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By Brian Christopher Thompson. 2015
Calixa Lavallée, the composer of "O Canada," was the first Canadian-born musician to achieve an international reputation. While primarily remembered…
for the national anthem, Lavallée and his work extended well beyond Canada, and he played a multitude of roles in North American music as a composer, conductor, administrator, instrumentalist, educator, and critic. In Anthems and Minstrel Shows, Brian Thompson analyzes Lavallée's music, letters, and published writings, as well as newspapers and music magazines of the time, to provide a detailed account of musical life in nineteenth-century North America and the relationship between music and nation. Leaving Quebec at age sixteen, Lavallée travelled widely for a decade as musical director of a minstrel troupe, and spent a year as a bandsman in the Union Army. Later, as a performer and conductor, he built a repertoire that prepared audiences for the intellectually challenging music of European composers and new music by his US contemporaries. His own music extended from national songs to comic operas, and instrumental music, as he shifted between the worlds of classical and popular music. Previously portrayed as a humble French Canadian forced into exile by ignorance and injustice, Lavallée emerges here as ambitious, radical, bohemian, and fully engaged with the musical, social, and political currents of his time. While nationalism and nation-building are central to this story, Anthems and Minstrel Shows asks to which nation - or nations - Lavallée and "O Canada" really belong.By Mutlu Konuk Blasing. 2013
An authoritative biography of Turkey's most important and most popular poet. Nâzim Hikmet (1902-1963), Turkey's best-loved poet and a commanding…
presence in its public life, lived through a turbulent era--the end of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Communist Russia, and the birth of the Turkish Republic. Born into the Ottoman elite, Hikmet embraced Communist ideals and joined the revolutionary ranks at nineteen. Of passionate temperament, he lived his life full-tilt, deeply romantic in his loves and uncompromising in his politics--for which he spent more than a third of his life in prisons or in exile. His stirring free verse in simple words, praising his country, his women, and the common man, was considered "subversive" and banned for decades. Today it is available in more than fifty languages, and Hikmet is recognized worldwide as a major twentieth-century poet.By Joan Dye Gussow. 2010
Michael Pollan calls her one of his food heroes. Barbara Kingsolver credits her with shaping the history and politics of…
food in the United States. And countless others who have vied for a food revolution, pushed organics, and reawakened Americans to growing their own food and eating locally consider her both teacher and muse. Joan Gussow has influenced thousands through her books, This Organic Life and The Feeding Web, her lectures, and the simple fact that she lives what she preaches. Now in her eighties, she stops once more to pass along some wisdom-surprising, inspiring, and controversial-via the pen. Gussow's memoir Growing, Older begins when she loses her husband of 40 years to cancer and, two weeks later, finds herself skipping down the street-much to her alarm. Why wasn't she grieving in all the normal ways? With humor and wit, she explains how she stopped worrying about why she was smiling and went on worrying, instead, and as she always has, about the possibility that the world around her was headed off a cliff. But hers is not a tale, or message, of gloom. Rather it is an affirmation of a life's work-and work in general. Lacking a partner's assistance, Gussow continued the hard labor of growing her own year-round diet. She dealt single-handedly with a rising tidal river that regularly drowned her garden, with muskrat interlopers, broken appliances, bodily decay, and river trash-all the while bucking popular notions of how "an elderly widowed woman" ought to behave. Scattered throughout are urgent suggestions about what growing older on a changing planet will call on all of us to do: learn self-reliance and self-restraint, yield graciously if not always happily to necessity, and-since there is no other choice-come to terms with the insistence of the natural world. Gussow delivers another literary gem-one that women curious about aging, gardeners curious about contending with increasingly intense weather, and environmentalists curious about the future will embrace.By Merrily Weisbord. 2010
Kamala Das (1934-2009) is one of India's most beloved and controversial literary figures. She was hailed and reviled as the…
first Indian woman to write an autobiographical cult classic about love and desire. Admirers dubbed her, "The First Feminist Emotional Revolutionary of Our Time." The tabloid press called her "The Love Queen of Malabar."By Jack Douglas, Jack Paar. 2015
"My Brother Was an Only Child" was Jack Douglas' very first humour book, having written for famous radio and television…
celebrities such as Jack Paar, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Jimmy Durante, as well as TV shows such as "Adventures of Harriet and Ozzie", "The George Gobel Show", and "Laugh-In". It perfectly captures the sense of humour prevalent in this era and is as refreshing and side-splittingly funny now as it was then.By Lily Isaacs. 2014
A powerful, unforgettable account of Christ's grace, mercy, and His work in their lives! A talented daughter of Holocaust survivors,…
Lily Isaacs is a woman who has felt pain and loss, and found the incomparable joy of a life with Jesus Christ. As a new Christian believer, she became estranged from her Jewish parents because of her faith, yet she never walked alone, always clinging to the hope she found in Christ. Throughout her music and that of her children, who together form the beloved and multi-award winning group The Isaacs, you hear the resonating inspirational legacy of this family's faith journey. An autobiographical look at Lily's life, from being a Jewish folk singer to serving as vocalist and matriarch of The Isaacs The powerful account of her struggle with a once unknown faith and how she finally "cried her way to God from the church's back pew" The incredible insights behind heartbreaking moments which were her greatest opportunities of faith. Whether surviving breast cancer or a challenging career, Lily's steady refrain has been one of God's constant love, comfort, and strength. With a remarkable and unforgettable mix of acoustic, gospel, and country music, she and The Isaacs continue to inspire and entertain audiences in churches and on stage around the world!By Calvin C. Rydbom. 2018
Music made in Akron symbolized an attitude more so than a singular sound. Crafted by kids hell-bent on not following…
their parents into the rubber plants, the music was an intentional antithesis of Top 40 radio. Call it punk or call it new wave, but in a short few years, major labels signed Chrissie Hynde, Devo, the Waitresses, Tin Huey, the Bizarros, the Rubber City Rebels and Rachel Sweet. They had their own bars, the Crypt and the Bank. They had their own label, Clone Records. They even had their own recording space, Bushflow Studios. London's Stiff Records released an Akron compilation album, and suddenly there were "Akron Nights" in London clubs and CBGB was waiving covers for people with Akron IDs. Author Calvin Rydbom of the "Akron Sound" Museum remembers that short time when the Rubber City was the place.By Thomas Vinciguerra. 1967
The professional and personal lives of the pioneers of an enduring magazine. From its birth in 1925 to the early…
days of the Cold War, The New Yorker slowly but surely took hold as the country's most prestigious, entertaining, and informative general-interest periodical. In Cast of Characters, Thomas Vinciguerra paints a portrait of the magazine's cadre of charming, wisecracking, driven, troubled, brilliant writers and editors. He introduces us to Wolcott Gibbs, theater critic, all-around wit, and author of an infamous 1936 parody of Time magazine. We meet the demanding and eccentric founding editor Harold Ross, who would routinely tell his underlings, "I'm firing you because you are not a genius," and who once mailed a pair of his underwear to Walter Winchell, who had accused him of preferring to go bare-bottomed under his slacks. Joining the cast are the mercurial, blind James Thurber, a brilliant cartoonist and wildly inventive fabulist, and the enigmatic E. B. White--an incomparable prose stylist and Ross's favorite son--who married The New Yorker's formidable fiction editor, Katharine Angell. Then there is the dashing St. Clair McKelway, who was married five times and claimed to have no fewer than twelve personalities, but was nonetheless a superb reporter and managing editor alike. Many of these characters became legends in their own right, but Vinciguerra also shows how, as a group, The New Yorker's inner circle brought forth a profound transformation in how life was perceived, interpreted, written about, and published in America. Cast of Characters may be the most revealing--and entertaining--book yet about the unique personalities who built what Ross called not a magazine but a "movement."By Wally Cox. 2015
This heartwarmingly funny book provides an idealized depiction of American comedian and actor Wally Cox's childhood. In the author's own…
words, "Nothing has been left to the imagination. The raw truth about such things as catching colds, geography class, and box tops is laid out in embarrassing detail.""As in the best of books, you are torn between tears and laughter in many places in this gently-written but nevertheless powerful book."--Worcester TelegramBy Robert Spaethling. 2000
"A wonderful collection that gives Mozart a voice as a son, husband, brother and friend." --New York Times Book Review…
"Mozart's honesty, his awareness of his own genius and his contempt for authority all shine out from these letters."--Sunday Times (London). " In Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life, Robert Spaethling presents "Mozart in all the rawness of his driving energies" (Spectator), preserved in the "zany, often angry effervescence" of his writing (Observer). Where other translators have ignored Mozart's atrocious spelling and tempered his foul language, "Robert Spaethling's new translations are lively and racy, and do justice to Mozart's restlessly inventive mind" (Daily Mail). Carefully selected and meticulously annotated, this collection of letters "should be on the shelves of every music lover" (BBC Music Magazine).By William Mckeen. 2008
"Gets it all in: the boozing and drugging . . . but also the intelligence, the loyalty, the inherent decency."…
--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Hunter S. Thompson detonated a two-ton bomb under the staid field of journalism with his magazine pieces and revelatory Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In Outlaw Journalist, the famous inventor of Gonzo journalism is portrayed as never before. Through in-depth interviews with Thompson's associates, William McKeen gets behind the drinking and the drugs to show the man and the writer--one who was happy to be considered an outlaw and for whom the calling of journalism was life.By Jill Lepore. 2016
From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the…
long-lost, longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called "The Oral History of Our Time." Joe Gould, a madman, believed he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gould began his life's work before the First World War, announcing that he intended to write down nearly everything anyone ever said to him. "I am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of every day people," he explained, because "as a rule, history does not deal with such small fry." By 1942, when The New Yorker published a profile of Gould written by the reporter Joseph Mitchell, Gould's manuscript had grown to more than nine million words. But when Gould died in 1957, in a mental hospital, the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Then, in 1964, in "Joe Gould's Secret," a second profile, Mitchell claimed that "The Oral History of Our Time" had been, all along, merely a figment of Gould's imagination. Lepore, unpersuaded, decided to find out. Joe Gould's Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that "The Oral History of Our Time" did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould's own diaries and notebooks--including volumes of his lost manuscript--Lepore argues that Joe Gould's real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernists' relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gould's terrifying obsession with the African American sculptor Augusta Savage. In ways that even Gould himself could not have imagined, what Gould wrote down really is a history of our time: unsettling and ferocious.From the Hardcover edition.By Victor Brombert. 2002
"A beautifully cadenced work of art--it will remind some readers of Nabokov's classic Speak, Memory."--Joyce Carol Oates Paris in the…
1930s--melancholy, erotic, intensely politicized--provides the poetic beginning for this remarkable autobiography by one of America's most renowned literary scholars. In Trains of Thought Victor Brombert recaptures the story of his youth in a Proustian reverie, recalling, with a rare combination of humor and tenderness, his childhood in France, his family's escape to America during the Vichy regime, his experiences in the U.S. Army from the invasion of Normandy to the occupation of Berlin, and his discovery of his scholarly vocation. In shimmering prose, Brombert evokes his upbringing in Paris's upper-middle-class 16th arrondissement, a world where "the sweetness of things" masked the class tensions and political troubles that threatened the stability of the French democracy. Using the train as a metaphor to describe his personal journey, Brombert recalls his boyhood enchantment with railway travel--even imagining that he had been conceived on a sleeper. But the young Brombert sensed that "the poetry of the railroad also had its darker side, for there was the turmoil of departures, the terror . . . of being pursued by a gigantic locomotive, the nightmare of derailments, or of being trapped in a tunnel." With time, Brombert became acutely aware of the grimmer aspects of life around him--the death of his sister, Nora, on an operating table, the tragic disappearance of his boyhood love, Dany, with her infant child, and the mounting cries of "Sale Juif," or "dirty Jew," that grew from a whisper into a thundering din as the decade drew to a close. The invasion of May 1940 dispelled the optimistic belief, shared by most of the French nation, that the horrors that had descended on Germany could never happen to them. The family was forced to flee from Paris, first to Nice, then to Spain, and finally across the Atlantic on a banana freighter to America. Discovering the excitement of New York, Brombert nonetheless hoped to return to France in an American uniform once the United States entered the war. He joined the U.S. Army in 1943, and soon found himself with General Patton's old "Hell-on-Wheels" division at Omaha Beach, then in Paris at the time of its liberation, and later at the Battle of the Bulge. The final chapter concludes with Brombert's return to America, his enrollment at Yale University, and the beginning of a literary voyage whose origins are poignantly captured in this coming-of-age story. Trains of Thought is a virtuosic accomplishment, and a memoir that is likely to become a classic account of both memory and experience.By Christoph Wolff. 2012
ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award winner A fresh look at the life of Mozart during his imperial years by one of the…
world's leading Mozart scholars. "I now stand at the gateway to my fortune," Mozart wrote in a letter of 1790. He had entered into the service of Emperor Joseph II of Austria two years earlier as Imperial-Royal Chamber Composer--a salaried appointment with a distinguished title and few obligations. His extraordinary subsequent output, beginning with the three final great symphonies from the summer of 1788, invites a reassessment of this entire period of his life. Readers will gain a new appreciation and understanding of the composer's works from that time without the usual emphasis on his imminent death. The author discusses the major biographical and musical implications of the royal appointment and explores Mozart's "imperial style" on the basis of his major compositions--keyboard,chamber, orchestral, operatic, and sacred--and focuses on the large, unfamiliar works he left incomplete. This new perspective points to an energetic, fresh beginning for the composer and a promising creative and financial future.By Tom Nolan. 2010
"The two sides of Shaw . . . are at the center of . . . [this] compulsively readable biography."--Daniel…
Akst, Wall Street Journal During America's Swing Era, no musician was more successful or controversial than Artie Shaw: the charismatic and opinionated clarinetist-bandleader whose dozens of hits became anthems for "the greatest generation." But some of his most beautiful recordings were not issued until decades after he'd left the scene. He broke racial barriers by hiring African American musicians. His frequent "retirements" earned him a reputation as the Hamlet of jazz. And he quit playing for good at the height of his powers. The handsome Shaw had seven wives (including Lana Turner and Ava Gardner). Inveterate reader and author of three books, he befriended the best-known writers of his time. Tom Nolan, who interviewed Shaw between 1990 and his death in 2004 and spoke with one hundred of his colleagues and contemporaries, captures Shaw and his era with candor and sympathy, bringing the master to vivid life and restoring him to his rightful place in jazz history. Originally published in hardcover under the title Three Chords for Beauty's Sake.By Edna O'Brien. 2009
"How long it's taken for these two mad, bad and dangerous writers to get together!"--Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle Acclaimed…
biographer of James Joyce, Edna O'Brien has written a "jaunty" (The New Yorker) biography that suits her fiery and charismatic subject. She follows Byron from the dissipations of Regency London to the wilds of Albania and the Socratic pleasures of Greece and Turkey, culminating in his meteoric rise to fame at the age of twenty-four. With "a novelist's understanding of tempo and characterization" (Miami Herald), O'Brien captures the spirit of the man and creates an indelible portrait that explodes the Romantic myth. Byron, as brilliantly rendered by O'Brien, is the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, and defiantly immortal.By Hunter S. Thompson. 1979
Originally published in 1979, the first volume of the bestselling "Gonzo Papers" is now back in print. The Great Shark…
Hunt is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's largest and, arguably, most important work, covering Nixon to napalm, Las Vegas to Watergate, Carter to cocaine. These essays offer brilliant commentary and outrageous humor, in signature Thompson style. Ranging in date from the National Observer days to the era of Rolling Stone, The Great Shark Hunt offers myriad, highly charged entries, including the first Hunter S. Thompson piece to be dubbed "gonzo" -- "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," which appeared in Scanlan's Monthly in 1970. From this essay a new journalistic movement sprang which would change the shape of American letters. Thompson's razor-sharp insight and crystal clarity capture the crazy, hypocritical, degenerate, and redeeming aspects of the explosive and colorful '60s and '70s.By Duff Mckagan. 2011
In his New York Times bestseller, Duff McKagan, founding member of Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver, shares the story…
of his rise to fame and fortune, his struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction, his personal crash and burn, and his life-saving transformation via a unique path to sobriety.In 1984, at the age of twenty, Duff McKagan left his native Seattle--partly to pursue music but mainly to get away from a host of heroin overdoses then decimating his closest group of friends in the local punk scene. In LA only a few weeks and still living in his car, he answered a want ad for a bass player placed by someone who identified himself only as "Slash." Soon after, the most dangerous band in the world was born. Guns N' Roses went on to sell more than 100 million albums worldwide. In It's So Easy, Duff recounts Guns' unlikely trajectory to a string of multiplatinum albums, sold-out stadium concerts, and global acclaim. But that kind of glory can take its toll, and it did--ultimately--on Duff, as well as on the band itself. As Guns began to splinter, Duff felt that he himself was done, too. But his near death as a direct result of alcoholism proved to be his watershed, the turning point that sent him on a unique path to sobriety and the unexpected choices he has made for himself since. In a voice that is as honest as it is indelibly his own, Duff--one of rock's smartest and most articulate personalities--takes readers on a harrowing journey through the dark heart of one of the most notorious bands in rock-and-roll history and out the other side.By Dionne Warwick, David F Wooley. 2010
Dionne Warwick made her singing debut in church at the request of her grandfather, the Reverend Elzae Warrick, when she…
was six years old. No one knew then that she would become an international music legend, but what she knew--as words of wisdom passed down from her grandfather--was that "if you can think it, you can do it." And she did it. Dionne released the first of more than fifty-six charted hits in 1962 with "Don't Make Me Over," followed by "Anyone Who Had a Heart," "Walk On By," "I Say a Little Prayer," "Alfie," and "A House Is Not a Home," to name a few. She received her first Grammy in 1968 for "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" and later recorded the classic hit "That's What Friends Are For." She was considered the voice of Burt Bacharach/Hal David compositions, and the rest is here, in her first autobiography. Dionne tells the stories of her life from her childhood in East Orange, New Jersey, in a two-family home with her parents, brother, and sister, to now, as she celebrates her fiftieth year in show business. She came by her musical gifts honestly. Her mother, Lee Drinkard Warrick, was a founding member of the legendary Drinkard Jubilairs, which included her mother's siblings Cissy, Marie, Annie, Nick, and Larry. Cissy went on to become a celebrated recording artist in her own right; she lived in the Warrick household, got married, and later gave birth to one of the most popular singers of our time, Whitney Houston. Dionne went on to start her own gospel group with her sister, Dee Dee, called the Gospelaires. Her father, once a Pullman porter, became an accountant, went on to promote gospel records for Hob Records, and wrote a book on gospel music. She attributes her strong family, who are faithful and industrious Christians, for keeping her grounded and giving her the fortitude, as well as the talent, to earn her place among world-class performing artists without losing herself or her soul.By Larry Mcmurtry. 2008