Jan Michael Vincent Edge Of Greatness

With hischiseled features, effortless screen presence, otherworldly vitality, strikingblue eyes, Jan-Michael Vincent seemed destined for superstardom. However, the real Jan-Michael Vincent was areluctant sex symbol plagued by doubt and low self-confidence, a perpetualmisfit doomed to alcoholism. Jan-MichaelVincent: Edge of Greatness covers Vincent’s entire life, beginning in hishometown of Hanford, California, and details the difference between JanVincent, a shy, small town boy, and Jan-Michael Vincent, Hollywood’s goldenboy, who was thought to be the next James Dean in the early to mid-1970s, aperiod in which Vincent delivered memorable performances in films such as Buster and Billie, The Mechanic, Tribes,and The World’s Greatest Athlete. Featuringinterviews with Vincent’s childhood classmates and friends, as well as hisformer Hollywood colleagues, including Donald P. Bellisario, Alex Cord, andRobert Englund, Jan-Michael Vincent: Edge of Greatnessreveals an eternal man-child, whose career and life symbolize the tragedy ofunfulfilled potential. David Grove is an author,film journalist, historian, and produced screenwriter. He is the author of the books Fantastic 4: The Making of the Movie, JamieLee Curtis: Scream Queen, Making Friday the 13th, and On Location inBlairstown: The Making of Friday the 13th. He lives in British Columbia, Canada. Grove missed his calling. He should have been anovelist. Thanks to Grove's vivid prose and keen eye for emotionaldetail, Edge of Greatness is reads much more like a tragicnovel than the standard biography of a mildly talented actor's rapid rise andhorrific downfall. This is the all-too-familiar story of a self-destructiveactor undone by all the temptations of Hollywood -- sex, drugs, alcohol -- andhis own hubris. The book tracks Vincent from his humble beginnings inthe central California farming community of Hanford, through his years ofstardom, and up to his current squalor, which is physical, mental andfinancial. As Grove puts it: "A black Mustang convertible and a patch of rosesout front offer the only clues to his past life, when his aquamarine eyes,chiseled features, and sun-streaked hair sang of creamy sand and sweet sex. Hehas long ceased being beautiful or strong." Vincent today is confined to a wheelchair. He has lost aleg, the result of peripheral artery disease, and he struggles with diabetes,epilepsy, and the ravages of "countless episodes of alcoholic poisoningand toxic shock." Grove goes on to say that Vincent "barely weights100 points, his teeth dangle in his jaw, brittle and emaciated" andthat the condition of his liver "has moved far beyond the simplecharacterization of cirrhosis. It's a celebration of rot." And all of those quotes are just from page one,effectively setting the stage for the tragic story to come. Sure, he gives awaythe ending, but it puts the actor's entire rise and fall into horrificperspective that haunts the book. What makes this tragedy such compellingreading, as opposed to the literary equivalent of watching a train wreck, isGrove's writing and reporting skills. Perhaps that's due to this startlingadmission from the author, at the very end of the book, when he asks himself ifhe likes Vincent: I don't like myself, which is what we have in common andwhy I was drawn to him. And he goes on to conclude: It's obvious now that he was not born; he was invented.I thought there would be more, but this is it. He got what he deserved. Wow. It's hard to turn your eyes away. -- Lee Goldberg

Jan-Michael Vincent: Edge of Greatness covers Vincent's entire life, beginning in his hometown of Hanford, California, and details the difference between Jan Vincent, a shy, small town boy, and Jan-Michael Vincent, Hollywood's golden boy.

Jamie Lee Curtis launched her film career with the immortal 1978 horror classic Halloween, creating a heroine in Laurie Strode who would become the prototype for the ultimate scream queen. Subsequent roles in horror films like The Fog, Prom Night, Terror Train, Roadgames and Halloween II - all of which are genre classics - would cement Curtis' status as cinema's undisputed scream queen, a title she holds to this day. Jamie Lee Curtis: Scream Queen details Curtis' career and life during her scream queen era and includes detailed and never-before-seen production histories - as well as running commentary - of the horror films that made Jamie Lee Curtis a genre icon. Featuring hundreds of interviews with Curtis' friends and colleagues - including John Carpenter, Richard Franklin, Debra Hill, Paul Lynch, Rick Rosenthal, Roger Spottiswoode - and years of intense research, Jamie Lee Curtis: Scream Queen is a comprehensive biography, an invaluable film reference, and a painstaking document of horror film history. David Grove is the author of Fantastic 4: The Making of the Movie (Titan Books) and Making Friday the 13th (FAB Press). He has written for such publications as Dreamwatch, Fangoria, Film Review, Film Threat, Hot Dog, MovieMaker, Rue Morgue, Sci-Fi Magazine, Shivers and Total Film. He lives in British Columbia, Canada.

For quarter of a century - from the shocking debut of 1980s Friday the 13th to the awesome commercial success of 2003's Freddy vs. Jason - the Friday the 13th series has endured as the most popular horror series in the world. Now, David Grove has written an exhaustive document detailing the making and impact of all of the films in the Friday the 13th series. Combining detailed production histories of each of the eleven film with rare anecdotes and interviews, Grove provides an entertaining and extensive document of this unique part of horror cinema history.

A vivid, novelistic history of the rise of Athens from relative obscurity to the edge of its golden age, told through the lives of Miltiades and Cimon, the father and son whose defiance of Persia vaulted Athens to a leading place in the Greek world. When we think of ancient Greece we think first of Athens: its power, prestige, and revolutionary impact on art, philosophy, and politics. But on the verge of the fifth century BCE, only fifty years before its zenith, Athens was just another Greek city-state in the shadow of Sparta. It would take a catastrophe, the Persian invasions, to push Athens to the fore. In Phoenix, David Stuttard traces Athens’s rise through the lives of two men who spearheaded resistance to Persia: Miltiades, hero of the Battle of Marathon, and his son Cimon, Athens’s dominant leader before Pericles. Miltiades’s career was checkered. An Athenian provincial overlord forced into Persian vassalage, he joined a rebellion against the Persians then fled Great King Darius’s retaliation. Miltiades would later die in prison. But before that, he led Athens to victory over the invading Persians at Marathon. Cimon entered history when the Persians returned; he responded by encouraging a tactical evacuation of Athens as a prelude to decisive victory at sea. Over the next decades, while Greek city-states squabbled, Athens revitalized under Cimon’s inspired leadership. The city vaulted to the head of a powerful empire and the threshold of a golden age. Cimon proved not only an able strategist and administrator but also a peacemaker, whose policies stabilized Athens’s relationship with Sparta. The period preceding Athens’s golden age is rarely described in detail. Stuttard tells the tale with narrative power and historical acumen, recreating vividly the turbulent world of the Eastern Mediterranean in one of its most decisive periods.

New York Times Bestseller “A genuinely moving story about race and class, parenting and marriage. . . Chabon is inarguably one of the greatest prose stylists of all time." — Benjamin Percy, Esquire New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon has transported readers to wonderful places: to New York City during the Golden Age of comic books (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay); to an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union); to discover The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Now he takes us to Telegraph Avenue in a big-hearted and exhilarating novel that explores the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland, California families, one black and one white. In Telegraph Avenue, Chabon lovingly creates a world grounded in pop culture—Kung Fu, ’70s Blaxploitation films, vinyl LPs, jazz and soul music—and delivers a bravura epic of friendship, race, and secret histories. As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland. When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complications to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life.

On location in Blairstown: The Making of Friday the 13th covers the creation, planning and filming of the iconic 1980 film, Friday the 13th in a way that no other film has been documented before. Through the memories of the cast and crew, many speak for the first (and last) time, as well as previously-undiscovered production information and materials, On location in Blairstown takes the reader "on location" and back in time to 1979 for the filming of Friday the 13th and behind the scenes for all of the adventures, conflicts and dramas that went into the making of one of the most enduring and popular horror films in history.

The pew edition of the prayer book of the Anglican Church of Canada. Includes: the Divine Office; Baptism and Reconciliation; the Holy Eucharist; the Proper of the Church Year; Pastoral Offices; Episcopal Offices; Parish Thanksgiving and Prayers; the Psalter; and Music. (ABC).