From New York Times bestselling author Patti Callahan comes Becoming Mrs. Lewis: The Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis, the exquisite novel of Joy Davidman, a 1940-50s writer and poet and the only woman C. S. Lewis ever married. In the vein of popular exploratory novels that uplift and uncover brilliant women forgotten to the past, comes the untold story of the woman who helped inspire some of Lewis’ best known works.
“Joy Davidman has been portrayed as the dying woman in Shadowlands,” explains Callahan, “but in researching Joy, I came to believe that she’d like to be understood as more than a woman who died well on a movie screen. She was a fiery woman who lived bravely and was alert and curious to the mysterious world she wanted to understand.”
When Joy began writing letters to C. S. Lewis—known to close friends and family as “Jack”—she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn’t holding together her crumbling marriage to her abusive, alcoholic husband William Lindsay Gresham, a well-regarded author during the era.
“There were conflicting narratives about her and I wanted to know this woman,” adds Callahan. “I wanted to understand her and how she changed not only her life but also the life and work of one of our most beloved authors of the twentieth century—C.S. Lewis.”
Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and against all odds, finding a love that even the threat of death couldn’t destroy.
In this masterful exploration, we meet a fiercely independent mother and a passionate woman who lived during a time when women weren’t meant to have a voice—and yet her love for Jack gave them both voices they didn’t know they had.
“Joy matters today because we are just now seeing these fascinating women dredged from the mud of the past. Joy is rarely given credit for the muse, best friend, co-author, love and wife she was to C. S. Lewis, and I hope this book helps to right that. Let’s meet the woman beside the man.”
Now it’s public knowledge: Public Media Distribution has release some nifty DVDs that belong in everyone’s library.
Carnivals have a delightful place in the American imagination, with childhood memories of family fun, fantasy and summer nights. But rising expenses and changes in U.S. labor patterns have caused many employers to find labor outside of U.S. borders.
https://youtu.be/NPTTIy1LKeI
Filmed over the span of six years, Farewell Ferris Wheel follows a carnival owner, a labor-recruiter and workers from a small town in Mexico who join the carnival legally on seasonal visas. The program is an honest on-the-ground portrait of the financial, emotional, and physical challenges they all face.
With insights from several internationally notable scholars of mythology and literature, Tolkien & Lewis: Myth, Imagination & the Quest for Meaning engages these scholars while challenging viewers to draw their own conclusions about the meaning of life and the role that mythology and imagination play in determining belief.
https://youtu.be/VD202PbUItw
On a dreary September evening in 1931, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their friend and fellow scholar, Hugo Dyson, met for dinner in Lewis’s Magdalen College dormitory in Oxford, England. Lewis’s transformation from atheist to theist to Christian was based on the insights of Tolkien and Dyson as they engaged in deep conversation about mythology, reality, ritual, imagination, and faith. The program explores the fundamental characteristics of myth with an emphasis on how myth impacts our lives.
The Smithsonian Channel’s The Real Story: Saving Private Ryan is an intimate and behind the scenes look at the inspiration for one of the greatest war films ever made. The multi Oscar-winning “Saving Private Ryan” captures the sheer horror and brutality of combat that the men of World War II had to experience.
https://youtu.be/dAs_W4bQvlg
Known for its realism, the film was selected in 2014 for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. So, was there a real Private Ryan? Uncover the real story behind this Hollywood blockbuster as the program conducts tests with weapons experts and gains insight from war historians. Viewers also hear the moving testimony of soldiers who landed at Normandy and meet the families whose tragic stories inspired the film that won five Oscars including Best Director in 1998.
Another look at wartime history: The Smithsonian Channel’s The Real Story: Platoon. The Oscar-winning anti-war film Platoon brought the true horror of the Vietnam War to the big screen. Based on filmmaker Oliver Stone’s own experiences as a soldier in the conflict, the film captivated millions of viewers all over the world. Yet how much of the film was real and how much was Hollywood fiction?
To reveal the real story, the program recreates scenes, and uncovers a radio transmission from the battle that inspired the movie’s climax. The program also includes interviews with Stone and cast member Willem Dafoe.
Even wee ones can savor the fun. Rose Cinderella thinks she is a regular teenager, but things change when she finds a magic key unlocking a world where fairy tales come to life! Rose Cinderella quite literally falls into Fairy Tale Land and discovers that Cinderella is not only her grandmother but also the headmistress of Regal Academy, a school where fairy tale families teach the next generation how to become heroes. The fun is framed in Regal Academy: Rose Cinderella in Fairy Tale Land.
The film series Pirates of the Caribbean presents the buccaneer lifestyle of pirates as a back-stabbing, high-living, hard-drinking world. It makes for an entertaining series, but is it a true depiction of the times? Enter The Smithsonian Channel’s The Real Story: Pirates of the Caribbean.
https://youtu.be/JlvmUlgXgDY
Historical evidence of real pirates shows that amidst the lawless merriment, pirates actually formed a highly organized society, where democracy ruled and voting and healthcare preceded England by a hundred years. The program interviews historians, weaponry experts, and one of the film’s screenwriters to show how true pirate adventures inspired the films.
The Special Air Service is the world’s most famous combat unit with the motto “Who Dares Wins”. Yet the story of how it came into existence has been, until now, a closely guarded secret. For the first time, the SAS has agreed to open up its archive and allow Ben Macintyre to reveal the true story of their formation during the darkest days of World War II.
With unprecedented access to the SAS secret files, unseen footage and exclusive interviews with its founding members, SAS Rogue Warriors tells the remarkable story behind an extraordinary fighting force.
An instant box office smash when it was released in 1977, the sci-fi flick Close Encounters of the Third Kind grossed over 300 million dollars and was nominated for eight Oscars. Now audiences can get a glimpse into the actual events that inspired the classic film.
Few realize the film was inspired by a series of reported UFO sightings in Michigan in the summer of 1966, and witness testimonies given to a U.S. Government investigation about alien abduction are just a few events examined in The Real Story: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Part of Smithsonian Channel’s original series The Real Story, this intriguing program allows viewers to separate science-based fact from science fiction.
It investigates the original cases that inspired the film–from the Michigan UFO chase to the first and most famous case of claimed alien abduction in the US, the Betty and Barney Hill abduction. Using modern technology, a re-examination of government documents puts old witness testimonies to the test.
