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Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan
By D R Thorpe. 1983
Great-grandson of a crofter and son-in-law of a Duke, Harold Macmillan (1894-1986) was both complex as a person and influential…
as a politican. Marked by terrible experiences in the trenches in the First World War and by his work as an MP during the Depression, he was a Tory rebel - an outspoken backbencher, opposing the economic policies of the 1930s and the appeasement policies of his own government.Churchill gave him responsibility during the Second World War with executive command as 'Viceroy of the Mediterranean'. After the War, in opposition, Macmillan was one of the principal reformers of the Conservatives, and after 1951, back in government, served in several important posts before becoming Prime Minister after the Suez Crisis.Supermac examines key events including the controversy over the Cossacks repatriation, the Suez Crisis, You've Never Had It So Good, the Winds of Change, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Profumo Scandal. The culmination of thirty-five years of research into this period by one of our most respected historians, this book gives an unforgettable portrait of a turbulent age.Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.Sultan In Arabia: A Private Life
By Christopher Ling. 2004
At a time when the influence of Islam and the Arab world dominate newspaper headlines as a result of bloodshed…
and terrorist threats, it will come as a welcome relief to learn of Sultan Qaboos. The very term 'Sultan' conjures up shades of peacock thrones and riches beyond the dreams of avarice. This incredible scene has almost vanished . . . but not quite.In today's oil-rich Arabia, one Sultan remains. He is one of the world's very last absolute rulers and presides over daily rituals the Ottomans of old Istanbul would recognise immediately. Arabia's sole surviving Sultan is, however, an arch exponent of the very British practice of discretion and reserve, which is far from surprising given that he owes his throne to the machinations of a very British coup. Indeed, so wide ranging is the cloak of Sultan Qaboo's reticence that his country has been described as the world's most secretive state. It would be quite impossible to divorce the man from the land which he has ruled for the past 33 years, so immediate is his authority, so absolute is his exercise of unfettered power. But who exactly is Qaboos bin Said Al Said? What of the journey without maps which led him to be complicit in the betrayal and overthrow of his own father? What role did he personally take in the Dhofar war of the 1970s, when he became the first Arab monarch to defeat the armed exponents of Marx and Lenin? And what of his hitherto secret connections with Margaret Thatcher and the incident that became known as the 'Thatcher necklace affair'?Suburban 100
By Paul Weller. 2007
REVISED, UPDATED AND WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY PAUL ABBOTTThis edition of Suburban 100 includes new lyrics from the critically…
acclaimed albums, 22 Dreams and Wake Up the Nation, which has been nominated for the Mercury Music Award.Paul Weller first burst onto the national music scene with The Jam in 1977 and was quickly marked apart from his contemporaries as a brilliant lyricist. In a writing career that has now spanned three decades, his songs have been acclaimed, imitated and loved by many. Suburban 100 - the first selection of Paul Weller's lyrics - draws on songs written for The Jam, The Style Council and solo releases that, together, tell stories of life and love, rage and romance. The youthful frustrations of small-town life that fuelled Weller's early writing is palpable, as is the angry but poignant response to Thatcher's Britain. His lyrics, rooted in English suburban culture, explore the hopes, dreams and crashing disappointments of ordinary people. They also revel in the mystical beauty of the English country landscape and repeatedly revisit dreamlike childhood summers.For the first time Paul Weller shares his reflections on his lyrics, offering candid insights to his writing process and the inspiration behind some of pop music's best loved songs. Suburban 100 reveals aspects of a famously private man.When Harry Met Pablo: Truman, Picasso, and the Cold War Politics of Modern Art
By Matthew Algeo. 2024
Truman and Picasso were contemporaries and were both shaped by and shapers of the great events of the twentieth century—the…
man who painted Guernica and the man who authorized the use of atomic bombs against civilians. But in most ways, they couldn't have been more different. Picasso was a communist, and probably the only thing Harry Truman hated more than communists was modern art. Picasso was an indifferent father, a womanizer, and a millionaire. Truman was utterly devoted to his family and, despite his fame, far from a rich man. How did they come to be shaking hands in front of Picasso's studio in the south of France? Truman's meeting with Picasso was quietly arranged by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art and an early champion of Picasso. Barr knew that if he could convince these two ideological antipodes, the straight-talking politician from Missouri and the Cubist painter from MÁlaga, to simply shake hands, it would send a powerful message, not just to reactionary Republicans pushing McCarthyism at home, but to the whole world: modern art was not evil. Truman author Matthew Algeo retraced the Trumans' Mediterranean vacation and visited the places they went with Picasso, including Picasso's villa, Picasso's ceramics studio in Vallauris, and ChÂteau Grimaldi, a museum in Antibes.A rigorous history with a heartwarming center, When Harry Met Pablo intertwines the biographies of Truman and Picasso, the history of modern art, and twentieth-century American politics, but at its core it is the touching story of two old men who meet for the first time and realize they have more in common—and are more alike—than they ever imagined.Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music beyond Humanity
By Gavin Steingo. 2024
A surprising study reveals a plethora of attempts to communicate with non-humans in the modern era. In Interspecies…
Communication, music scholar Gavin Steingo examines significant cases of attempted communication beyond the human—cases in which the dualistic relationship of human to non-human is dramatically challenged. From singing whales to Sun Ra to searching for alien life, Steingo charts the many ways we have attempted to think about, and indeed to reach, beings that are very unlike ourselves. Steingo focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, when scientists developed new ways of listening to oceans and cosmic space—two realms previously inaccessible to the senses and to empirical investigation. As quintessential frontiers of the postwar period, the outer space of the cosmos and the inner space of oceans were conceptualized as parallel realities, laid bare by newly technologized “ears.” Deeply engaging, Interspecies Communication explores our attempts to cross the border between the human and non-human, to connect with non-humans in the depths of the oceans, the far reaches of the universe, or right under our own noses.Stronger: Forty Days of Metal and Spirituality
By Brian Welch. 2010
This 40-Day devotional from Brian “Head” Welch, former lead guitarist of Korn and the New York Times bestselling author of…
Save Me From Myself, is an intimate tour through the Bible passages that have meant the most to him on his trying journey from substance abuse to salvation. Save Me From Myself, Welch’s self-effacing story his against addiction and his reawakening to divine love, has made the metal band icon into a hero of Christian rock. Uncompromisingly honest about his demons, and equally fervent about his faith, Head and his impassioned devotional offer a uniquely voiced guiding light perfect for young Christians and rock music fans everywhere.My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future
By Alice Randall. 2024
Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author with a &“lively, engaging, and often wise&” (The New York Times Book Review)…
voice, offers a lyrical, introspective, and unforgettable account of her past and her search for the first family of Black country music.Country music had brought Randall and her activist mother together and even gave Randall a singular distinction in American music history: she is the first Black woman to cowrite a number one country hit, Trisha Yearwood&’s &“XXX&’s and OOO&’s&”. Randall found inspiration and comfort in the sounds and history of the first family of Black country music: DeFord Bailey, Lil Hardin, Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and Herb Jeffries who, together, made up a community of Black Americans rising through hard times to create simple beauty, true joy, and sometimes profound eccentricity. What emerges in My Black Country is a celebration of the most American of music genres and the radical joy in realizing the power of Black influence on American culture. As country music goes through a fresh renaissance today, with a new wave of Black artists enjoying success, My Black Country is the perfect gift for longtime country fans and a vibrant introduction to a new generation of listeners who previously were not invited to give the genre a chance.What the Taliban Told Me
By Ian Fritz. 2023
An &“essential&” (Kevin Maurer, #1 New York Times bestselling author) memoir of a young Air Force linguist coming-of-age in a…
war that is lost.When Ian Fritz joined the Air Force at eighteen, he did so out of necessity. He hadn&’t been accepted into colleges thanks to an indifferent high school career. He&’d too often slept through his classes as he worked long hours at a Chinese restaurant to help pay the bills for his trailer-dwelling family in Lake City, Florida. But the Air Force recognizes his potential and sends him to the elite Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, to learn Dari and Pashto, the main languages of Afghanistan. By 2011, Fritz was an airborne cryptologic linguist and one of only a tiny number of people in the world trained to do this job on low-flying gunships. He monitors communications on the ground and determines in real time which Afghans are Taliban and which are innocent civilians. This eavesdropping is critical to supporting Special Forces units on the ground, but there is no training to counter the emotional complexity that develops as you listen to people&’s most intimate conversations over the course of two tours, Fritz listens to the Taliban for hundreds of hours, all over the country night and day, in moments of peace and in the middle of battle. What he hears teaches him about the people of Afghanistan—Taliban and otherwise—the war, and himself. Fritz&’s fluency is his greatest asset to the military, yet it becomes the greatest liability to his own commitment to the cause. Both proud of his service and in despair that he is instrumental in destroying the voices that he hears, What the Taliban Told Me is a &“fraught, moving&” (Kirkus Reviews) coming-of-age memoir and a reckoning with our twenty years of war in Afghanistan.King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America's Spymaster in Korea
By Blaine Harden. 2017
From the New York Times bestselling author of Escape from Camp 14, the shocking, gripping account of the most powerful…
American spy you’ve never heard of, whose role at the center of the Korean War—which gave rise to the North Korean regime—is essential to understanding the most intractable foreign policy conflict of our time. In 1946, master sergeant Donald Nichols was repairing jeeps on the sleepy island of Guam when he caught the eye of recruiters from the army's Counter Intelligence Corps. After just three months' training, he was sent to Korea, then a backwater beneath the radar of MacArthur's Pacific Command. Though he lacked the pedigree of most U.S. spies—Nichols was a 7th grade dropout—he quickly metamorphosed from army mechanic to black ops phenomenon. He insinuated himself into the affections of America’s chosen puppet in South Korea, President Syngman Rhee, and became a pivotal player in the Korean War, warning months in advance about the North Korean invasion, breaking enemy codes, and identifying most of the targets destroyed by American bombs in North Korea. But Nichols's triumphs had a dark side. Immersed in a world of torture and beheadings, he became a spymaster with his own secret base, his own covert army, and his own rules. He recruited agents from refugee camps and prisons, sending many to their deaths on reckless missions. His closeness to Rhee meant that he witnessed—and did nothing to stop or even report—the slaughter of tens of thousands of South Korean civilians in anticommunist purges. Nichols’s clandestine reign lasted for an astounding eleven years. In this riveting book, Blaine Harden traces Nichols's unlikely rise and tragic ruin, from his birth in an operatically dysfunctional family in New Jersey to his sordid postwar decline, which began when the U.S. military sacked him in Korea, sent him to an air force psych ward in Florida, and subjected him—against his will—to months of electroshock therapy. But King of Spies is not just the story of one American spy: with napalmed villages and severed heads, high-level lies and long-running cover-ups, it reminds us that the darkest sins of the Vietnam War—and many other conflicts that followed—were first committed in Korea.David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor
By Michael Brenson. 2014
“An essential account of America’s greatest sculptor . . . [A] magnum opus.” —Marjorie Perloff, The Times Literary SupplementThe landmark…
biography of the inscrutable and brilliant David Smith, the greatest American sculptor of the twentieth century. David Smith, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, did more than any other sculptor of his era to bring the plastic arts to the forefront of the American scene. Central to his project of reimagining sculptural experience was challenging the stability of any identity or position—Smith sought out the unbounded, unbalanced, and unexpected, creating works of art that seem to undergo radical shifts as the spectator moves from one point of view to another. So groundbreaking and prolific were his contributions to American art that by the time Smith was just forty years old, Clement Greenberg was already calling him “the greatest sculptor this country has produced.” Michael Brenson’s David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor is the first biography of this epochal figure. It follows Smith from his upbringing in the Midwest, to his heady early years in Manhattan, to his decision to establish a permanent studio in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he would create many of his most significant works—among them the Cubis, Tanktotems, and Zigs. It explores his at times tempestuous personal life, marked by marriages, divorces, and fallings-out as well as by deep friendships with fellow artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. His wife Jean Freas described him as “salty and bombastic, jumbo and featherlight, thin-skinned and Mack Truck. And many more things.” This enormous, contradictory vitality was true of his work as well. He was a bricoleur, a master welder, a painter, a photographer, and a writer, and he entranced critics and attracted admirers wherever he showed his work. With this book, Brenson has contextualized Smith for a new generation and confirmed his singular place in the history of American art.Sonic Rebellions: Sound and Social Justice
By Wanda Canton. 2024
Sonic Rebellions combines theory and practice to consider contemporary uses of sound in the context of politics, philosophy, and protest,…
by exploring the relationship between sound and social justice, with particular attention to sonic methodologies not necessarily conceptualised or practiced in traditional understandings of activism.An edited collection written by artists, academics, and activists, many of the authors have multidimensional experiences as practitioners themselves, and readers will benefit from never-before published doctoral and community projects, and innovative, audio-based interpretations of social issues today. Chapters cover the use of soundscapes, rap, theatre, social media, protest, and song, in application to contemporary socio-political issues, such as gentrification, neoliberalism, criminalisation, democracy, and migrant rights. Sonic Rebellions looks to encourage readers to become, or consider how they are, Sonic Rebels themselves, by developing their own practices and reflections in tandem to continue the conversation as to how sound permeates our sociopolitical lives.This is an essential resource for those interested in how sound can change the world, including undergraduates and postgraduates from across the social sciences and humanities, scholars and instructors of sound studies and sound production, as well as activists, artists, and community organisers.Marching with the First Nebraska: A Civil War Diary
By August Scherneckau. 2007
August Scherneckau’s diary is the most important firsthand account of the Civil War by a Nebraska soldier that has yet…
come to light. A German immigrant, Scherneckau served with the First Nebraska Volunteers from 1862 through 1865. Depicting the unit’s service in Missouri, Arkansas, and Nebraska Territory, he offers detail, insight, and literary quality matched by few other accounts of the Civil War in the West. His observations provide new perspective on campaigns, military strategy, leadership, politics, ethnicity, emancipation, and a host of other topics. Scherneckau takes readers on the march as he and his comrades plod through mud and snow during a grueling winter campaign in the Missouri Ozarks. He served as a provost guard in St. Louis, where he helped save a former slave from kidnappers and observed the construction of Union gunboats. He describes the process of transforming a regiment from infantry to cavalry, and his account of First Nebraska’s pursuit of Freeman’s Partisans in Arkansas is an exciting portrayal of mountain fighting. An annotated edition that brings to bear the editors’ and translator’s respective expertise in both the Civil War and the German language, Scherneckau’s account is an important addition to primary material on the war’s forgotten theater. It will be a valued resource for historian and Civil War enthusiast alike.Reckless Daughter: A Joni Mitchell Anthology
By Barney Hoskyns. 2016
Joni Mitchell has only visited the U.S. Top 40 singles chart four times in her long recording career - and…
the Top 20 just once. So much for 'stoking the starmaker machinery behind the popular song', as she sang in her 1974 song 'Free Man in Paris'.What Joni has done, on the other hand, is record a handful of masterful albums - Blue, Court And Spark, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns for starters - that prove she is right up there with the big boys: with Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson and Stevie Wonder. Few women can hold a candle to her oeuvre: maybe Aretha Franklin, maybe Kate Bush, Bjork, Joanna Newsom. Airs and graces she may have, but airs and graces backed up by 'Woodstock', 'The Arrangement', 'A Case Of You', 'Help Me', 'Dog Eat Dog' and 'The Magdalene Laundries' are forgivable. Some of Mitchell's songs are great art. Almost all are emotionally complex and musically gripping.Reckless Daughter collects some of the most incisive commentary on Joni's music - and some of the most candid conversations she has had with journalists during her long career. From a review of her first performance at L.A.'s legendary Troubadour in 1968 to a career-sweeping 1998 interview by MOJO's Dave DiMartino, this anthology of almost 60 articles charts every stage of Joni's extraordinary journey as a singer, songwriter and artist.Reckless Daughter: A Joni Mitchell Anthology
By Barney Hoskyns. 2016
Joni Mitchell has only visited the U.S. Top 40 singles chart four times in her long recording career - and…
the Top 20 just once. So much for 'stoking the starmaker machinery behind the popular song', as she sang in her 1974 song 'Free Man in Paris'. What Joni has done, on the other hand, is record a handful of masterful albums - Blue, Court And Spark, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns for starters - that prove she is right up there with the big boys: with Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson and Stevie Wonder. Few women can hold a candle to her oeuvre: maybe Aretha Franklin, maybe Kate Bush, Bjork, Joanna Newsom. Airs and graces she may have, but airs and graces backed up by 'Woodstock', 'The Arrangement', 'A Case Of You', 'Help Me', 'Dog Eat Dog' and 'The Magdalene Laundries' are forgivable. Some of Mitchell's songs are great art. Almost all are emotionally complex and musically gripping. Reckless Daughter collects some of the most incisive commentary on Joni's music - and some of the most candid conversations she has had with journalists during her long career. From a review of her first performance at L.A.'s legendary Troubadour in 1968 to a career-sweeping 1998 interview by MOJO's Dave DiMartino, this anthology of almost 60 articles charts every stage of Joni's extraordinary journey as a singer, songwriter and artist.Cinderella: The Love of a Daddy and His Princess
By Steven Curtis Chapman. 2008
As the clock strikes midnight, remember . . . Each moment we have to spend with our children is a…
blessing from above. But as we cherish this chapter of life, we realize the pages of time will keep turning. Alternating between the voices of a father and his daughter, Cinderella celebrates the blessings of childhood, family, love and life. You will be enchanted by this modern fairytale that teaches us how to hand our own Cinderella her glass slippers and let her go.The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent
By Kazuo Ishiguro. 2024
From the Nobel Prize–winning author of Klara and the Sun and Never Let Me Go comes a gorgeously illustrated volume…
of lyrics written for the platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated jazz singer Stacey Kent.Memorably introduced by Ishiguro himself, The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain collects the lyrics of sixteen songs he wrote for world-renowned American singer Stacey Kent, which were set to music by her partner, Jim Tomlinson. An exquisite coming together of the literary and musical worlds, the lyrics are infused with a sense of yearning, melancholy, love, and the romance of travel and liminal spaces.Further exploring the notion of collaboration and interpretation, the collection is illustrated by the acclaimed Italian artist Bianca Bagnarelli, whose work perfectly captures the atmosphere and sensibility of the songs.At a time of transformation in the music history classroom and amid increasing calls to teach a global music history,…
Navigating Stylistic Boundaries in the Music History Classroom adds nuance to the teaching of varied musical traditions by examining the places where they intersect and the issues of musical exchange and appropriation that these intersections raise. Troubling traditional boundaries of genre and style, this collection of essays helps instructors to denaturalize the framework of Western art music and invite students to engage with other traditions—vernacular, popular, and non-Western—on their own terms.The book draws together contributions by a wide range of active scholars and educators to investigate the teaching of music history around cases of stylistic borders, exploring the places where different practices of music and values intersect. Each chapter in this collection considers a specific case in which an artist or community engages in what might be termed musical crossover, exchange, or appropriation and delves deeper into these concepts to explore questions of how musical meaning changes in moving across worlds of practice. Addressing works that are already widely taught but presenting new ways to understand and interpret them, this volume enables instructors to enrich the perspectives on music history that they present and to take on the challenge of teaching a more global music history without flattening the differences between traditions.Cultures of Work, the Neoliberal Environment and Music in Higher Education (Palgrave Critical University Studies)
By Sally Macarthur, Julja Szuster, Paul Watt. 2024
This edited book considers the impact of neoliberalism on music teaching, research and scholarship in a higher education context. As…
a subject that bears little resemblance to other university practical disciplines, and fares poorly in a model driven by economics, the book considers whether musicology is a ‘public good’ or a threatened species. It contemplates what musicology can usefully contribute to a paradigm driven by economics, and questions whether it is ever possible to recover an ideal civil subject in neoliberal music academia. Contributions investigate what it means to build music research capacity in innovative ways, such as forging cross-cultural relationships, subverting conventional notions of quality and value, replacing them with knowledges and values that guide Indigenous intellectual traditions, and whether interventions into the legacy of colonialism are truly ever possible in neoliberal higher education institutions that celebrate difference and diversitywhile reinforcing social inequities. The book also explores the relationships between gender and music, music research training and scholarship, and whether the interdisciplinarity championed by the university is ever workable. Finally, it undertakes a cross-disciplinary, new materialist reading of a canonical musical work, offering a radically new perspective. The book will appeal to students and scholars of music education, musicology, higher education studies and the creative arts more broadly.Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words
By Boel Westin. 2024
An in-depth, perceptive account of the unconventional life of the Moomins&’ beloved creator, now available in the United States Tove…
Jansson achieved fame as the creator of the Moomins, beloved by generations of readers around the world. Remarkably, the Moomins were only part of the prodigious creative output of this Finnish-Swedish writer and artist. Jansson&’s work also includes short stories and five novels for adults, as well as paintings, murals, and book illustrations. In this acclaimed biography, Boel Westin relies on numerous conversations with Jansson and unprecedented access to her journals, letters, and personal archives to present an engrossing and comprehensive review of the life and world of Scandinavia&’s best-loved author. As Westin&’s meticulous research makes clear, Jansson&’s artistic and literary works reflected what was most important to her: the love of family and nature and the desire to pursue her art. Guided by her personal motto, &“Love and work,&” Jansson seized both with uncompromising joy. And while her romantic relationships with men proved unfulfilling, she found those with women—especially with her longtime partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä—both grounding and inspiring. Westin weaves together the many threads of Jansson&’s rich, complex life: an education interrupted to help her family; the bleak war years and her emergence as a painter; the decades of Moominmania across books, newspaper comic strips, merchandise, and adaptations; her later fictions, including her popular The Summer Book; and her time with Pietilä on the solitary island of Klovharu. Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words offers fans and admirers around the world the most complete portrait of the writer Philip Pullman described as &“a genius, a woman of profound wisdom and great artistry.&”Let Me Take You Down: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever
By Jonathan Cott. 2024
The conception, creation, recording, and significance of the Beatles&’ &“Penny Lane&” and &“Strawberry Fields Forever&” John Lennon wrote &“Strawberry Fields…
Forever&” in Almería, Spain, in fall 1966, and in November, in response to that song, Paul McCartney wrote &“Penny Lane&” at his home in London. A culmination of what was one of the most life-altering and chaotic years in the Beatles&’ career, these two songs composed the 1967 double A-side 45 rpm record that has often been called the greatest single in the history of popular music and was, according to Beatles producer George Martin, &“the best record we ever made.&” In Let Me Take You Down: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, Jonathan Cott recounts the conception and creation of these songs; describes the tumultuous events and experiences that led the Beatles to call it quits as a touring band and redefine themselves solely as recording artists; and details the complex, seventy-hour recording process that produced seven minutes of indelible music. In writing about these songs, he also focuses on them as inspired artistic expressions of two unique ways of experiencing and being in the world, as Lennon takes us down to Strawberry Fields and McCartney takes us back to Penny Lane. In order to gain new vistas and multiple perspectives on these multifaceted songs, Cott also engages in conversation with five remarkable people: media artist Laurie Anderson; guitarist Bill Frisell; actor Richard Gere; Jungian analyst Margaret Klenck; and urban planner, writer, and musician Jonathan F. P. Rose. The result is a wide-ranging, illuminating exploration of the musical, literary, psychological, cultural, and spiritual aspects of two of the most acclaimed songs in rock and roll history.