Join Diesel, A Bookstore on Tuesday June 4th at 6:30 pm as they welcome Samuel Garza Bernstein to the store to discuss and sign Starring Joan Crawford: The Films, the Fantasy, and the Modern Relevance of a Silver Screen Icon.

In Starring Joan Crawford: The Films, the Fantasy, and the Modern Relevance of a Silver Screen Icon, author and screenwriter Samuel Garza Bernstein examines what makes this star from Hollywood’s Golden Age a powerful cultural force and model of feminist self-determination for women today. Covering her five-decade career, Garza Bernstein reveals how Miss Crawford continually molded and remolded her image, trying on and discarding various personas and fads, while staying true to herself. Embracing her conflicts and contradictions, he describes Joan Crawford as “an essential American archetype.” Drawing on reams of press coverage and packed with vibrantly, never-before-seen restored images from movie posters and stills, publicity shots, sheet music, and magazine covers, STARRING JOAN CRAWFORD is both a celebration of its subject and a compelling exploration of how she informed ideas about wealth and class, femininity and gender roles, identity, and fulfillment. Dividing her career into five phases, Garza Bernstein looks at what Crawford meant to audiences of the time and then looks at how her films and the personas she created still affect us and relate to the way we live now.

Samuel Garza Bernstein is a Stonewall Book Award-winning author, screenwriter, and playwright. He splits his time between Porto, Portugal, and Los Angeles, California.

This event is free to attend and will be held in the Lower Courtyard near DIESEL, A Bookstore at the Mart.