RaveAir MailShelton’s new memoir, The Church of Baseball, does for filmmaking what Bull Durham did for the national pastime: it demystifies the craft, pillories the business, and celebrates the calling with wit and passion ... Shelton’s prose is as natural as his dialogue, and he conjures characters with casual mastery ... In The Church of Baseball, as in Bull Durham, Shelton riffs on life in the American grain, and scales the heights of the homegrown surreal. Like Mark Twain, he reveals an unsentimental education that reads like a robust and impudent yarn.
Karin Wieland
PositiveThe Washington PostWieland’s patient depiction of girls coming of age between world wars has its own sneak-attack power. You are fascinated as Riefenstahl succumbs to the Nazi promise of German force ... Bach wrote in Leni that there was little 'meaningful comparison' between the beloved star and the notorious director. Wieland’s book proves him wrong. She uses these two virtuosos’ lives to generate piercing insights about ambition, ego, creativity and the life-changing, world-altering repercussions of a momentous choice.
