“A fascinating life story told with verve and authority.” - Toronto Star

“Hopefully it achieves wide readership simply because Jewison’s story rates big-time treatment. Indeed, to read Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life, is to wonder why this most consequential of directors wasn’t better known. A big thanks to Ira Wells for giving biography treatment to a major Hollywood creator who strangely never became a legend.” - Forbes

“Ira Wells makes the persuasive case that Jewison deserves more fame than he has received, and along the way delivers a rollicking tale of Hollywood during Jewison’s most active years and plenty of backstage trivia.” - Air Mail

“[A]n exhaustively researched look at the career of the country's most prolific, but least understood, filmmaker. The book is an ambitious, and frequently essential, endeavour.” - Globe and Mail

“A thoroughly enjoyable and detailed look at a memorable life in film.” - Library Journal

“Prismatic… Wells’s biography also doubles as a historical tour of show business in the second half of the 20th century.” - Zoomer

“Wells gives this fine filmmaker his due. It’s the kind of book that’s going to inspire anyone reading it to go back and watch one, two, or 10 of the movies.” - Broad Street Review (Philadelphia)

“[Giving] the reader a vast sense of Jewison’s decades-spanning career… In Wells’s hands, Jewison’s body of work becomes a series of case studies revealing an ever-changing America.” - Quill and Quire

Countering the standard narrative of literary naturalism's much-touted concern with environmental and philosophical determinism, Fighting Words draws attention to the polemical essence of the genre and demonstrates how literary naturalists engaged instead with explosive political and cultural issues that remain fervently debated today. Naturalist writers, Wells argues in Fighting Words, are united less by a coherent philosophy than by an attitude, a posture of aggressive controversy, which happens to cluster loosely around particular social issues. While many of their arguments were irascible, attention-seeking, and self-consciously inflammatory, the combative spirit that fueled these outbursts remains central to the canonical texts of the movement. Wells considers Frank Norris's The Octopus in light of the emerging discourses of environmentalism and ecological despoliation, and examines the issue of abortion in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. A chapter on Richard Wright's Native Son takes issue with traditional humanistic readings of its protagonist by analyzing the disturbing relationship between terrorism and lynching as a crime and punishment that resists formal incorporation into the law. By highlighting the contentious rhetoric that infuses the canonical texts of literary naturalism, Fighting Words opens up a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary interrogation of racial, sexual, and environmental polemics in American culture.

“Fighting Words is written in graceful prose and is an outstanding addition to the press’s Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism series." - Gary Scharnhorst, author of Sinclair Lewis Remembered

 “Fighting Words elegantly argues the significance of polemics in three naturalist authors—Norris, Dreiser, and Wright—who were strongly influenced by H. L. Mencken's notion of using words to ‘fight.’ It is impressive." - Jeanne Campbell Reesman, author of Jack London's Racial Lives: A Critical Biography and Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers