Izzy's Picks: Scandals of Classic Hollywood

Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema is a juicy selection of cultural history by Anne Helen Petersen. Petersen has a PhD in Media Studies focusing on the history of the gossip industry. How cool is that?!?! That’s one super awesome thing about academia, it’s possible to get a degree in anything. This goes to show how cool our world is and how many things there are to study. I love how academia makes it possible for things that have often been trivialized (like gossip) to become legitimized. Petersen crosses her scholarly training with the thirst of a celebrity journalist and creates a work that has the facts of an academic journal with the intrigue of a gossip column. So fun and informative!