable evidence, that of the manuscript scores and cue sheets (as opposed to less accurate screen credits). The result is the definitive guide to the composers and musical scores for the first 60 years of American film.

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The Modern Amazons : Warrior Women on Screen Review

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(More customer reviews)What this fun, engaging book lacks in depth, it makes up for in breadth. I did not find this especially helpful in gaining a deeper understanding of the changing roles that strong female characters have been playing in popular culture in the past several decades, but no book I know can match it for its range and scope. I've done a great deal of reading about women in the movies and on TV, but this books goes way beyond that to show how women have appeared in a vast array of media during recent years. I give the book 4 stars instead of less simply because it provides an incredible services by calling attention to strong women in a number of areas that have been neglected in previous surveys. Nonetheless, I think the book can at best serve as a jumping off point for further work. But by helping map out the areas where strong women can be discerned is an invaluable service. It was very close to being a near complete cataloging of the most important female figures in popular media. There were a few minor omissions, but as far as I can tell only one major one: the inexplicable failure to mention FARSCAPE, the show above all others that not only features multiple strong female characters but places these in a non-patriarchal universe. No show I know engages gender issues so interestingly and few female characters on TV are as pertinent to the authors' discussion as Claudia Black's character Aeryn Sun.
This is also one of the more lavishly illustrated books that you can ever hope to own. There are photos on nearly every page of the book, many of them full page.
There are, however, a number of problems with the book. First, the sheer breadth means that nothing can be discussed in much depth. I was ecstatic when the authors bring up Third Wave Feminism (many TV critics look at shows like BUFFY or DARK ANGEL and describe them as post-feminist, when in fact they are better understood in the light of the Third Wave), but not much more than that is done with it. Still, kudos for bringing that up at all! More troubling is the utter lack of critical distinction in bringing up all the various "Amazons." The brute fact is that many of the shows and movies mentioned are just flat out awful. CHARMED is discussed as well as BUFFY, with no indication that CHARMED is critically reviled while BUFFY is by consensus one of the masterpieces of television. BLADE: TRINITY, ELEKTRA, and CATWOMAN are mixed in with THELMA AND LOUISE and BLADE RUNNER, with no mention that the first three were universally trashed. There is a long discussion of Linda Carter's turn as WONDER WOMAN, but no mention that 1) the show is bad and 2) Wonder Woman on the show is distressingly subservient to men and spends most of her time trying to make her boss look good. I can fully understand a discussion of Xena in a book like this, but there is no acknowledgment that the show has always been a cult favorite, but has been universally considered a not very good show, while she doesn't by contrast bring up the enormous critical acclaim of BUFFY, ALIAS, and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.
Finally, there is that term "Amazon." The book wants to celebrate the various warrior women in popular culture, but roping the majority of the women into that category is a bit of a stretch. I absolutely love Emma Peel in THE AVENGERS, but I have a lot of trouble viewing her under either the category of a warrior woman or an Amazon. A very strong female character? Absolutely. But I think the book stretches conceptual categories a bit more broadly than is advisable.
Nonetheless, I definitely recommend the book. The panoramic scope outweighs weaknesses. At the very least it has mapped out the terrain to be explored in any discovery of strong female characters in popular culture.

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The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande Review

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(More customer reviews)The author reports on, and reflects upon, the anthropological research that she conducted in the region where she herself grew up: the Española Valley in Northern New Mexico. It is a region that few outsiders have taken the trouble to understand, while insiders (who generally feel beleaguered) are usually not eager to disclose to Anglos like me what their lives are like.
Dr. Garcia displays an all-too-rare insistence on questioning nearly everything. She thinks for herself in a refreshing and provocative way. In the process, she humbly yet methodically undermines conventional wisdom about the nature of addiction and the treatment of addicts.
In the past few years, I've seen enough of northern New Mexico to realize that alongside its grandeur and hospitality is a troubled and despairing aspect. Yet until now I had little idea of the depth, pervasiveness, and complexity of its problems. This book exposes them while providing a wide-ranging context. The author's systemic perspective encompasses geography, history, government social services, and more. As such, the book is appropriately disturbing on many levels. At the same time, it also bears poignant witness to human decency and loyalty and compassion under trying circumstances.
The scholarly stuff (such as literature reviews and methodological reflections), which is important to experts, is confined largely to the first few pages of each chapter. The rest of it reads much like an article in The New Yorker: straight-talking, compelling writing that is accessible also to non-experts.
This book gave me much more of an insider's view of (one slice of) Hispano life in the Española Valley than I imagined I'd ever be privileged to know. It has opened my eyes, and for that I'm grateful.

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The Pastoral Clinic takes us on a penetrating journey into an iconic Western landscape--northern New Mexico's Española Valley, home to the highest rate of heroin addiction and fatal overdoses in the United States. In a luminous narrative, Angela Garcia chronicles the lives of several Hispano addicts, introducing us to the intimate, physical, and institutional dependencies in which they are entangled. We discover how history pervades this region that has endured centuries of material and cultural dispossession, and we come to see its heroin problem as a contemporary expression of these conditions, as well as a manifestation of the human desire to be released from them. Lyrically evoking the Española Valley and its residents through conversations, encounters, and recollections, The Pastoral Clinic is at once a devastating portrait of addiction, a rich ethnography of place, and an eloquent call for a new ethics of care.

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