Screening difference : how Hollywood's blockbuster films imagine race, ethnicity, and culture /

Ginneken (an independent scholar based in France) builds on the "everyday experience of a young audience" while using "concrete and easy-to-recognize" examples. All of his examples are, indeed, easy. The book begins with a set of questions--for example, does the reader know that "Pocahontas did not at all fall in love with John Smith, as the Disney movie and many others pretend"?--and ends with a glossary that defines words like "nostalgia," "pseudonym," and "quest." The author shows in detail how blockbuster movies (Disney, Spielberg, James Bond, and so on) represent otherness in one-sided and prejudiced ways and how often movies misrepresent history (few viewers would expect otherwise). Adult readers with even minimal awareness of Hollywood's many problematic ideologies will find almost any other book more interesting, and even younger readers will do better with Geoff King's Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (CH, Oct'01, 39-0828), David Eldridge's Hollywood's History Films (2006), or Warren Buckland's Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster (CH, Feb'07, 44-3193). Although this book is "academically sound" (as the author claims in the introduction), it is pretty basic. Summing Up: Optional. Lower-division undergraduates. S. C. Dillon Bates College