Available to order on Amazon, Waterstones, from your local bookstore, or directly from the publisher Polaris, please consider my third published work, The Cinematic Connery: The Films of Sir Sean Connery.
Here’s the official blurb:
Scotland’s greatest export. The world’s first super spy. Voted the sexiest man on the planet. Sir Sean Connery was a titanic figure on screen and off for over half a century.
Behind the son of a factory worker, growing up in near-poverty on the harsh streets of pre-war Edinburgh, lay a timeless array of motion pictures that spanned multiple decades and saw Connery work across the globe with directors as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay. And amongst them his greatest role, whether he liked it or not – Bond, James Bond.
Author A. J. Black delves into Connery’s life for more than mere biography, exploring not just the enormously varied pictures he made including crowd pleasing blockbusters such as The Untouchables or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, serious-minded fare in The Hill or The Offence, and his strange sojourns into eclectic fantasy with Zardoz or Time Bandits, but also the sweep of a career that crossed movie eras as well as decades.
From skirmishes with the angry young men of the British New Wave, via becoming the cinematic icon of the 1960s as 007, through to a challenging reinvention as a unique older actor of stature in the 1980s, this exploration of the Cinematic Connery shows just how much his work reflected the changing movie-going tastes, political realities and cultural trends of the 20th century, and beyond…
And for the unofficial blurb…
Anyone who follows what I do may be unsurprised to learn this book was originally intended to be a podcast. In the wake of Sean Connery’s death, my friend Carl Sweeney and I recorded an episode of our show at the time, Motion Pictures, as a tribute to him. This led me to consider doing a retrospective series about Connery’s films and got as close as recording a pilot, with fellow podcaster Russ Hugo. I then toyed with blog posts going through his filmography. Then it struck me – there’s a book here! Not a biography, of which there are dozens, but rather a cultural & cinematic exploration of the man and his career, given how Connery spanned three or four different eras of cinema and a wealth of societal change across the latter half of the 20th century. It very soon congealed into the style and structure of The Cinematic Connery, my first and only title which wonderfully stuck!
For this book, I approached a different publisher, in the British firm Polaris, whose previous publications (such as John Rain’s Thunderbook) I’ve been really impressed by. They’ve been a real joy to work with – collaborative, supportive, challenging in all the right ways. The finished product is 100% a better book than the manuscript I delivered. I’m contracted to write one more book for them but this is hopefully the start of a beautiful friendship.
I hope you enjoy this book. It was huge fun watching all of Connery’s oeuvre and digging deep into my favourite actor’s career, and it’s certainly my most accessible book to date. I’m very proud to share it with you – and just look at that cover! Courtesy of the great Sean Longmore. I definitely need that as a poster!
You can order the book handily from the following places and all good book stores:
If you do consider it, my deepest thanks.
culturalconversation.co.uk 