Summary: New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot uses the life and career of her father, Lyle Talbot, an early Hollywood star, to tell the story of the rise of popular culture. The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century is a combination of Hollywood history, social history, and family memoir, conjures nostalgia for those earlier eras of 1910s and 1920s small-town America, and the 1930s and 1940s in Hollywood.
