“Fortunately, I never got VD. One of the girls did and I heard that she was taken away and beaten to death. The rest of us remained quite healthy. Given our hectic sex life. I don’t understand how we remained healthy. Maybe we were just a bunch of young country girls living off our youth.” There are said to have been 100,000 “comfort girls” recruited by the Japanese military during World War II, and set up in brothels throughout Asia. Today the surviving women once forced into prostitution by Japan’s “Imperial Forces” are in the process of suing the Japanese government for their years of degradation and abuse. JB

Publisher: Norton
Hardback: 303 pages
Illustrated

What causes revolutions? Is it a significant corpus of classic philosophical texts held in reverence centuries later? Apparently such texts barely caused a ripple in the book trade in pre-revolutionary France. Employing careful methodology, Darnton discovers that the French reading class of this period were more often than not reading books which fell under the broad categories of either philosophical pornography, utopian fantasy, or political slander. In discussing his reasons for what some may consider “sheer antiquarianism,” Darnton explains “[T]hat the history of books as a new discipline within the ‘human sciences’ makes it possible to gain a broader view of literature and of cultural history in general. By discovering what books reached readers throughout an entire society and (at least to a certain extent) how readers made sense of them, one can study literature as part of a general cultural system.” Detailed tables and maps detailing the book trade and communication networks in pre-revolutionary France, as well as reproductions of illustrations from representative texts and substantial extracts from three such works are presented. JAT

Publisher: Norton
Paperback: 440 pages

As an exhaustive history of the town of Auschwitz, this book has a certain value. However, this reviewer is puzzled as to why these two authors should have decided to research the history of an insignificant little Polish village all the way back to its origins in 1270. Obviously, Auschwitz is only of historical interest insofar as the history of the Holocaust—which is indeed covered in meticulous detail later in the book—is concerned. However, aside from interesting photographs and the history of a Polish village, the book really adds nothing new to what historians already know about the infamous concentration camp. JB

Publisher: Norton
Hardback: 443 pages
Illustrated

If one comes into contact with other human beings, there’s a good chance of hearing at least one urban legend, those fantastic yet somehow believable stories about phantom carjackers in the back seat, or small stray dogs that turn out to be Mexican sewer rats. Jan Brunvand is a folklorist who has made an academic career out of studying urban legends. The Baby Train is his fifth collection of these orally transmitted tales (though they are also increasingly being spread via fax and the Internet). Highlights here are a great chapter on “Sex and Scandal Legends” (including the title piece wherein the regular appearance of an early morning freight train causes the local fertility rate to skyrocket) and a small section devoted to “Drug Horror Stories.” As a special bonus, Brunvand offers handy hints for politely debunking urban legends told in your presence, all without using the words, “I can’t believe you fell for that.” LP

Publisher: Norton
Paperback: 367 pages

The main focus is on film-music methodology and technology, tracing early sound in film through to its maturity as practiced by such acknowledged masters in the field as Goldsmith, Herrmann, Rosenman and Bernstein. Includes perceptive interviews which give much insight into the compositional process, example scores which are discussed and dissected, overviews of key moments in film sound history and techniques, and film-music aesthetics codified. For such a thorough study, its one failing is the author’s bias against electronics in music, which is surprising given the strong tradition within the film-music and sound community to encompass all aspects of sound production.
Since the original publication date was 1977, post-Star Wars orchestral scoring and the new generation of composers and their techniques are omitted, which unfortunately prevents the book from being truly definitive. Nevertheless, a first-rate source on the development and traditions of motion-picture scoring. BW

Publisher: Norton
Paperback: 329 pages
Illustrated

Profiles one of the most preeminent and influential photographers of the 20th century, covering Arbus’ privileged Park Avenue childhood, her marriage to (and divorce from) Alan Arbus, her photographic work for various fashion magazines (among them, Vogue and Glamour) and her emergence as an artist in her own right. Encouraged by her mentor, Lisette Model, to pursue “the forbidden” with her camera, Arbus documented—with a steely persistence, a gentle manner and a wise child’s eyes—the perverse, the alienated and the strange: “people without their masks,” as she put it. But the ever mounting freedoms and risks she pursued in her work did not come without a price. Plagued throughout her life by depressions that commenced in childhood, Arbus possessed a sense of despair and futility that appears to have escalated in proportion to her increasing fame. She resolved her personal crisis tragically by committing suicide in 1971. A compassionate, informative and highly readable biography of this uncompromising and enigmatic giant of American photography. MDG

Publisher: Norton
Paperback: 367 pages
Illustrated

“Instead of memory, there is a culture of permanent playback” in which Barbara Steele, Alexander Nevsky, D.W. Griffith, Zombie Holocaust and a hundred thousand other cinematic images flicker in and out of our consciousnesses. The Phantom Empire is an elegantly written, dreamy rumination on how we have absorbed motion pictures into our individual and collective psyches. At various levels, it is about the creation of the spectator, the way movies initiate us into society, and how time distorts when we see old actors in their youth and dead actors living on the screen.
At the same time author O’Brien relates nothing less than a condensed history of the cinema itself. “The screen,” he writes, “was a second sky, where what you saw was nothing compared to the anticipation of what you might at any moment witness: a shooting star, a spaceship, an apocalypse.” Hypnotic and thought provoking. LP

Publisher: Norton
Hardback: 281 pages