Paul Anderer looks back at Kurosawa before he became famous, taking us into the turbulent world that made him. We encounter Tokyo, Kurosawa's birthplace, which would be destroyed twice before his eyes; explore early twentieth-century Japan amid sweeping cross-cultural changes; and confront profound family tragedy alongside the horror of war. With fresh insights and vivid prose, Anderer discusses the Great Earthquake of 1923, the dynamic energy that...

An unlikely pair to become international celebrities, husband-and-wife duo Martin & Osa Johnson found themselves as America’s foremost filmmaker-explorers after the success of their first few documentaries on the native tribes of Africa and Southeast Asia. For SIMBA: THE KING OF THE BEASTS, they forded crocodile-infested rivers, braved stampeding elephants and stared down angry rhinos in order to film lions in their natural habitat. Their work directly...

The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, who died at the age of 88, has been internationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema. Rashomon, which won both the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema. Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. In this newly revised and expanded edition of his study of Kurosawa's...

Boomtown San Diego, in 1888, erupts in murder. Retired marshal and hero of the O.K. Corral Wyatt Earp is involved. What's really going on? Award-winning, best-selling mystery author James Musgrave takes issues from the present and turns them into ingenious puzzles for listeners to solve. In the 19th century, the same human foibles existed, but the problems happened at a much slower pace. In The Dancing Murders, Musgrave turns four suspects over...