Books
Books
Available to order on Amazon, Waterstones, from your local bookstore, or directly from the publisher Polaris, please consider my third published work, The Cinematic Connery: The Films of Sir Sean Connery.
Here’s the official blurb:
Scotland’s greatest export. The world’s first super spy. Voted the sexiest man on the planet. Sir Sean Connery was a titanic figure on screen and off for over half a century.
Behind the son of a factory worker, growing up in near-poverty on the harsh streets of pre-war Edinburgh, lay a timeless array of motion pictures that spanned multiple decades and saw Connery work across the globe with directors as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay. And amongst them his greatest role, whether he liked it or not – Bond, James Bond.
Author A. J. Black delves into Connery’s life for more than mere biography, exploring not just the enormously varied pictures he made including crowd pleasing blockbusters such as The Untouchables or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, serious-minded fare in The Hill or The Offence, and his strange sojourns into eclectic fantasy with Zardoz or Time Bandits, but also the sweep of a career that crossed movie eras as well as decades.
From skirmishes with the angry young men of the British New Wave, via becoming the cinematic icon of the 1960s as 007, through to a challenging reinvention as a unique older actor of stature in the 1980s, this exploration of the Cinematic Connery shows just how much his work reflected the changing movie-going tastes, political realities and cultural trends of the 20th century, and beyond...
And for the unofficial blurb…
Anyone who follows what I do may be unsurprised to learn this book was originally intended to be a podcast. In the wake of Sean Connery's death, my friend Carl Sweeney and I recorded an episode of our show at the time, Motion Pictures, as a tribute to him. This led me to consider doing a retrospective series about Connery's films and got as close as recording a pilot, with fellow podcaster Russ Hugo. I then toyed with blog posts going through his filmography. Then it struck me - there's a book here! Not a biography, of which there are dozens, but rather a cultural & cinematic exploration of the man and his career, given how Connery spanned three or four different eras of cinema and a wealth of societal change across the latter half of the 20th century. It very soon congealed into the style and structure of The Cinematic Connery, my first and only title which wonderfully stuck!
For this book, I approached a different publisher, in the British firm Polaris, whose previous publications (such as John Rain's Thunderbook) I've been really impressed by. They've been a real joy to work with - collaborative, supportive, challenging in all the right ways. The finished product is 100% a better book than the manuscript I delivered. I'm contracted to write one more book for them but this is hopefully the start of a beautiful friendship.
I hope you enjoy this book. It was huge fun watching all of Connery's oeuvre and digging deep into my favourite actor's career, and it's certainly my most accessible book to date. I'm very proud to share it with you - and just look at that cover! Courtesy of the great Sean Longmore. I definitely need that as a poster!
You can order the book handily from the following places and all good book stores:
If you do consider it, my deepest thanks.
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Also available:
Star Trek, History and Us: Reflections of the Present and Past Throughout the Franchise.
Here’s the official blurb:
Since 1966, the Star Trek television franchise has used outer space and the thrilling adventures of the crews of the U.S.S. Enterprise to reflect our own world and culture. Kirk and Spock face civil rights issues and Vietnam war allegories while Picard, Data, and the next generation seek an ordered, post-Cold War stability in the Reagan era.
The crews of Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise must come to terms with our real life of war, manifest destiny in the 21st century, and the shadow of 9/11. Now, as the modern era of the franchise attempts to portray a utopia amidst a world spinning out of control, Star Trek remains about more than just the future. It is about our present. It is about us.
This book charts the history of Gene Roddenberry’s creation across five decades alongside the cultural development of the United States and asks: are we heading for the utopian Federation future, or is it slipping ever further away from reality?
And for the unofficial blurb…
I had the idea for this book even before I wrote Myth-Building in Modern Media thanks to the Trek FM podcast I co-devised with author Duncan Barrett in 2017. It is now Duncan's baby but I appear regularly and often help produce the show and it remains a real point of pride for me as a creative. The discussions we have enjoyed on that show formed the basis for a book that indulges my passion for Star Trek, my love of cultural history, and my fascination with American politics, and brews them into one big show. I wrote this book primarily during the first Covid-19 lockdown in the spring & summer of 2020, afforded the luxury to be working from home, and I sometimes wonder if I ever would have finished it were it not for the pandemic. Nevertheless, it is a work I am very proud of, and truly loved the process of researching, reading and writing.
You can order the book handily from the following places and all good book stores:
Amazon UK (paperback)
It is an academic text, and as such is beyond the traditional price range of more populist books, so if funds don’t stretch, it’s worth considering asking your local library to purchase and stock it, and then you can borrow for free while also supporting your local library. It’s a win win!
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Also available:
Myth-Building in Modern Media: The Rise of the Mytharc in Imagined Worlds.
Here's the official blurb:
Mythology for centuries has served as humanity's window into understanding its distant past. In our modern world, storytelling creates its own myths and legends, in media ranging from the world of television and cinema to literature and comic books, that help us make sense of the world we live in today. What is the "Mytharc," how did it arise, and how does it inform modern long-form storytelling? How does the classical hero's journey intersect with modern myth and narrative? And where might the storytelling of tomorrow take readers and viewers as we imagine our future? From The X-Files to H.P. Lovecraft, from Lost to the Marvel cinematic universe and many worlds beyond, this study explores our modern storytelling mythology and where it may lead us.
And for the unofficial blurb... Myth-Building began life in late 2017 as, originally, a text named after the earlier incarnation of this blog, Cultural Conversation, and has ebbed and flowed in terms of structure, style and content between early 2018 when it was officially commissioned and early 2019 when the manuscript finally headed off to the United States, and took a few extra tiny turns during editing since then. It remains, however, the book I set out to write - an exploration of fictional mythology inside the TV series and movies I love, and while I hope to move on to greater pastures, I will always remain very proud of this work.
You can order the book handily from the following places (and likely your own national derivation of Amazon will stock it too):
It is an academic text, and as such is beyond the traditional price range of more populist books, so if funds don't stretch, it's worth considering asking your local library to purchase and stock it, and then you can borrow for free while also supporting your local library. It's a win win!
If you do consider it, my deepest thanks.