This is a brilliant large-format book. It charts the Jewish/
Austrian film director's traumatic flight from Nazi Berlin in 1933 to Paris, then to permanent exile in Hollywood. We witness
his struggles with moguls, producers, actors and crew who were
unable to cope with his innate perfectionism. His life and his
films are inextricably entwined. The detailed text is backed
by relevant documents: unstamped passports, love-letters to and from Marlene Dietrich, scrawled film notes, reports of witch-
hunts, and stunning photographs of Lang at work on his many
films. The book is a fitting tribute to our Last Dinosaur. I
highly recommend it to everyone who loves films.

Rolf Jacobsen, who died in 1994, had a poetic career spanning more than 60 years, and Roger Greenwald's translations are a selection of the best of Jacobsen's many collections. The bi-lingual format, with Norwegian and English on facing pages, is an essential part of the reading experience, whether or not you can sound out Norwegian - and investment in a 30 minute-language tape will let you do that in a day: believe me, it is worth it. Even the visual inspection of the Norwegian text conveys an important message about the impact of Jacobsen as a modernist: almost every Norwegian word is shorter than its English conterpart, and the verbal economy in the expression of complex thoughts and ideas - for which Jacobsen strove - is often breathtaking.
Jacobsen wrote feelingly and brilliantly about the connections and correspondences between the natural, and the technological/industrial worlds. There are poems about forests, and about "antenna forests," about swarms and crowds, trees and buildings, the dark silence of the winter night, and "Thoughts uopn Listening in on a Radio Telescope."
Greenwald's translations are clear, spare, faithful, and elegant - and he knows what they can do and what they cannot - thus the original Norwegian text on the facing pages. There is an intelligent introduction (by Grenwald), and several good photos of Jacobsen - the best of which is certainly the quintessentially Norwegian frontispiece, with Jacobsen, in his 40's, writing outdoors against the background of a weathered ski hut.