The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures

A spellbinding true-crime story about an underdog inventor believed to have birthed motion pictures who vanished before his invention ever went mainstream.

Paul Fischer (A Kim Jong-Il Production) is a meticulous writer, screenwriter and film producer known for dismantling the secretive worlds of true-crime stories. In The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures, Fischer probes the life of Louis Le Prince, a struggling independent inventor largely lost to history, who, in 1888, first captured moving images of his family, and later secured patents in four countries for his innovation. But, in 1890, one month prior to unveiling his brainchild far and wide, Louis visited his estranged brother in Dijon, France. At the reunion of these now middle-aged siblings, Louis, with fervent passion and zeal, shared details about his creation and how he believed motion pictures "could alter the course of humankind" and "revolutionize the human experience, as drastically as the railroad and the telephone." After their visit, Louis set off to take an express train back to Paris, en route to the U.S., but somewhere between Dijon and Paris, he vanished and was never seen again.

His disappearance was never solved, but his devoted, long-suffering wife spent the remainder of her days trying to prove her husband had been kidnapped and killed--all arranged by Thomas Alva Edison, who she claimed stole his invention and, in 1894, launched it as his own. Edison claimed that his Kinetoscope technology marked the birth of motion pictures.

With a spellbinding presentation supported by painstaking research, Fischer puts forth evidence to try to unravel the mystery of Le Prince's life and death. The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures is a work of art unto itself.

The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder and the Movies by Paul Fischer

Simon and Schuster, $28.99 hardcover, 9781982114824, 416 pages

Publication Date: April 19, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (April 19, 2022), link HERE

 

To read the longer form of this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (February 15, 2022), link HERE

 

The Year of the Horses

An honest, resolute memoir that details how a writer suffering an existential crisis found healing and salvation in her passion for horses.

Novelist and writing guru Courtney Maum takes readers on a candid, deeply moving journey that details how she found her way out of a labyrinth of depression by rekindling her passion for horses. 

By her 35th birthday, Maum (Before and After the Book Deal; Costalegre) was a successful novelist, working on her second book. She was at her happiest--a beloved wife and doting mother of a beautiful baby girl, Nina. She and her equally creative filmmaker husband had moved from Brooklyn, N.Y., into a fixer-upper house they bought in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts. But when Nina turned two, something indefinable manifested in Maum--an existential crisis. Maum was deluged with roiling feelings that stalled her writing, plagued her with insomnia and provoked a general feeling of emotional malaise. A non-life-threatening car crash sustained with her husband and daughter "was a match to the depression" that would all-out engulf her. However, the accident proved a necessary jolt that sent Maum on a journey to reassess her life and decipher what might bring her a sense of peace and joy, and restore her equilibrium.

In therapy, Maum mined her past, recognizing how she missed her affinity and fascination for horses, starting when she was a child with a pony, boarded in a barn near her family's Greenwich, Conn., home. Maum's journey of healing and salvation in reconnecting to equine culture is wittily engaging and uncompromisingly forthright. She confronts the past, while also braiding in delightful flourishes regarding the metaphorical meanings of horses and the universal role they have played throughout history and in the arts.

 The Year of the Horses: A Memoir by Courtney Maum

Tin House Books, $27.95 hardcover, 9781953534156, 416 pages

Publication Date: April 19, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (May 3, 2022), link HERE

 

To read the longer form of this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (March 22, 2022), link HERE