Joan Crawford forged a new and successful screen image in this powerful women's noir film; winning her an Academy Award for best actress.

Albert J. LaValley's through and insightful guide to Mildred Pierce at once tells us much about the making of this complex film, the problems and process of transferring the story to the screen, the specific and important roles of the producer, director, and set designer, and how the film relates to broad trends within the industry. It is without a doubt the most thorough treatment of this important American motion picture.

Tokyo Boogie-woogie and D.T. Suzuki seeks to understand the tensions between competing cultures, generations, and beliefs in Japan during the years following World War II, through the lens of one of its best-known figures and one of its most forgotten. Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (D.T. Suzuki) was a prolific scholar and translator of Buddhism, Zen, and Chinese and Japanese philosophy and religious history. In the postwar years, he was a central figure in the introduction of Buddhism to the United States and other English-language countries, frequently traveling and speaking to this end. His works helped define much of these interpretations of ‘Eastern Religion’ in English, as well as shape views of modern Japanese Buddhism.

Against this famous figure, however, is a largely unknown or forgotten shape: Suzuki Alan Masaru. Alan was D.T. Suzuki’s adopted son and, though he remained within his father’s shadow, is mostly known as the lyricist of the iconic pop hit “Tokyo Boogie-woogie.” Perhaps due to his frequent scandals and the fraught nature of the relationship, Alan remains unmentioned and unstudied by scholars and historians. Yet by exploring the nature of the relationship between these two, Shoji Yamada digs into the conflicting memories and experiences of these generations in Japan.

In twentieth-century Kenya, age and gender were powerful cultural and political forces that animated household and generational relationships. They also shaped East Africans’ contact with and influence on emergent colonial and global ideas about age and masculinity. Kenyan men and boys came of age achieving their manhood through changing rites of passage and access to new outlets such as town life, crime, anticolonial violence, and nationalism. And as they did, the colonial government appropriated masculinity and maturity as means of statecraft and control.

In An Uncertain Age, Paul Ocobock positions age and gender at the heart of everyday life and state building in Kenya. He excavates in unprecedented ways how the evolving concept of “youth” motivated and energized colonial power and the movements against it, exploring the masculinities boys and young men debated and performed as they crisscrossed the colony in search of wages or took the Mau Mau oath. Yet he also considers how British officials’ own ideas about masculinity shaped not only young African men’s ideas about manhood but the very nature of colonial rule.

An Uncertain Age joins a growing number of histories that have begun to break down monolithic male identities to push the historiographies of Kenya and empire into new territory.