“Nearly all the so-called world histories and histories of civilization so popular in contemporary academic circles are based mainly on what is known as European Civilization,” says John G. Jackson. “This species of parochialism gives a false picture of human history, and few students become aware of the fact that European Civilization, speaking historically, is a product of the recent past, and that European Culture was not indigenous but was derived from older civilizations of Africa and Asia.”

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 327 pages

During the Summer of Love, the Diggers combined street theater and thievery to feed the hoards who had made their way to San Francisco, tantalizing the media who wished to pigeonhole their activities and most of all to find out about their mysterious spokesman Emmet Grogan. In his autobiography Grogan reveals all, although one suspects this master trickster is being selective and creative in his revelations. From playing ringolevio (an elaborate and violent game of tag) on the streets of New York, to teen-junkiedom, cat burglary, life on lam in Europe, and a brief stint with the IRA, to his arrival in San Francisco in the mid-’60s, Emmet Grogan’s is a life lived on the liminal edge of society. NN

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 500 pages
Illustrated

Snappy, corny put-downs for BOOZERS, BORES, CHISELERS, CHATTERBOXES, CREAMPUFFS, DUMBBELLS, FAILERS, FLAT TIRES, GOLD DIGGERS, HYPOCHONDRIACS, LIARS, MEANIES, and even NUDISTS: “She grins and bares it… There’s a mutual attraction between her and a young man in the camp—they’re in the nude for love… The only thing she wears are beads—of perspiration… She’s a fine specimen of the nuder gender… He’s a lawyer, and ever since he joined the colony, he hasn’t had a suit… He’s the camp athlete. He runs 100 yards in nothing… He was thrown out because he asked for dressing on his salad.” GR

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 412 pages

The heartbreak, the sorrow, the star trips—sorry! wrong book!—”Bob Denver takes us backstage and behind the scenes of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and Gilligan’s Island. Writing in a remarkably friendly and affable style, Denver tells us what it was like to be plucked from complete obscurity to portray America’s most celebrated beatnik, Maynard G. Krebs, and then to become Gilligan, the world’s favorite stranded castaway.” In addition, Denver reveals his 25 favorite Dobie episodes and his 50 favorite Gilligans. Features stories prop mishaps, how TV shows are put together, and anecdotes about all the cast members. GR

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 184 pages
Illustrated

“Bunkie, Louisiana: Colonel A.A. Haas, the founder of the town, once gave his daughter a mechanical monkey that he had bought for her when he made a trip to New Orleans. His daughter, Maccie, could not pronounce monkey, so she called the toy Bunkie. Later, when the town was officially incorporated in 1885, her father, in a capricious moment…” You get the picture. ‘Ropeka is the Dakota Indian word for “good place to dig potatoes.” GR

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 241 pages

“In the final analysis films are films and dreams are dreams: no one can reasonably deny that they’re the end results of different processes, with different life spans, frames of reference and spheres of influence. And yet there are respects in which they resemble one another, and horror films—more than any other genre-flirt with the patterns of enunciation associated with dreams. In this respect you can hardly resist the temptation to speak of Dario Argento’s films as dark dreams of death and night and blood, to borrow Yukio Mishima’s rapturously apt phrase.”

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 299 pages
Illustrated

An American original—the finest female purveyor of good, clean smut. Before the Brooklyn-born vaudevillian hit Hollywood (Night After Night, She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel), Mae West was a Broadway playwright and actress. From day one, the “girl who shook a wicked shoulder” was in hot water with the critics, and she thrived on the scandal. Her 1927 comedy/drama Sex (written as “Jane Mast”) was raided by the police, and the cast was thrown in jail. The “hot second act” in the bordello was probably the reason. Next came “a homosexual comedy in three acts,” The Drag. Said one Variety reviewer: The play “was a cheap and shabby appeal to sensationalism.” The high point came in the third act, “a jazzed-up revel on the garbage heap. Some 30 young men take part in the spectacle, half tricked out in women’s clothes and half in tuxedos. Half a dozen of the boys in skirts do specialties, and the episode takes on the character of a chorus-girl ‘pick-out’ number in a burlesque show… All hands are rouged, lipsticked and liquid-whited to the last degree.” Mae West’s sister was arrested for disorderly conduct prior to the opening. GR

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 208 pages
Illustrated

Tales of the Teutonic Love Goddess. “Universal, having created a ‘new Dietrich’ with Destry Rides Again, was prepared to cash in on a good thing. What they hadn’t counted on was giving Dietrich a role that was to become one of her best! Seven Sinners, an action-packed, two-fisted melodrama, had wide appeal, and Dietrich’s Bijou Blanche is a gorgeous satire of the Sadie Thompsons of the world. René designed some of the wildest creations. The black-and-white-patchwork quilt get-up is a riot of bad taste, to say nothing of her rings, bracelets, cigarette holder (loaded with jewels) and the inevitable feathers!” As movie critic Bosley Crowther noted: “If Miss Dietrich and her comedies were both just a little broader, Mae West would be in the shade.” GR

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 224 pages
Illustrated

“From the animal grace of Bruce Lee through the brutal flailing of Sonny Chiba to the wooden precision of Chuck Norris, martial arts movies are ridiculed or ignored by everyone save the millions who love them. The very same people who gasp in wonder at the Peking Opera deride kung fu movies without realizing that the finest ones are marvelous combinations of opera and ballet… The historic grandeur, the melodramatic emotions and the impressive choreography only serve to point up the martial movies’ action. That’s what we really love. These are great action movies.”

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 255 pages
Illustrated

The dish, the dirt and the wit from the famed raconteur of cinema’s subtleties. “What optical sleights-of-hand there were, what jugglings of the editing technique were utilized to convey that ‘something’ after all had happened to the carnally eager but morally handicapped lovers in films… The legacy of that long struggle to be literally truthful about sex—that natural and wholly necessary thing—took the shape of film stills that, if gotten all together in one museum, would look like an erotomaniac’s dreams of heaven and hell. It has been a melodrama in itself: the efforts of this book to provide a visual university of sexual images representing film history as impersonated by actors and actresses. The author’s duty has been to put it all together in words that cement meanings to meanings the way sex cements bodies to bodies.” Chapters on “The Kiss,” “Bosoms and Bottoms,” “The Love Gods,” “Camp Sex,” and “Sex Symbols and Fetishes.” GR

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 256 pages
Illustrated