Lewis almost defines the idea of a cult director, since his work was exclusively in the b picture category and he never worked with big stars or big budgets. Except for the justly famous Gun Crazy, a wild film noir take on the Bonnie and Clyde story, and the talked about but more minor noir The Big Combo, most of Lewis' films are not well known and a lot of them are not good, though the director often tries to do something stylish or unexpected with some of the scenes. It's not surprising I guess that the only book on the man is this slim, expensive and not very detailed book. It's okay if you love Joseph H. Lewis movies and you want to spend 30-something dollars for a moderately extended interview and a filmography. The interviewer doesn't go very deep and you don't come away with a very good idea of what inspired Lewis or even many good anecdotes.

Joseph H. Lewis was a superb film director, and Francis Nevins did an absolutely wonderful job of covering his career.

This putative "biography" of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-98) is a very strange book. It is usually filed in the biography section, but may just as well be listed as fiction. It gives us a few interesting insights into its subject, but is certainly not reliable as an actual biography.

Published anonymously in 1899, not long after the subject's assassination at the hands of an Italian radical, this book seems, in many ways, a standard biography of the Empress' life. Yet large portions of it describe the female author's first-person interactions with Her Majesty. These include time alone together in the Empress' private rooms in her various palaces, riding together across the plains of Hungary, an action-packed vacation in Brittany in which the Empress and the author resuscitate sailors shipwrecked in a storm, and many intimate and personal discussions. The latter include a moving scene following the wedding of Crown Prince Rudolf, when "Elizabeth, with a swift movement, came toward me, flung herself upon the floor, and, burying her proud head upon my knees, burst into an uncontrollable passion of tears" (p. 175).

Rudolf himself (according to these pages), tells the author she and he "have always been awful chums" (p. 195).

The problem is, there's no evidence any of these things actually happened.

The anonymous author, it's now known, was Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen, an American author who at the turn of the last century wrote a syndicated gossip column under the pseudonym, "Marquise de Fontenoy." Far from being an intimate friend of the Empress, Cunliffe-Owen's name appears in none of the more recent and reputable biographies of the Empress I've consulted, nor does this book appear in any of their bibliographies or indices. The highly dramatic (and, you would think, memorable) rescued-sailors scene also is no place to be found in any of the numerous printed or online biographies of the Empress that I've consulted.

If you already know something about the Empress's life and death, this book can be an entertaining (and/or infuriating) example of instant celebrity journalism at its worst. But if you're less familiar with the unfortunate "Sisi"'s story, steer away from this one.

I know Joe Keenan, He was my Grandfather. The only way to tell his story is sitting with a group of his friends and listening. He was a great storyteller and Mr Gannon never captures that fact.