My Review of "Leading Lady"

Stephen Galloway's Leading Lady:  Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker is a fascinating look at Sherry Lansing, whose appointment as head of 20th Century Fox in 1980 made her the first female president of a major Hollywood studio.  He follows Lansing from her Chicago childhood, explaining how her father's death and mother's resourcefulness influenced her strengths and insecurities.  A gawky teenager, she gained from moviegoing a desire to "reinvent herself" and as a young woman moved to California to follow her acting dreams.  Although this first career didn't last long, she found a mentor in producer Ray Wagner, who hired her as a script reader, a move that transformed her life.

Galloway captures the personal drive that allowed Lansing to forge a path through sexist Hollywood and shepherd films such as Kramer vs. Kramer, Forrest Gump, and Saving Private Ryan past creative obstacles to eventual success.  He also shows how she personally left her mark on many films, such as by helping to craft Fatal Attraction's revised, crowd-pleasing finale.

As the book draws to a close, Galloway describes how Lansing realized she wanted more out of life, and by 2005 left Hollywood behind to start a cancer research foundation.  Galloway has created a colorful page-turner chronicling Lansing's legacy as both a filmmaker and a philanthropist.

I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.

My Review of "How We Love"

Milan & Kay Yerkovich's How We Love:  Discover Your Love Style, Enhance Your Marriage (expanded edition) is a fascinating book that every married couple should read.  Here, these two veteran marriage counselors help place our marriage within the larger context of each person's life -- family of origin, habits and contemporary behavior are all interconnected in ways that readers may not appreciate before How We Love.

The authors take the psychological tools of attachment theory to construct how our lives with early families can create "intimacy imprints" -- an underlying blueprint that shapes your behavior, beliefs, and expectations of all relationships, especially your marriage.  How We Love outlines four of those imprint "styles" and goes to out explore how each of those styles interact with others in particular marriages to create the drama of our marriages.

This is an amazing little book that offers a lot of hope for marriages that may have gotten stuck.

I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.