Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties - by Foster Hirsch

This fascinating look at Hollywood’s most turbulent decade and the demise of the studio system is set against the boom of the post–World War II years, the Cold War, and the atomic age—and the movies that reflected the seismic shifts.

About the author:

Foster Hirsch is a professor of film at Brooklyn College, and the author of sixteen books on film and theater, including Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir, and A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actors Studio. He lives in New York City.

Praise for Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties:

“The definitive book on 1950s Hollywood.” — Booklist

“An important, riveting look at our nation at its peak as a world power and at the political, cultural, sexual upheavals it endured, reflected and explored in the quintessential American art form.

Autographed copy of Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties - $40.

*Books will be brought to the event on Sunday, February 9, to the Great Neck Library. If you wish to pick up your book in advance at Gold Coast Arts, call 516-829-2570 and ask for Caroline or email caroline@goldcoastarts.org.

modern Russian immigrant experience

A violent crime shattered Moscow native Anya Gillinson’s world when she was thirteen years old, urging her family to leave Russia for the American dream. As a teenager raised in a deeply patriarchal Russian society, Anya found herself grappling with a fiercely independent America. Her candid and heartfelt memoir delves into the clash between these two cultures through the stories of her family. It explores how her upbringing in Russia, and the subsequent immigrant experience, shaped her sense of femininity - a concept with vastly different definitions on either side of the Atlantic. Dreaming in Russian pits the two competing identities of her immigrant self against one another. After over thirty years of living in America, in the grip of its indefatigable modernism, Gillinson has come to understand that her bones, brains, and womanhood remain deeply rooted in the soil of Russian patriarchy.

Anya’s journey forces questions, yet in the end it leaves her without answers, but at least with a personal resolution - that three decades of living in America have brought her back to her Russian past, which forever predetermined her present and outlined her future.

Dreaming in Russian: A Memoir - $30.

You can pick up the book at Gold Coast Arts by calling 516-829-2570 and ask for Caroline, or email caroline@goldcoastarts.org.