The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Vol 3
The Poetry of Robert Frost

Cesar Romero: The Joker is Wild

Dynamic and debonair, Cesar Romero was best known for creating the role of the Joker in the 1960s Batman television series. As the first actor to play Batman and Robin’s villainous nemesis, Romero established the character’s giddy, manic tone and the distinctive laugh that subsequent actors like Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, and Joaquin Phoenix would use as the starting points in their own Oscar-nominated (Nicholson) and Oscar-winning (Ledger and Phoenix) performances. As a closeted gay man of Latin American descent, Romero gracefully faced many personal challenges while maintaining his suave public image and starring opposite legends ranging from Shirley Temple to Marlene Dietrich, Carmen Miranda to Frank Sinatra, and Kurt Russell to Jane Wyman.

The first biography of the consummate entertainer, Cesar Romero: The Joker Is Wild, captures the critical moments of Romero’s childhood, adolescence, and accomplishments in Hollywood. Author Samuel Garza Bernstein shares anecdotes regarding Romero’s public and personal life, as well as Romero’s private disdain for his reputation as the “Latin lover,” a discriminatory stereotype he found constrictive both in terms of his range as an actor and as a man who kept his sexuality private.

Cesar Romero is an in-depth study of a significant Hollywood star and his impact on the entertainment industry. Batman made him immortal, but with more than four hundred film and television credits, his six-decade career as an actor, dancer, and singer made him a true Hollywood icon.

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • Discover this transcendent middle grade masterpiece about a young black boy whose quiet rural live in the Appalachian Mountains begins to change—winner of the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. Mayo Cornelius Higgins sits on his gleaming, forty-foot steel pole, towering over his home on Sarah’s Mountain. Stretched before him are rolling hills and shady valleys. But behind him lie the wounds of strip mining, including a mountain of rubble that may one day fall and bury his home. M.C. dreams of escape for himself and his family. And, one day, atop his pole, he [...]

  • Masterful, clever, and relentlessly suspenseful, Magpie Murders is a deviously dark take on vintage English crime fiction in which the reader becomes the detective.

  • Once again, the real and the fictional worlds have become dangerously entangled. And if Susan doesn't solve the mystery of Pünd’s Last Case, she could well be its next victim.

  • Congressman John Lewis (GA-5) is an American icon and key figure of the civil rights movement. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper’s farm to the halls of Congress, from a segregated schoolroom to the 1963 March on Washington, and from receiving beatings from state troopers to receiving the Medal of Freedom from the first African-American president. Now, to share his remarkable story with new generations, Lewis presents March, a graphic novel trilogy, in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and New York Times best-selling artist Nate Powell (winner of the Eisner Award and LA Times [...]