Iron Fist Special 40th Anniversary Edition. Review by Carl F. Gauze.

Oscar Wilde recounts his life story, his views on art, and his views on love.

A one-man show about one of the biggest civil rights heroes of all time.

The War of the Roses spills out across this stage with gags and battles galore.

A one woman show relating the fascinating history of Dr Ruth Westheimer, America’s favorite sex advisor.

Blacks fight for equality as immigrants fight for survival and whites fight to reach the North pole.

A dramatization of the 1953 Soviet Union’s “Doctors’ Plot.”

Well, they made it this far. Let’s see what they’ve accomplished.

She is woman, and I heard her roar.

Turn of the century watch dial painters intentionally consume radium, leading to death and profits for the American Radium Company.

The cross-dressing comic returned to Memphis with history, philosophy, and plenty of laughs.

Moisés Kaufman takes us into the hellish world of Oscar Wild’s foolish libel trial that sent him to jail for two years

A close-up view of the young women who prompted the Salem Witch trials.

More American History than you can shake a stick at, assuming you stopped laughing long enough to find a stick at.

They said he was mad, they said he was incapable of running a country, they say he was obsessed with irrelevant details, but Ludwig the Second died young and left a good looking corpse.

This thoughtful and well-documented text explores the history of dark comedy in film through the perspective of Charlie Chaplin’s work and his movies about war.

A view into the last few year of French Impressionist Auguste Renoir’s life. Carl F Gauze is beguiled by its stillness.

The net result of plowing through a weighty tome like this is a sense of awe at how a bunch of kids created their own culture whole cloth, like the music industry on a Utopian, communal, microcosmic level.

Matthew Moyer recommends Twomorrows’ last volume in the All Star Companion series to pop culture scholars of all stripes. It’s an essential element to any Golden Age history, when so many originals are still out of the reach of the casual fan.

Scott Adams finds this compelling history of Merge Records, the underdog label that beat the odds and succeeded, to be insanely readable.