Books, 9/7.

"To fully understand Reagan the man," Marc Eliot writes in Reagan: The Hollywood Years, "one must also understand Reagan the actor... how the characters he played... led him to create the persona he inhabited that eventually served as the God-like narrator of General Electric Theater, the forerunner to his greatest role of all, the president of the United States." Newsweek's David Ansen does the quoting in his admiring review: "The passages devoted to Reagan's movies are the least interesting part of what turns out to be a fascinating portrait of an amiable, unflappable young careerist who hitched his wagon to two of the most powerful men in Hollywood," Jack Warner and Lew Wasserman. "Many of Eliot's insights come as no surprise, but his ultimate point is hard to contest: Reagan became a great actor only after his acting career came to an end."

In a single entry, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell offer an invaluable online supplement to Film Art.

"Polanski has lived for his work, and it is by his work that he must be judged," argues Jonathan Yardley, reviewing Polanski in the Washington Post. "It is a pity that there are so many stains on his record, but there are few stains on his films. In this fine biography, [Christopher] Sandford gives those films the praise they deserve, and he is fair as well to Polanski the man."

For the San Francisco Chronicle, Eddie Muller reviews The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives and Tech-Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir.

"[Manny] Farber's essays are almost brattily smart, alluring and written in a style thankfully impossible to copy," writes Justin Stewart in an appreciation in Stop Smiling. "For good or bad, I gain more appreciation for the kind of cinematic coddlers and able showoffs he usually disdains. But Farber on fire can rile a reader up for or against a movie, or just thrillingly conflict one, like almost no other. Never a 'final word' kind of critic, he vitalized the discourse with unique insight and bomb-throwing verbal panache."

"The appeal of Hitchcock to the theorist and historian of film is impossible to overstate. To study him is to find an economical way of studying the entire history of cinema." For the TLS, Paula Marantz Cohen reviews Richard Allen's Hitchcock's Romantic Irony, Quentin Falk's Mr Hitchcock and Donald Spoto's Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies.

"Robert Giroux, an editor who introduced and nurtured some of the major authors of the 20th century and who rose to join one of the nation's most distinguished publishing houses as a partner, making it Farrar, Straus & Giroux, died Friday in Tinton Falls, NJ. He was 94." Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times. Related: a frustrating anecdote excerpted from Al Silverman's The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Publishers, Their Editors and Authors.

The Los Angeles Times previews the books to be released this fall.

Posted by dwhudson at September 7, 2008 9:16 AM