Joseph McBride

A year after becoming sheriff, Quinn Colson is faced with the release of an infamous murderer from prison. Jamey Dixon comes back to Jericho preaching redemption, and some believe him; but for the victim's family, the only thought is revenge.

In this enormously engaging, vibrant, and richly researched biography of Albert Camus, the French writer and journalist Olivier Todd has drawn on personal correspondence, notebooks, and public records never before tapped, as well as interviews with Camus's family, friends, fellow workers, writers, mentors, and lovers. Todd shows us a Camus who struggled all his life with irreconcilable conflicts -- between his loyalty to family and his passionate nature, between the call to political action and the integrity to his art, between his support of the native Algerians and his identification with the forgotten people, the poor whites. A very private man, Camus could be charming and prickly, sincere and theatrical, genuinely humble, yet full of great ambition. Todd paints a vivid picture of the time and place that shaped Camus -- his impoverished childhood in the Algerian city of Belcourt, the sea and the sun and the hot sands that he so loved (he would always feel an exile elsewhere), and the educational system that nurtured him. We see the forces that lured him into communism, and his attraction to the theater and to journalism as outlets for his creativity. The Paris that Camus was inevitably drawn to is one that Todd knows intimately, and he brings alive the war years, the underground activities that Camus was caught up in during the Occupation and the bitter postwar period, as well as the intrigues of the French literati who embraced Camus after his first novel, L'Etranger, was published. Todd is also keenly attuned to the French intellectual climate, and as he takes Camus's measure as a successful novelist, journalist, playwright and director, literary editor, philosopher, he also reveals the temperament in the writer that increasingly isolated him and crippled his reputation in the years before his death and for a long time after. He shows us the solitary man behind the mask -- debilitated by continuing bouts of tuberculosis, constantly drawn to irresistible women, and deeply troubled by his political conflicts with the reigning French intellectuals, particularly by the vitriol of his former friend Sartre over the Algerian conflict. Filled with sharp observations and sparkling with telling details, here is a wonderfully human portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning writer, who died at the age of 46 and who remains one of the most influential literary figures of our time. - Jacket flap.

"Ernst Lubitsch's sophisticated, elegant, and stylish films of the 1930s and 1940s are often credited with creating the genre of the classic Hollywood romantic comedy. Famed for the "Lubitsch touch" and his distinct comedic style particularly when it came to romance and sex and American hypocrisy around them. Lubitsch's films influenced and won the admiration of his fellow directors, including Welles, Hitchcock, and most notably Billy Wilder. And, while he is now best known as the director of such films as Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not To Be, much of his work and his name is less well known. In this book, Joseph McBride, the author of best-selling biographies of Steven Spielberg and Frank Capra, reconsiders Lubitsch's place in film history and reminds us of the genius of and the many pleasures of his film. In How Did Lubitsch Do It? (the title is a play on a sign that was in Billy Wilder's office) McBride examines all of Lubitsch's films beginning with his work in Germany where he became known as "The D.W. Griffith of Europe" for his historical epics as well as being celebrated for his comedies. McBride then considers Lubitsch's work in Hollywood and how his films reflected his amused indulgence of human behavior and a celebration of un-American virtues such as the joys of adultery and serial philandering while depicting marriage in a more realistic way. McBride's discussions of Lubitsch's films answer the question asked in the book's title to explain "The Lubitsch Touch" and the endlessly inventive and fresh ways the director found of telling stories, as well as his distinctive style, his handling of character, and his ability to strike the right tone in his films"--