A Fine Romance

In a follow-up to Knock Wood, the Emmy Award-winning actress traces the milestone events of her life, including her first marriage, the birth of her daughter, her work on Murphy Brown and her struggles with widowhood.

The author presents a hand written, illustrated account of her two months exploring the English countryside.

In A Fine Romance, David Lehman looks at the formation of the American songbook—the timeless numbers that became jazz standards, iconic love songs, and sound tracks to famous movies—and explores the extraordinary fact that this songbook was written almost exclusively by Jews. An acclaimed poet, editor, and cultural critic, David Lehman hears America singing—with a Yiddish accent. He guides us through America in the golden age of song, when “Embraceable You,” “White Christmas,” “Easter Parade,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “My Romance,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Stormy Weather,” and countless others became nothing less than the American sound track. The stories behind these songs, the shows from which many of them came, and the shows from which many of them came, and the composers and lyricists who wrote them give voice to a specifically American saga of love, longing, assimilation, and transformation. Lehman’s analytical skills, wit, and exuberance infuse this book with an energy and a tone like no other: at once sharply observant, personally searching, and attuned to the songs that all of us love. He helps us understand how natural it should be that Wizard of Oz composer Harold Arlen was the son of a cantor who incorporated “Over the Rainbow” into his Sabbath liturgy, and why Cole Porter—the rare non-Jew in this pantheon of musicians who wrote these classic songs shaped America even as America was shaping them. (Part of the Jewish Encounter series)

"Feminist film theory will soon be a quarter of a century old. It has known the euphoria of the 1970s, experienced the contradictions of the 1980s, and glimpsed the reversals and political gains, which include women of color, of the 1990s." But, Patricia Mellencamp asks, what is the next move? In this challenging look at twenty years of feminist film theory, Mellencamp elaborates on its rich history, drawing on her personal academic life, and offering inventive readings of a remarkable variety of films: recent Hollywood releases like Forest Gump, Pulp Fiction, Thelma and Louise, Basic Instinct, and Silence of the Lambs, and features and independent films made by women, such as The Piano, Angie, Orlando, Bedevil, Daughters of the Dust, Privilege, and Forbidden Love. With a clever sense of irony and wit, Mellencamp poses a question from which her analysis takes off: What did Rapunzel, Cinderella and Snow White forget to tell Thelma and Louise? According to Mellencamp, they forgot what comes after "the end," after the wedding to the prince. So many women's stories, often by choice, stop after the prince whisks the princess away to live happily ever after. This book asks, what does "happily" mean for women? And what does "ever after" cost women? This creative call to shift film feminism's infamous "gaze" from sex and bodies to money and work ascertains where film feminism has been and what it needs to progress. Rather than recycling and regaining the same ground, Mellencamp urges film feminism to explore and claim new territory. Author note: Patricia Mellencamp is Professor of Film and Cultural Theory, Department of Art History, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. She has published several books, including High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Ageand Indiscretions: Avant-garde Film, Video, and Feminism.

Candice Bergen's bestselling 1984 memoir: an “engaging, intelligent, and wittily self-deprecating autobiography” (The New York Times). Candice Bergen was born into the heady Hollywood of the 1950s, where “celebrity offspring” were celebrities unto themselves. And because she was the daughter of Edgar Bergen, vaudeville and radio's greatest dignitary/comedian, her “sibling” was Charlie McCarthy, the impudent dummy beloved of millions. Bergen—much as he loved his daughter—was a man who “kept his emotions pressed and neatly hung,” and was more comfortable speaking to—and through—his brainchild who never had to grow up and leave the paradise that was childhood. Knock Wood is a book all about growing up—about the comedy of expectations that ruled Candice Bergen's early life, about the ironies that attended her exotic rites of passage. She stepped out into a world that offered her a wealth of options: adolescence in Swiss boarding schools; at nineteen, costarring opposite Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles; quick entry into the profession of photojournalism; automatic acceptance among the esteemed company of the moment—be it the international jet set, Bel Air in the 1960s, or the world that was radical politics in the 1970s. But always she carried the conviction that her gifts were untested, her luck unearned. Told with wit, self-deprecation, and a rare degree of courage, Knock Wood is the extraordinary record of Candice Bergen's coming of age. It is at once the moving fable of the love between a father and a daughter, of a woman's triumph over self-doubt, and a dazzling journal of America's life and times over the past four decades.

Our Fine Romance is the true story of two young people growing up separately during the London Blitz of 1940 and their subsequent evacuation into the English countryside. Following their unusual meeting, courtship and marriage they emigrated to "Apartheid" South Africa. Three years and two children later, for financial reasons, they made the risky decision to move to Northern Rhodesia, close to the war ravaged Republic of Congo. During their life there in the 1960's the "Wind of Change" was sweeping through the Colonial African States. Many British territories became independent during this time and, after another child and 10 years in Africa, they decided to start a new life on the West Coast of Canada. With the addition of a fourth child and successful careers in their adopted country, Maureen and Michael are both now retired and living in Vancouver, British Columbia, but a recent turn of events has lead to their biggest challenge yet.

"Shines with elusive insights about persons we recognize at once as acquaintances and friends, caught briefly in events that are part of their upper-class life, part of their inevitable sexual prisons, part of their middle age. To be able to say consistently interesting things about these embroilments--class, sex, age--is a triumph for a novelist. Cynthia Propper Seton has pulled off just such a triumph." --Doris Grumbach, Los Angeles Times

Where is this thing called love? And how do you get there from here? For many it's an elusive goal that's over even before it has a chance to start -- but it doesn't have to be. In A FINE ROMANCE, nationally recognized psychologist Dr. Judith Sills shows how the whole agonizing and exhilarating process of love actually develops between two people -- and how the rules of successful courtship can be learned and mastered. Dr. Sills covers all the skills you need to develop the right relationship in the areas of intimacy, compromise, and commitment. She also takes you step-by-step through the five stages of a relationship: * SELECTION -- when you actively or passively choose a partner. * SEDUCTION -- the dating days when you and your partner decide if the relationship is romantic, platonic, or dead. * SWITCH -- that uncomfortable period when the pursuer backs off just as the partner responds. * NEGOTIATION -- when you both acknowledge your differences and try to find a decent way to fight about them. * COMMITMENT -- the negotiation to marriage. There is no one right person. There is only your ability to give and receive love. This book will help lovers learn how to do just that.