An Evening with Steve Darnall and Maureen Ryan: In Conversation

Steve Darnall and Maureen Ryan will be at The Book Cellar to celebrate their books: Steve Darnall's Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition, and the paperback edition of Maureen Ryan's Burn it Down!

About the Books:

Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition:

The long-awaited reissue of the classic Vertigo miniseries Uncle Sam by Steve Darnall and Alex Ross is a sharp political fever dream praised by Kirkus as a "truly subversive graphic novel" and "a damning account of American political history that also affirms basic democratic ideals"

Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition is a vibrant, hallucinatory tour of modern America--the story of a star-spangled, ragged vagrant named Sam who is guided by the voices in his head and his own fractured memories.

Absorbed by history-traveling visions of America's dark past, Uncle Sam struggles to remember his true identity and piece together the scattered clues of his own experiences in this deep and thoughtful look at America's checkered past.

Meticulously researched by Steve Darnall and fully painted by Alex Ross, Uncle Sam returns in print just when it is needed most--in time for the 2024 presidential election--as a reminder of American ideals, the promise of our nation, and the democracy that is at stake.

Burn it Down:

In this spectacular, newsmaking exposé that has the entertainment industry abuzz and on its heels, Vanity Fair's Maureen Ryan blows the lid off patterns of harassment and bias in Hollywood, the grassroots reforms under way, and the labor and activist revolutions that recent scandals have ignited.

It is never just One Bad Man.

Abuse and exploitation of workers is baked into the very foundations of the entertainment industry. To break the cycle and make change that sticks, it's important to stop looking at headline-making stories as individual events. Instead, one must look closely at the bigger picture, to see how abusers are created, fed, rewarded, allowed to persist, and, with the right tools, how they can be excised.

In Burn It Down, veteran reporter Maureen Ryan does just that. She draws on decades of experience to connect the dots and illuminate the deeper forces sustaining Hollywood's corrosive culture. Fresh reporting sheds light on problematic situations at companies like Lucasfilm and shows like Lost, Saturday Night Live, The Goldbergs, Sleepy Hollow, Curb Your Enthusiasm and more.

Interviews with actors and famous creatives like Evan Rachel Wood, Harold Perrineau, Damon Lindelof, and Orlando Jones abound. Ryan dismantles, one by one, the myths that the entertainment industry promotes about itself, which have allowed abusers to thrive and the industry to avoid accountability--myths about Hollywood as a meritocracy, what it takes to be creative, the value of human dignity, and more.

Weaving together insights from industry insiders, historical context, and pop-culture analysis, Burn It Down paints a groundbreaking and urgently necessary portrait of what's gone wrong in the entertainment world--and how we can fix it.

About the Authors:

Steve Darnall is a writer whose lifelong flirtation with the world of comic books began in 1990, when he and his friend Alex Ross collaborated on a story that served as the inspiration for the award-winning 1993 miniseries Marvels. Steve and Alex have subsequently collaborated on the miniseries Marvel, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt and Uncle Sam, which, some 27 years after its release, is still very likely the only graphic novel to receive positive reviews in both The New York Times and The People's Tribune. He served as a consultant for the 2021 movies Being the Ricardos and Ken Burns' celebrated Country Music documentary. At present, Steve is channeling his twin fascinations with American history and popular culture as the editor of Nostalgia Digest magazine and the host of Those Were the Days and Radio's Golden Age, two weekly shows dedicated to the "Golden Age" of radio. 

Critic and journalist Maureen “Mo” Ryan is a Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair, and has written for Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times, EW, Salon, GQ and Vulture. Prior to joining Vanity Fair, Ryan worked as a television critic at Variety, Huffington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. In addition to criticism, opinion pieces and feature stories about the entertainment industry, she has spent much of the last decade writing in-depth pieces on matters of inclusion, misconduct and abuse in Hollywood – and on efforts to make the industry better on a variety of fronts.

Her first book, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, is a deeper exploration of these issues, and came out amid the Hollywood strikes in June 2023. The New Yorker called it “galvanizing,” it was a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller, and it was an NPR Book of the Year. 

Ryan lives in the Chicago area with her family. More of her work can be found at moryan.com.

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