Longtime Pacific Palisades resident Robert A. Rosenstone will speak about his latest book, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian: Living and Writing the Past, at an upcoming event in Pacific Palisades.
Rosenstone will speak in the Palisades Library community room at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 3. The public is invited.
Adventures of a Postmodern Historian (published by Bloomsbury) is a mixed-genre memoir that charts Rosenstone’s adventures as he undertook research over 50 years in some extremely different locations and milieus: Spain during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era, Japan in the 1980s, and Hollywood in the last quarter of the century.
He has lectured at more than 50 universities on six continents, and has published 15 books in a variety of genres—history, biography, fiction, criticism, and poetry.
The cast of characters with whom Ros- enstone has interacted is diverse, including both Communists and Anarchists; members of the Lincoln Battalion who fought in the Spanish Civil War; diplomats and bureaucrats of both the American and Russian governments; Japanese customs officers and stubborn university officials, Zen masters and Shinto priests; Hollywood stars such as Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton; and Academy award-winners like Oliver Stone, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, and novelist Jerzy Kosinski.
Rosenstone is the leading international scholar in the fast-growing field devoted to studying the relationship between history and the visual media, a field he helped to pioneer after spending seven years as historical consultant on Warren Beatty’s Oscar-winning film, Reds.
Beatty used Rosenstone’s Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (Knopf, 1975), as the basis of his movie.
Rosenstone has worked as consultant and writer on half a dozen other films, both dramatic features and documentaries, and has written two books on the topic of film as history: Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Harvard, 1995), and History on Film/Film on History (Pearson, 2006).
His works of fiction include a book of stories, The Man Who Swam into History: The (Mostly) True Story of my Jewish Family (Texas, 2002), a historical novel based on the life of Russian writer Isaac Babel, King of Odessa (Northwestern, 2003), and a novel set in contemporary Spain, Red Star, Cres- cent Moon: A Muslim—Jewish Love Story (Scarith Press, 2008).
Rosenstone has long been married to Nahid Massoud, a retired UCLA nurse, who is active in both the Palisades Garden Club and the Malibu Orchid Society. Her local art gallery, Sharq, has been exhibiting works of bicultural American artists and hosting author readings and musical events for 12 years.
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