This week’s Nonfiction November festivities are being hosted over on the Volatile Rune blog, with the prompt being:
“Use this week to challenge yourself to pick a genre you wouldn’t normally read.”
Reading outside my areas of interest and comfort zone is never fun, but sometimes the discussions make it worthwhile. This one was a tough one for me, but I found two books in a category that I hardly ever read: entertainment.
I do read a good many books about music and musicians but not many about plays movies television mainly just because I don’t watch a lot of television, movies or plays. But one of the following books came highly recommended, and one is by a favorite author of mine.
I’ve been a fan of Allen Churchill ever since reading his books, The Literary Decade (it’s an all-time favorite of mine) and his book about the birth of Greenwich Village, titled The Improper Bohemians. He was such a wonderful writer.
So, based on those two fun reads, I tracked down a copy of his 1962 book called, The Great White Way: A Re-Creation of Broadway’s Golden Era of Theatrical Entertainment. The book opens on November 12, 1900, on the corner of Broadway and 39th Street, and drops the curtain almost 20 years later with an actual funeral parade down the street mourning “how Broadway will never be the same”.
The area was called ‘the great white way’ because Broadway was one of the largest installations of outdoor electric lights (replacing gas lamps) and while some of the names were familiar to me (Weber & Fields, Ziegfeld, Nat Goodwin), many of the streets and theaters are well known. I learned a lot about labor organizations and some of the driving forces behind Prohibition, which started a year after this book ends. The Great White Way was written in the 1920s so Churchill was able to interview some of the actors and theater goers from the era. Their stories added some needed humor.
What I enjoyed most were the bits about the theater owners and management. Some of those folks sound more like characters in a Raymond Chandler book than real-life people. Lots of fun. Churchill did a real good job with explaining the business side of the New York City theater business back then too. Lots of producers, directors, and actors are battling from different sides of the same coin.
While I am no theater buff, I am an Allen Churchill fan and I enjoyed The Great White Way.
The other book was Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation. This book, which came out in 2022, is the one that was highly recommended to me. The book is a collection of essays explaining how Tarantino’s love of movies and movie making is rooted in the 1970’s films he was exposed to from an early age (maybe too early an age?). I am not the biggest fan of Tarantino, but I did learn a lot from this book and appreciate his explanations “from behind the lens”. It was cool to understand scenes and shot sequences from someone who has thought a lot about this and read all the histories. Much of it really is an art form, but then much of it really is just crass humor trying to make a punchy and violent joke. Some of the humor was above my head.
I am confident that I would’ve enjoyed Cinema Speculation ten times more if I had seen even half the movies he referenced or half the actors. I thought Tarantino did a good job of showing through films made (not just explaining) how current culture and political climates inform the movies that get made and how they are ultimately received. I did add a few movies to my “to watch” list. And whether you are a fan of Tarantino’s work or not, you have to appreciate his passion and voice which drips from every page. They did a good job letting ‘Quentin the fan’ come through on this one.
And that’s it for the second week of Nonfiction November 2025. Head on over to Volatile Rune and see what else is being talked about. I’d love to hear what nonfiction you read this year.
