Billy Wilder on Assignment

edited by Noah Isenberg (Princeton, $25)

“Billy Wilder sweet-talked his way into his singular life,” said Marc Weingarten in The Washington Post. The future Hollywood director spent his 20s as a charismatic but cutting newspaper writer in Vienna and Berlin, and the profiles, reviews, and other stories collected here “read like precursors to the New Journalism–era reportage of Tom Wolfe.” In one piece, he’s working as a taxi dancer. In another, he mocks a mogul’s teeth. On political topics, he was “a Weimar version of H.L. Mencken.”