ALBION, Mich. — The Wolf At The Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, & the Holocaust, written by Albion College professor of history Geoffrey Cocks, was recently cited as an “International Book of the Year” for 2004 in the London Times Literary Supplement (TLS).

Novelist and screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who co-authored the screenplay for Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut, was among the writers solicited by the TLS for their choices of the year’s outstanding books.  Raphael notes that he initially found Cocks’s thesis—that Kubrick filled his films, and in particular The Shining, with veiled Holocaust references—to be “far-fetched, if not addled.”  But he concludes that Cocks’s “meticulous mastery of Kubrick’s work and of the relevant literature sheds improbably illuminating light on an elusive, allusive genius.” 

Cocks notes that the TLS citation puts his book in a rare category, as the publication noted fewer than 100 books in its “Books of the Year” edition. Further, he says, “I am quite pleased that Fred Raphael has been won over to my thesis.”

Raphael is also a contributor to a volume of essays on Kubrick, Depth of Field:  Stanley Kubrick, Film, and the Uses of History, edited by Cocks, Albion College political science professor Glenn Perusek, and Agnes Scott College dean James Diedrick, to be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2006.

The Wolf at the Door:  Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust was published by Peter Lang in 2004.  Cocks, currently the Julian S. Rammelkamp Professor of History at Albion College, has a long scholarly and personal interest in the work of the widely acclaimed Kubrick.  Cocks organized a successful national symposium dedicated to Kubrick and his films at Albion College in the spring of 2000 and he is presently teaching an Honors Program Fine Arts Seminar on Kubrick.

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