Search results for ""Author Neal Gabler""

An enthralling appreciation of the monumentally gifted popular artist and cultural icon who challenged Hollywood’s standards of beauty and glamour Barbra Streisand has been called the “most successful...talented performer of her generation” by Vanity Fair, and her voice, said pianist Glenn Gould, is “one of the natural wonders of the age.” Streisand scaled the heights of entertainment—from a popular vocalist to a first-rank Broadway star in Funny Girl to an Oscar-winning actress to a producer and director. But she has also become a cultural icon who has transcended show business. To achieve her success, Brooklyn-born Streisand had to overcome tremendous odds, not the least of which was her Jewishness. Dismissed, insulted, even reviled when she embarked on a show business career for acting too Jewish and looking too Jewish, she brilliantly converted her Jewishness into a metaphor for outsiderness that would eventually make her the avenger for anyone who felt marginalized and powerless. Neal Gabler examines Streisand’s life and career through this prism of otherness—a Jew in a gentile world, a self-proclaimed homely girl in a world of glamour, a kooky girl in a world of convention—and shows how central it was to Streisand’s triumph as one of the voices of her age.

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His classic films illuminated everyone’ s childhood. The theme parks are on every tourist itinerary. The movie empire is one of Hollywood’ s biggest. Walt Disney is one of the few men who unquestionably changed our culture. And Neal Gabler is the first author to have had complete access to the Disney Archives, enabling him to write the definitive biography of this remarkable man. Gabler charts Disney’ s journey from running a fledgling studio with short cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, to the reinvention of animation with full-length films like Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi and Dumbo. Chronicling Walt’ s profligacy and expansionism, as well as his obsessive perfectionism when working on the briefest of sequences in Fantasia, Gabler describes how it was left to Walt’ s brother Roy to keep the business solvent. The successes speak for themselves - Disney then moved beyond animation with huge hits like Mary Poppins, and mixed utopianism and merchandising to conceive the world’ s first modern theme park, Disneyland. In addition to the towering achievements, Gabler shows the dark side of Walt Disney - ruthless towards long-serving staff, cavalier with contracts, neglectful of his family – but also the vulnerability, born of loneliness and ill health, in an admirably balanced portrait.

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