BOOK DATA Nora Stone, How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960–2022. New York: Oxford University Press. 2023. $125.00 cloth; $34.95 paper. 234/240 pages.

Documentary comes into the world torn between its virtue as a public service and its value as commodity. This tension is central to Nora Stone’s meticulously researched book How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960–2022, which charts documentary’s progression from Hollywood’s margins to the bread and butter of online streaming platforms. In this refreshing addition to the history of nonfiction film, Stone foregrounds distribution and circulation as the locus of documentary’s influence, tracing evolutions in infrastructure, film culture, and market machinations to explain the genre’s commercial transformation.

The book progresses chronologically, with each chapter focusing on a different era in the development and proliferation of documentary film and its distribution networks. Stone draws on a wealth of sources such as archival documents, trade journals, popular...

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