In 1972, Jeff Rice's novel The Night Stalker introduced Carl Kolchak to the world. This spine-tingling novel of supernatural terror became an instant bestseller and served as the basis for the film of the same name, starring Darren McGavin and adapted by legendary Twilight Zone screenwriter Richard Matheson. After The Night Stalker became the one of the highest rated television movies of all time, a sequel, The Night Strangler, was released the following year to great acclaim. Now, after more than three decades out of print, Kolchak's creator Jeff Rice has released the original novels which sparked a television phenomenon! At last, The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler are together in one volume...
Can you live your life by what The Twilight Zone has to teach you? Yes, and maybe you should. The proof is in this lighthearted collection of life lessons, ground rules, inspirational thoughts, and stirring reminders found in Rod Serling’s timeless fantasy series. Written by veteran TV critic, Mark Dawidziak, this unauthorized tribute is a celebration of the classic anthology show, but also, on another level, a kind of fifth-dimension self-help book, with each lesson supported by the morality tales told by Serling and his writers. The notion that “it’s never too late to reinvent yourself” soars through “The Last Flight,’’ in which a World War I flier who goes forward in time and gets the chance to trade cowardice for heroism. A visit from an angel blares out the wisdom of “follow your passion” in “A Passage for Trumpet.” The meaning of “divided we fall” is driven home with dramatic results when neighbors suspect neighbors of being invading aliens in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” The old maxim about never judging a book by its cover is given a tasty twist when an alien tome is translated in “To Serve Man.”
First edition of Sinclair's savage satire, loosely based on the life and career of Edward L. Doheny, and the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. Although Sinclair's famous novel The Jungle deals with Chicago's meatpacking industry, he moved west to Pasadena in 1916 and began writing novels set in California, the best of which was Oil!, the story of the education of Bunny Ross, son of wildcat oil man Joe Ross after oil is discovered outside Los Angeles. The novel was the basis for Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film There Will Be Blood. In California Classics, Lawrence Clark Powell called Oil! "Sinclair's most sustained and best writing."
Even as a country ceases to be a great power, the concept of it as a great power can continue to influence decision making and policy formulation. This book explores how such a process took place in Russia from 1917 through 1920, when the Bolshevik coup of November 1917 led to the creation of two regimes: the Bolshevik "Reds" and the anti-Bolshevik "Whites." As Reds consolidated their one-party dictatorship and nursed global ambitions, Whites struggled to achieve a different vision for the future of Russia. Anatol Shmelev illuminates the White campaign with fresh purpose and through information from the Hoover Institution Archives, exploring how diverse White factions overcame internal tensions to lobby for recognition on the world stage, only to fail—in part because of the West's desire to leave "the Russian question" to Russians alone. In the Wake of Empire examines the personalities, institutions, political culture, and geostrategic concerns that shaped the foreign policy of the anti-Bolshevik governments and attempts to define the White movement through them. Additionally, Shmelev provides a fascinating psychological study of the factors that ultimately doomed the White effort: an irrational and ill-placed faith in the desire of the Allies to help them, and wishful thinking with regard to their own prospects that obscured the reality around them.
During the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Civil War, more than twenty thousand kinds of banknotes were used throughout the vast expanse of the former Russian Empire. At that time, money was issued not only by the official authorities, such as the Imperial Government, the Provisional Government, and, later, the Bolshevik Government, but also by Generals Denikin, Wrangel, and Yudenich, Admiral Kolchak, Atamans Semyonov and Petliura, Hetman Skoropadskyi, and many other great and small rulers of Russia. Russian money was manufactured in Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, and the United States. To some degree, money served as a manifesto of the issuing government, reflected in the various symbols depicted on the banknotes. Using new archival data, this book expands and, in a number of cases, revises the well-established view of the daily life of people during the Revolution, and dispels the settled myth about how the natural economy prevailed in the years of the Russian Civil War. The book presents unique illustrations taken from the author’s private collection: the “Romanov” banknotes; postage stamps used as currency; “Duma” money; and 1917 banknotes known as “kerenkies”, “morzhovkies”, “tchaikovkies”, “Northern rubles”, “krylatkies”, “rodzyankies”, “the Don rubles”, and “kolchakovkies”. Some of these banknote designs were made by well-known Russian artists, such as Ivan Bilibin, Sergey Chekhonin, and Georgy Narbut. The book is addressed to historians, economists, and all readers interested in Russian history and economy.
The pioneering, incisive, lavishly illustrated survey of noir on television—the first of its kind Noir—as a style, movement, or sensibility—has its roots in hardboiled detective fiction by writers like Chandler and Hammett, and films adapted from their novels were among the first called “film noir” by French cineÌ?astes. But film isn’t the only medium with a taste for a dark story. Hundreds of noir dramas have been produced for television, featuring detectives and femmes fatales, gangsters, and dark deeds, continuing week after week, with a new disruption of the social order. In TV Noir, television historian Allen Glover presents the first complete study of the subject. Deconstructing its key elements with astute analysis, from NBC’s adaptation of Woolrich’s The Black Angel to the anthology programs of the ’40s and ’50s, from the classic period of Dragnet, M Squad, and 77 Sunset Strip to neo-noirs of the ’60s and ’70s including The Fugitive, Kolchak, and Harry O., this is the essential volume on TV noir.
Did you ever want to prank your wife everyday, write about the results, and publish them online without her knowledge? That's exactly what Jeff Rice did in 2011. Now, the popular blog series will be available as a book for the first time ever, revised and updated with an all-new conclusion from the author. Don't miss how this prank ends.
