New Releases

A 120-page biography of legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock traces his work from his early days working on silent films to classics such as North by Northwest and Vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much by professor emeritus Michael Wood also examines the director’s life in a provincial London suburb and in posh Los Angeles.

English professor Jeff Nunokawa writes about everything from literary criticism to Spanish soccer striker Fernando Torres in Note Book, which offers a selection of 250 of Nunokawa’s more than 5,000 Facebook essays, which he has penned every morning since 2007. The pieces raise questions about literary form, function, and community in the digital age.

The common assumption that the United States has been an officially Christian nation since the time of the founding fathers has held great weight in our historical narrative, but the idea of “Christian America” actually is an invention from the time of our own fathers and grandfathers, contends history professor Kevin Kruse in One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America.