The Hollywood icon best known for her role in "Star Wars" shares interconnected essays exploring her life as the child of Hollywood royalty, adventures on the sets of "Star Wars," and struggles with bipolar disorder.

The 20th century can be seen as the "mass" century - mass production, mass market, and mass destruction. Add to the list mass entertainment, exemplified by the rise of Hollywood and the film industry. Track the development of motion pictures - and the inventions that made them possible.

A fascinating novel of the friendship and creative partnership between two of Hollywood's earliest female legends--screenwriter Frances Marion and superstar Mary Pickford--from the New York Times bestselling author of The Swans of Fifth Avenue and The Aviator's Wife It is 1914, and twenty-five-year-old Frances Marion has left her (second) husband and her Northern California home for the lure of Los Angeles, where she is determined to live independently...

"The film industry in Hollywood now employs a global mode of production run by massive media conglomerates that mobilize hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers for each feature film or television series. Yet these workers and their labor remain largely invisible to the general audience. In fact, this has been a signal characteristic of Hollywood style for more than a hundred years: everything that matters happens onscreen, not off. Consequently,...

Based on a true story. In the late 1940's, Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez became known as the notorious "Lonely Hearts Killers". They would swindle and then viciously murder war widows who would answer their personal ads. Ray would describe himself as a sexy Latin Lover. Martha was Ray's initial mark. But when they met, it was love at first sight. With Martha posing as Ray's sister, they bilked elderly spinsters and widows of their savings and...

The dangerous streets of Nanjing throw together a group of opposites, a flock of shell-shocked schoolchildren, a dozen seductive courtesans, and a renegade American posing as a priest to save his own skin, or so he thinks, all seeking safety behind a walled cathedral. Trapped by marauding soldiers, over the next few days the prejudices and divides between them will fall away as they unite around a last ditch plan to protect the children from impending...

Joe Gardner is a middle-school band teacher who gets the chance of a lifetime to play at the best jazz club in town. A misstep takes him from New York City to The Great Before, a fantastical place where new souls get their personalities before going to Earth. Determined to return to his life, Joe teams up with a precocious soul, 22, who has never understood the appeal of the human life. As Joe tries to show 22 what's great about life, he may discover...