There’s nothing more exciting than standing among a throng of strangers listening to live music or watching the lights go down in a movie theater when the show is about to begin. But these six books certainly come close.
The Art of Bob Mackie
Bob Mackie is a member of a very small club: Hollywood costume designers whom regular folks (meaning, not ex-theater kids) know by name. Throughout his storied career, Mackie has designed gowns for Marilyn Monroe, Carol Burnett, Cher, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Madonna and, well, anybody who was anybody on TV, the silver screen or Broadway. The Art of Bob Mackie by Frank Vlastnik and Laura Ross is an authorized trip down memory lane, featuring brightly colored sketches and photos of over-the-top creations from Mackie’s 60 years in fashion, from his big break designing for Broadway star Mitzi Gaynor in 1966 to his costumes for The Cher Show, the 2018 jukebox musical based on the actress and singer’s career. Fans of “lewks,”divasand Hollywood gossip will have lots to enjoy.
The Motherlode
Hip-hop has never been a man’s game, but male rappers have gotten more attention, money and respect since the beginning. Former Vibe and Jezebel editor Clover Hope sets things straight with The Motherlode, an encyclopedia dedicated to the women of hip-hop. Going all the way back to the 1980s, Hope leaves no woman out, from MC Sha-Rock (hip-hop’s first prominent female emcee) to Cardi B. Each rapper is honored with an essay, a minibio and funky artwork by Rachelle Baker, meaning your giftee has no excuse not to kill at a Women in Hip-Hop category on “Jeopardy!” Present this book with your own playlist of hip-hop’s fiercest ladies, and it’ll be a gift to remember.
Colorization
Journalist Wil Haygood’s Colorization traces the experience of Black artists on and behind the screen through 100 years of film history, demonstrating that racism hasn’t always been this bad in Hollywood. It’s actually been a lot worse. This meaty analysis of Black film history spans everything from The Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified the Ku Klux Klan, to Gone With the Wind (1939) and its infamous whitewashing of slavery, to Get Out (2017) and its memorable portrayal of “post-racial” liberalism. Haygood has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and his research skills are as impeccable as that honor implies. He is also such a descriptive writer that you need not have seen every single movie he writes about in order to understand his analysis. Don’t be surprised if Colorization ends up on film studies syllabi for years to come.
Art Boozel
We could all stand to freshen up our cocktail repertoire, and that’s where Art Boozel comes in. The book pairs dozens of artists with cocktails based on their work and/or personalities. For example, the Keith Haring is made with pear cider, lemon juice and a brandied cherry (among other ingredients), so it’s as bright and colorful as Haring’s art. Author Jennifer Croll has an endlessly creative mind for unique cocktails (her previous book, Free the Tipple, is also a compendium of cocktail recipes), and each artist and their drink is delightfully illustrated by Kelly Shami. Come for the recipes, stay for the contemporary art history lesson you never got in school.
Mental Floss: The Curious Viewer
Mental Floss: The Curious Viewer, “a miscellany of bingeable streaming TV shows from the past 20 years,” is a reminder of just how many hours of prestige TV there is to watch. (There’s a lot.) Jennifer M. Wood, an editor at the pop culture blog Mental Floss, unearths everything you ever wanted to know about beloved shows like “Friends,” “Sex and the City,” “Downton Abbey,” “Friday Night Lights” and other shows worthy of a binge-watch. She shares fun facts and behind-the-scenes gossip from each show but somehow doesn’t make you feel like you’ve read them all in a Buzzfeed article. The Curious Viewer might just be the book that pulls the couch potato in your life away from the TV (and helps them dominate at trivia night).
Fun City Cinema
At a certain point, everyone who lives in New York City stops seeing movie sets as exciting and instead sees them as a nuisance. That’s because the streets of Gotham have graced so many films. In Fun City Cinema, film critic and former film editor of Flavorwire Jason Bailey revisits the films that tell the story of NYC’s history and, in some cases, America’s history. The city changes so frequently that many films are “fascinating artifacts of cinematic archeology,” he writes in his introduction. It may be jarring to see photos of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and controversial ex-mayors such as Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in the same book as, say, The Muppets Take Manhattan. Alas, these are contradictions New Yorkers live with every day.
