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  Hollywood vs America - The...

  Michael Medved

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  Why does our popular culture seem so consistently hostile to the values that most Americans hold dear? Why does the entertainment industry attack religion, glorify brutality, undermine the family, and deride patriotism? In this explosive book, one of the nation's best known film critics examines how Hollywood has broken faith with its public, creating movies, television, and popular music that exacerbate every serious social problem we face, from teenage pregnancies to violence in the streets. Michael Medved powerfully argues that the entertainment business follows its own dark obsessions, rather than giving the public what it wants: In fact, the audience for feature films and network television has demonstrated its profound disillusionment in recent years, with disastrous consequences for many entertainment companies. Meanwhile, overwhelming numbers of our fellow citizens complain about the wretched quality of our popular culture--describing the offerings of the mass media as the worst ever. Medved asserts that Hollywood ignores--and assaults--the values of ordinary American families, pursuing a self-destructive and alienated ideological agenda that is harmful to the nation at large and to the industry's own interests. In hard-hitting chapters on "The Attack on Religion," "The Addiction to Violence," "Promoting Promiscuity," "The Infatuation with Foul Language," "Kids Know Best," "Motivations for Madness," and other subjects, Medved outlines the underlying themes that turn up again and again in our popular culture. He also offers conclusive evidence of the frightening real-world impact of these messages on our society and our children. Finally, Medved shows where and how Hollywood took a disastrous wrong turn toward its current crisis, and he outlines promising efforts both in and outside the industry to restore a measure of sanity and restraint to our media of mass entertainment.Sure to elicit strong response, whether it takes the form of cheers of support or howls of enraged dissent, Hollywood vs. America confronts head-on one of the most significant issues of our times.

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  Goodbye to All That (NHB Modern...

  Luke Norris

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  'I want you to remember something… You do what you want with your life. Alright? Break heads if you need to and hearts if you have to, but whatever you do don't do what I did. Don't waste yourself.'
  Luke Norris's taut and tender debut play asks if it's ever too late to start again.
  Frank has been married for forty five years. Three years ago he fell in love...
  'fiercely funny and astutely upsetting... A terrific debut' - Independent
  'we're in the presence, unquestionably, of a playwright of major promise' - Telegraph
  'Norris has come up with a fascinating 75-minute play about the differing possibilities of love' - Guardian
  'Norris examines with rueful affection and clear-eyed pathos' - International Herald Tribune

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  The Conscientious Deacon

  Vachel Lindsay

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  LibriVox volunteers bring you 14 recordings of The Conscientious Deacon by Vachel Lindsay. This was the Weekly Poetry project for May 5th, 2013.Vachel Lindsay described this poem as "a song to be syncopated as you please". According to Wikipedia he is considered the father of modern singing poetry (as he referred to it) in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted. His extensive correspondence with the poet Yeats details his intentions to revive the musical qualities in poetry as had been practised by the ancient Greeks. (Introduction by Ruth Golding)

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  Dracula - Radio Drama

  Bram Stoker, Roger James Elsgood

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  A modern dramatisation of Dracula performed by a full cast 'in the dark'.

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  The Painted Bed - Poems

  Donald Hall

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  The former US poet laureate delivers a book “filled with raw sexual disclosures, rowdy anger and a self-blasting mockery” (The New York Times). 
   
  Donald Hall’s fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: “The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.” In that poetic tradition, as in The Painted Bed, the beloved might be a person or something else—life itself, or the disappearing countryside. Hall’s new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his Without (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem, “Daylilies on the Hill 1975-1989,” moves back to the happy repossession of the poet’s old family house and its history—a structure that “persisted against assaults” as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing—”mania is melancholy reversed,” as Hall writes in another long poem, “Kill the Day.” In this book’s fourth and final section, “Ardor,” the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges. 
   
  “More controlled, more varied and more powerful, this taut follow-up volume [to Without] reexamines Hall’s grief while exploring the life he has made since. The book’s first poem, ‘Kill the Day,’ stands among the best Hall has ever written.” —Publishers Weekly 
   
  “A compelling, sometimes shocking, and certainly deeply moving depiction of bereavement.” —Poetry 
   
  “Hall has continued growing as a poet, and his steady readers may consider this his finest collection . . . Bleakness and beauty characterize the reminiscent lyrics that follow, too, joined by a breathtaking bluntness.” —Booklist

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  There's a certain slant of light

  Dickinson Emily

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  In tribute to the first real snowfall this year. - Summary by David Lawrence

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