For those familiar with the legends, and the truths, of the German and Austrian migration to Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s, Otto Preminger’s life serves as an exemplary tale. First, there is his confabulation of Vienna as his rightful birthplace, when in fact he, like Billy Wilder and Edgar G. Ulmer, two other self-professed Viennese-born directors, really entered the world in a less glamorous backwater province (Wiznitz, Poland, in Preminger’s case). Then there is his immodest assertion that he was “the first apprentice actor of the Viennese Reinhardt Company.” Which Austrian- or German-born director did not, at some point,

If you were a movie mogul and had to choose between funding a documentary on the history of twentieth-century classical music and one on rock, which would you select? The average businessperson would probably opt for the latter. Me, I’d wager on classical without a second thought. The history of classical music in the twentieth century, though most wouldn’t suspect it, has all the elements of a blockbuster: sex, violence, scandal, war (of ideologies and of nations), personal struggle, even, dare I say it, humor. The rise and drug-addled fall of the rock musician is by now a familiar story,

Have a relative who still, in this post-Hitchens, post-Dawkins age, intends to vote Huckabee in the primaries to protest the newfangled idea that Homo sapiens are descended from monkeys? Here’s a seasonal suggestion for a nice present: Evolution, a handsome square-formatted volume that commingles Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu’s text with Patrick Gries’s noirish photos of dearly departed members of the family tree—some close, some not so—provides a stylish retort to the ostriches of the world and their sand-sticking ways. M. de Panifieu’s sharp commentary (he is an acclaimed professor of natural sciences) is the perfect prolix counterpoint to M. Gries’s aestheticized

Shelves at used-book stores in Japan more resemble the cat-food aisle at Wal-Mart than they do the cramped and haphazard arrangements in their American counterparts: row after row of gleaming books, identically thick and tall, differentiated only by the color on the label. Tokyo’s most notable secondhand-book store, Book Off, even employs in its logo an insipid smiley face similar to the Evil Empire’s.

If you are looking for signed first editions of the canonical novels of Don DeLillo, you need to be prepared to shell out roughly $375 for White Noise, $200 for Mao II, $175 for Underworld, and $160 for Libra. In contrast, a signed first edition of the 1980 autobiography Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League, by Cleo Birdwell, will set you back $425. How did an obscure book by a total unknown outstrip four of the most highly regarded works of fiction of the past three decades? Because, as DeLillo