Praise for Joe McBride

Paul Brunick has a great piece at Moving Image Source on Joseph McBride's trio of "doorstop" filmmaker biographies.

I am referring of course to Searching for John Ford, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, and Steven Spielberg: A Biography, Second Edition which are all available from UPM.

McBride is a leading film historian and scholar. He is currently associate professor in the cinema department at San Francisco State University. His many books also include Hawks on Hawks and What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career. 

After the jump, watch Joe McBride's take on the Academy Award Best Picture nominees.

Book of the Year

Dictionary of Louisiana French: As Spoken in Cajun, Creole, and American Indian Communities, has been awarded the 2011 Humanities Book of the Year award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. 

The prize committee noted the editor's "masterful job in compiling an educational and reference resource based on thorough scholarship. This Dictionary of Louisiana French is indispensible to the study of French culture in Louisiana."

The Dictionary not only contains the largest number of words and expressions of French vocabulary in Louisiana but also provides the most complete information available for each entry. Entries include the word in the conventional French spelling, the pronunciation (including attested variants), the part of speech classification, the English equivalent, and the word's use in common phrases. 

The Dictionary also features a wealth of illustrative examples derived from fieldwork and textual sources and identification of the parish where the entry was collected or the source from which it was compiled. An English-to-Louisiana French index enables readers to find out how particular notions would be expressed in la Louisiane.  

Praise for The Survival of Soap Opera

TV soap operas have been derided, mocked, loved, and appreciated in equal measure since their appearance. Now, when the genre is at a turning point, The Survival of Soap Opera investigates the causes of soaps’ dwindling popularity, describes soaps’ impact on TV and new media culture, and gleans lessons from soaps’ complex history and ponders the relevance for the future of the popular entertainment form.

Soap critic Marlena De Lacroix offers her praise for the book in recent post. A sound bite below:

What I really like about the book is its tone of intelligent optimism. Nowhere does it say what everyone else is saying — that soaps are dying.  It examines minutely a medium that is still — unlike Tom Hughes — alive and in the fight, even as its numbers dwindle. It’s a uniquely American creation that is still often worth watching — and thinking deeply about.

Also, The Survival of Soap Opera was recently featured on the site Daytime Confidential. The post generated some interesting debate in the comments section.

On the Horizon: Panther Tract

Panther Tract: Wild Boar Hunting in the Mississippi Delta by Melody Golding (Katrina: Mississippi Women Remember) features over 150 color photographs and tales that magnify the tradition-rich lore of dogs, horses, and hunters pursuing wild boar.Golding presents readers with an insider’s observance of extraordinary hunting, southern hospitality, camaraderie, and the love of dogs, horses, and hair raising excitement.

The photographs in the book are representative of a “day at the hunt,” starting at dawn and ending well after dark. Subjects include the Mississippi Delta landscape and  the people and animals involved in the hunt. Portraits of the hunters, and their interactions with one another and their dogs and horses, fascinate.

The tales center on vivid hunting experiences, both at Panther Tract—a large wilderness paradise in Yazoo County, owned by legendary southern gentleman Howard Brent—and in other locations in the Mississippi Delta. The narratives come from men, women, doctors, lawyers, judges, businessmen, politicians, farmers, sharecroppers’ sons, and even a Hollywood screenwriter.

The stories collected here range from traditional often humorous hunting tales to more serious accounts of the history of hog hunting in America. Hank Burdine, a Mississippi native and hunter who has written for many statewide publications, lends a broad vision to the history, statistics, and lore of hunting wild hogs. An appendix features boar recipes by Chef John Folse.

Panther Tract will be available in April from UPM. Click through for images from the book.