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Glen Pitre's Cigarettes & Nylons Premiering at the Prytania Theatre as part of the New Orleans Film Fest, 10/17/10
Executive Produced by Michelle Benoit & Glen Pitre for Franco-German television, Cigarettes & Nylons stars Adélaïde Leroux (star of the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize winning Flandres), alongside Louisiana actors Billy Slaughter, Jessie Terrebone, James Yeargin, Michael Aaron Santos, Louis Hearthum, Geraldine Singer, Morrey McElroy, Sol Gothard, Catherine Lasperches, & Francette Vinet-Izard
Cigarettes & Nylons
Three women in a foreign land. They hardly speak the language, don’t know the customs, but vow to be good wives to young men they barely know. The year is 1946. The foreign land is the United States.
In WWII, during brief encounters and stolen moments, 6,500 American recruits married French girls even while fighting their way to Paris and beyond. An overwhelmed U.S. Army set up “cigarette” camps --- Camp Chesterfield, Camp Lucky Strike --- to “Americanize” the brides before shipping them to the care of in-laws they’d never met.
Cigarettes & Nylons follows three young women through hope and disillusionment, love and heartbreak, to a time when even as the world was burning, young hearts were set aflame. 94 minutes, mostly in French, with English subtitles.
AEI Client Dennis Palumbo's Mirror Image Reviewed By Lois Henderson of Bookpleasures.com
Author: Dennis Palumbo
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
ISBN: 1590587529
Click Here To Purchase Mirror Image
An upbeat setting, convincing characters and a plot that has one on the edge of one’s seat from page one—what more could a reader ask for in a crime novel? Once more, established mystery writer Dennis Palumbo has pulled off a fine fast-paced whodunnit that has one yearning for more. Set in Pittsburgh, with the backdrop of the “old Appalachian Hills, sloping away before spreading urban tendrils, looking as pristine and timeless as when the first settlers came over four hundred years ago”, the novel has such tangible atmosphere that the reader is locked into the plot by Palumbo’s versatile writing, which changes from poetic description to slick dialogue in the blink of an eye.
The characters range from the psychotic (with part of the novel being set in a psychiatric institution, which has its fair share of scary and battle-scarred inmates) to the professional (though the latter seem, at times, not to be too far off the former…). Palumbo’s own background as a psychotherapist enables him to imbue the lead character with authenticity and compassion towards the emotionally maimed and much undervalued social misfits.
Dr. Daniel Rinaldi is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating victims of violent crime, to which he himself has also, ironically enough, been subject, with his wife being shot in a mugging in front of his very eyes. So, in a way, he also has some emotional baggage with which to contend. Not only that, but he’s also at loggerheads with Dr. Brooks Riley, Chief Psychiatrist at Ten Oaks, the most successful private psychiatric facility in the state of Pennsylvania, who’s determined to see to it that he gets Rinaldi’s license revoked.
When a patient of Rinaldi’s opts for dressing just like him, and gets viciously stabbed to death just outside the doc’s offices, all hell breaks loose. Tracking down the suspect, naturally, forms the major impetus of the plot, though there are loads of characters whose interrelationships tend at times to be of the rockiest kind, but at times reflect what true friendship is all about. The professional details regarding post-traumatic stress disorder which are neatly woven into the plot are fascinating. The characters are well-rounded and credible, with a fair amount of attraction between the sexes adding extra spice to the unfolding drama.
One cannot doubt that Palumbo has hands-on experience of the police and court proceedings which are so integral to the plot. His mystery stories have appeared in the past in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine and Written By, among other eminent journals. Mirror Image should make a great read for anyone interested in the crime genre, as long as you are open-minded enough not to mind the occasional cussing which goes with the territory.
Click Here To Purchase Mirror Image
Lois Henderson
Reviewer Lois Henderson: Lois has a MA General Linguistics, BA (English) Honors, Higher Education Diploma, Higher Diploma in Library and Information Science - indexer of more than 130 books; editor of dozens of theses and study manuals at university and college level.
See AEI Client Royce Buckingham's Goblins German Book Trailer
Click on Book!
Rough translation
Sure. Mumbles....Cantankerous monsters. I hate monsters. Ooops. (whistles) Hello boys. Are they all my fans? "No, those are fans of cantankerous monsters and dim-witted demons" (your previous books). Oh too bad, they don't have a clue. Psst..., psst, hey, demons are totally yesterday's news (passee'). I've got something here for you-all. This will knock your socks off.
Guest Post: PITTSBURGH: The Steel City in Transition
Dennis Palumbo
With the publication of my new novel, Mirror Image, a lot of people have asked why I set the mystery thriller in Pittsburgh. My usual, somewhat facetious answer is that New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago and Miami were all taken.
The real answer, apart from the fact that I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, is that my home town provides the best setting possible for a contemporary novel, and for the most obvious of reasons: it represents what is happening to many cities throughout the country. At least, the ones that are struggling to survive the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, from an industrial and manufacturing-based economy to a digitial and information-based one.
When we think of eastern cities, we think of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Detroit. Burly, muscular cities whose very foundations were laid by immigrant men and women, hard workers whose daily toil fueled those cities' economic engines.
Pittsburgh was an exemplar of that depiction. With the accent on was. Famous for its steel mills and factories---and for the resultant smoky air and soot-coated buildings---the Pittsburgh I knew as a child has undergone a renaissance in the past thirty years.
For example, the seventeen miles of steel mills that once lined its converging rivers are no more. (I remember them well; for two summers during my undergraduate days at Pitt I shoveled coal into the blast furnace at J&L Steel on Second Avenue, popping salt pills to stave off dehydration.) Moreover, with the arrival of software companies and the proliferating financial institutions, the downtown has sprouted shining new towers and off-loaded many of its older, WW-II era structures. And the air is pretty clean and soot-free.
What makes Pittsburgh an interesting phenomenon is the way it's handling this transition. Not that it hasn't been, nor continues to be, rocky. Nor without its casualities---primarily blue collar workers and their families. What Billy Joel sang about in "Allentown" is true for most of Pittsburgh's small outlying communities and cities whose survival depended on the steel and coal industries. Even at the newly gentrified core of downtown Pittsburgh, the Steel City itself, what new steel there is---embedded in freshly-poured concrete---is imported from Japan.
But, like it or not, in today's economy---let alone today's global marketplace---eastern industrial cities have to change or die. Pittsburgh is changing---has changed---and this resulting mix of old and new actually gives the city a fresh opportunity to grow. When you add to this its rich bounty of endowments
from such heavy-weights as the Mellons, the Scaifes and the Carnegies, as well as its nationally-known universities and hospitals, Pittsburgh is well-positioned to be as relevant as any other American city. Plus, it boasts the Steelers!
Of course, change is a mixed blessing, especially for those of us whose lives straddled both "eras" of Pittsburgh. A fact I make use of in Mirror Image. After a traumatic experience involving one of his patients, the novel's narrator, a psychologist named Daniel Rinaldi, is musing on how mixed that blessing is as he heads home...
"We made the turn onto my street, whose edge fell away onto a panoramic view of the Three Rivers and the glistening lights of contemporary Pittsburgh. Gone were the steel mills and factories; in their place stood razor-thin buildings of glass and chrome, of software and bond trading.
"The city had changed a lot since I was a kid, a shot-and-a-beer town colliding with the Information Age. Though sometimes, like tonight, I missed the Pittsburgh I grew up in. Forged by immigrants. Musty like the smell of damp wool. A mosaic of thick accents and old neighborhoods, clanging trolleys and cobblestone streets. Before mini-malls and decaf lattes. Before spaghetti became pasta."
I guess, in the end, though a blessing may be mixed, it's still a blessing. In these difficult, uncertain times, that's something every Pittsburgh native---even if reluctantly---has come to understand.
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