J. Paul Leonard Library Spotlight

Wednesday May 9th, 2007
at 4pm
in the de Bellis Collection Reading Room,
6th Floor, J. Paul Leonard Library
Free and open to the public

The Frank V. de Bellis Collection presents a lecture given by Prof. Lucia Gregori, Washington University, on Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities:” the real and the potential in literature and science.

San Francsico State University Bookstore
Monday, April 30, 1:30-3:30 pm

Co-sponsored by the Friends of the J. Paul Leonard Library and the SFSU Cinema Department

Biographer and former United Artists executive Steven Bach now takes on his most challenging subject in Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (Alfred A. Knopf). Bach provocatively clears away all the mythology surrounding the filmmaker whose Faustian pact with Adolf Hitler resulted in the infamous propaganda feature Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Bach teaches at Bennington College and Columbia University.

“Bach finally presents Leni Riefenstahl as she genuinely was — not as we have seen her so far — but as Hitler’s self-serving and mendacious p.r. handmaiden. If you haven’t thought of ‘Nazi artist’ as a noxious and corrupting oxymoron, Bach’s scrupulous account of a zealously masked life may persuade you otherwise.” — CYNTHIA OZICK