Ladies' man

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Rubén Martínez

"The U.S.-Mexican border is one of the most permeable boundaries in the world. Even as the United States deploys billions of dollars and a vast arsenal to "hold the line," the border is breached daily by Mexicans in search of work. Yet the migrant gambit is perilous. Thousands die crossing the border, and those who reach "the other side" are branded illegals, undocumented and unprotected.". "In Crossing Over, the Ruben Martinez puts a human face on the phenomenon, following the exodus of the Chavez clan, an extended Mexican family with the grim distinction of having lost three sons in a tragic border incident. He charts the migrants' progress from their small south-Mexican town of Cheran through the harrowing underground railroad to the tomato farms of Missouri, the strawberry fields of California, and the slaughterhouses of Wisconsin. He reveals the effects of emigration on the family members left behind and offers a powerful portrait of migrant culture, an exchange that deposits hip-hop in Indian villages while bringing Mexican pop to the northern plains. Far from joining the melting pot, Martinez argues, the migrants - as many as seven million in the United States - are spawning a new culture that will alter both countries, as Latin America and the United States come increasingly to resemble each other."--BOOK JACKET.

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Maxene Andrews and Bill Gilbert

Maxene, Patty and LaVerne - the Andrew Sisters. Their songs and-can-do singing style immortalized the 1930s and 40s. Their upbeat, three-part harmony brightened the spirits of Americans at home and abroad during the dark years of World War Il. In Over Here, Over There, Maxene Andrews and Bill Gilbert make those years come alive again in a richly nostalgic, warmly affectionate look back at a country at war - and the talented men and women who entertained the troops who were fighting it. Touring America fifty weeks a year, singing songs like "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" and "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B," the Andrew Sisters played to standing-room-only civilian audiences in theaters and auditoriums, performed at war bond rallies in Times Square and the Hollywood Canteen, visited soldiers at military posts and hospitals, and traveled to North Africa, Sicily and Europe for the USO. Over Here, Over There is also the story of the many other stars - Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Ann Sheridan, Kathryn Grayson, Abbott and Costello, Mickey Rooney, and Glenn Miller, to name only a few - who entertained a combined audience of 161 million servicemen and women in just four years. Here's a singer's soft strains of "Abide With Me" over a fresh muddy grave in Anzio . . . Ann Miller collapsing after twenty-four hours at a hotel-turned-hospital . . . Patty Andrews announcing V-J Day and the end of the war to a stunned GI audience in Naples. Brimming with the energy, the excitement, the sense of camaraderie - and the music - of the times, Over here, Over There is a lovingly crafted memoir and tribute to the unforgettable moment in our history when a unique blend of national unity, loyalty and spirit brought Americans together as never before . . . and never since.

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Gavin Lambert

A major rediscovery - a full-scale biography - of the electrifying Russian-born actress who brought Stanislavksy and Chekhov to American theatre, who was applauded, lionized, adored - a legend of the stage and screen for forty years, and then strangely forgotten. Her shockingly natural approach to acting transformed the theatre of her day. She thrilled Laurette Taylor. The first time Tennessee Williams saw her he knew he wanted to be a playwright ("She was so shatteringly powerful that I couldn't stay in my seat"). Eugene O'Neill said of her that she gave him his "first conception of a modern theatre." She introduced the American stage and its audience to Ibsen's New Woman, a woman hell-bent on independence. It was a role Nazimova embodied offstage as well. When she toured in a repertory of A Doll's House, The Master Builder, and Hedda Gabler from 1907 to 1910, she earned the then unheard-of sum of five million dollars for theatre manager Lee Shubert. Eight years later she went to Hollywood and signed a contract with Metro Pictures (before it was MGM) and became the highest-paid actress in silent pictures, ultimately writing, directing, and producing her own movies (Revelation, Stronger than Death, Billions, Salome). Four years later she formed her own film company. She was the only actress, other than Mae West, to become a movie star at forty, and was the first to cultivate the image of the "foreign" sophisticate, soon to be followed by Pola Negri, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich. Gavin Lambert was given exclusive access to her unpublished memoirs, letters, and notes. And now fifty years after her death, eighty years after her ascendancy as a giant figure to the American public, Lambert has brilliantly re-created the life and work of this complex, dark, glamorous, and important figure.

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David Henry Sterry

"Here is a story like no other: The unforgettable chronicle of a season spent walking the razor-sharp line between painful innocence and the allure of the abyss. David Sterry was a wide-eyed son of 1970s suburbia, but within his first week looking for off-campus housing on Sunset Boulevard he was lured into a much darker world - servicing the lonely women of Hollywood by night.". "Chicken - the word is slang for a young male prostitute - revisits this year of living dangerously, in a narrative of dazzling inventiveness and searing candor. Shifting back and forth from tales of Sterry's youth - spent in the awkward bosom of a "normal" but disintegrating family - to his fascinating account of the Neverland of post-sixties sexual excess, Chicken teems with Fellini-esque characters and set pieces worthy of Dionysus. And when the life finally overwhelms Sterry, his retreat from the profession will leave an indelible mark on readers' minds and hearts."--BOOK JACKET.