Captain Shore’s enthusiasm for firearms and especially for rifles led him to take every possible opportunity to try out different weapons, ammunition and methods of shooting. His interest was combined with sound common sense, and he would never countenance a rumour about a particular weapon or incident unless he was able to confirm it for himself.As a result everything in this book is based on his personal experience. In World War II Captain Shore took part in the British landings at D-Day, and fought in Normandy and northern Europe. He came across many different weapons in varying condition, some of the worst being those used by the Dutch and Belgian resistance fighters. He was keen to learn from experienced snipers and then to train others, and he became an officer sniping instructor at the British Army of the Rhine Training Centre.He shares a wealth of first-hand knowledge of different rifles, pistols, machine guns, ammunition, telescopes, binoculars and all the equipment a sniper should carry. This is not only an account of sniping in World War II but also a guide to all aspects of sniping based on personal knowledge and experience in training and battle. Illustrated heavily with photos, pictures and other illustrations of snipers, their weapons and their tactics.

    A fascinating and enigmatic character, Mozart was hailed in his own lifetime as a child prodigy and a musical genius. His travels throughout Europe exposed him to art, music, and education, offering plentiful opportunities for his gifts as a composer and musician to evolve and thrive. Despite his preternatural talents, the artist struggled significantly throughout his life, and he died in his prime. Explore the life of one of history's greatest classical composers as his ambitions and remarkable skills catapult him into the highest aristocratic courts of the Age of Enlightenment. Inside you will read about... - Prodigious Bloodlines - Early Compositions and Career - Fame, Riches, and Opera - The Man Behind the Music - War Time, Hard Times - The Death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart And much more!

    president's daughter?Brimming with answers to popular questions like these, The Best Bar Trivia Book Ever arms you with the knowledge your team needs to annihilate your bar trivia competition. This must-have guide features hundreds of facts, covering everything from sports and pop culture to history and science, so that you're always ready to deliver the ultimate trivia smackdown. You'll also get all the ins and outs of your favorite event with information on important bar trivia rules, assembling a team, and claiming victories week after week.Whether you're new to the scene or want to dominate at your local bar, this book will help your team outsmart the competition every single week!

    Writing in the clear and highly entertaining prose that made Opera 101 the standard text in its field, Fred Plotkin--music expert, teacher, lecturer, and famous author--presents classical music in a way that respects both the reader and the art form. In Classical Music 101:The reader will discover how to become an expert listener, which is essential for learning to love classical music.A thousand years of music are explored, with emphasis on great works in all styles. Significant composers will be profiled in depth, including Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and many more.Important musicians, such as pianist Emanuel Ax, singer Marilyn Horne, and conductor James Levine, speak about their art in interviews.Classical Music 101, the newest addition to a highly successful series intended for readers who don't consider themselves dummies or idiots, will help the person drawn to the finer things in life (and readers who don't know how to approach them) discover the glories of music.

    What started as five young men with a common dream of becoming rock stars eventually disintegrated into in-fighting, ego clashes, and financial disputes, until in 1995, following the release of Definitely Maybe, things came to a head and Tony left the band. Here, Tony reveals the truth about the early years before the band was formed. He discusses the drug consumption, the sexual activities, his much-publicized rift with Noel Gallagher, and how he was duped into signing a less-than-favorable record contract. His recollections include stories involving David Beckham, Prince, Eric Cantona, and John McEnroe. Witty, revealing, and fascinating, this book is a must-read for Oasis fans.

    It is our turn," writes Conrad Black in this scintillating manifesto for how Canada can achieve an exalted role in world affairs. For over 400 years we have toiled in the shadows of our potential and achieved an indifferent recognition among other nations. Chipper, patient, and courteous, we have pursued an improbable destiny as a splendid nation in the northern section of the new world, a demi-continent of relatively good and ably self-governing people, but most would agree we have neither developed a vivid national personality nor realized our true potential. Our main chance, writes Black, is now before us and it is not in the usual realms of military or economic dominance. With the rest of the West engaged in a sterile and platitudinous left-right tug of war, Canada has the opportunity to lead the advanced world to its next stage of development in the arts of government. By transforming itself into a controlled and sensible public policy laboratory, it can forge new solutions to the tiresome problems besetting welfare, education, health care, foreign policy, and other governmental sectors the world over, and make an enormous contribution to the welfare of mankind. Canada has no excuse not to lead in this field, argues Black, who offers nineteen visionary policy proposals of his own. "This is the destiny, and the vocation, Canada could have, not in the next century, but in the next five years of imaginative government.

    Whether or not psychedelic drugs played a role (and as many musicians say they've used them as not), psychedelic rock has consistently charted brave new worlds that exist only in the space between the headphones. The history books tell us the music's high point was the Haight-Ashbury scene of 1967, but the genre didn't start in San Francisco, and its evolution didn't end with the Summer of Love. A line can be drawn from the hypnotic drones of the Velvet Underground to the disorienting swirl of My Bloody Valentine; from the artful experiments of the Beatles' Revolver to the flowing, otherworldly samples of rappers P.M. Dawn; from the dementia of the 13th Floor Elevators to the grungy lunacy of the Flaming Lips; and from the sounds and sights at Ken Kesey's '60s Acid Tests to those at present-day raves. Turn On Your Mind is an attempt to connect the dots from the very first groups who turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, to such new-millennial practitioners as Wilco, the Elephant 6 bands, Moby, the Super Furry Animals, and the so-called "stoner-rock" and "ork-pop" scenes.

    Can you imagine being a struggling musician back then? It must take an incredible amount of restraint to play that gently.’ —Actor/comedian Fred Armisen, from his foreword to this book Just what is ‘yacht rock,’ you ask? Perhaps the easiest description is music that would not sound out of place being played while carousing aboard a yacht back in the good old days. But these songs were also some of the top pop gems of the 1970s and '80s. And while some associate yacht rock’s biggest songs with one-hit wonder artists, several of rock’s most renowned artists fall under this category, too - including Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Steely Dan, Hall & Oates, The Doobie Brothers, Toto, and more. Yacht rock seemed to have become extinct by the early twenty-first century … until a comedic video series, simply titled Yacht Rock, went viral and introduced captain’s hats and blazers to a whole new generation - as well as the emergence of a popular cover band, the Yacht Rock Revue, and of course, Jimmy Fallon’s on-air admiration of all things yacht rock. Now, yacht rock is one of the most celebrated ‘yesteryear’ styles of pop music, and has resonated with a new generation of musicians (including the Fred Armisen/Bill Hader-led Blue Jean Committee and soul/funk/electronica crossover act Thundercat). But despite all the hoopla, there has never been a book that told the entire story of the genre. Until now. Featuring interviews with many of the heavy hitters of the genre, including John Oates, Kenny Loggins, and Don Felder, The Yacht Rock Book leaves no sail unturned. This is the definitive story of the yacht rock’s creation, rise, chart-smashing success, fall, and stunning rebirth.

    Add the mercurial Brian Jones (who'd been effectively run out of Cheltenham for theft, multiple impregnations and playing blues guitar) and the wryly opinionated Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, and the potential was obvious. During the 1960s and 70s the Rolling Stones were the polarising figures in Britain, admired in some quarters for their flamboyance, creativity and salacious lifestyles, and reviled elsewhere for the same reasons. Confidently expected never to reach 30 they are now approaching their seventies and, in 2012, will have been together for 50 years. In The Rolling Stones, Christopher Sandford tells the human drama at the centre of the Rolling Stones story. Sandford has carried out interviews with those close to the Stones, family members (including Mick's parents), the group's fans and contemporaries - even examined their previously unreleased FBI files. Like no other book before The Rolling Stones will make sense of the rich brew of clever invention and opportunism, of talent, good fortune, insecurity, self-destructiveness, and of drugs, sex and other excess, that made the Stones who they are.

    From the seed first planted by slave dances held in Congo Square and nurtured by early ensembles led by Buddy Belden and Joe King Oliver, jazz began its long winding odyssey across America and around the world, giving flower to a thousand different forms--swing, bebop, cool jazz, jazz-rock fusion--and a thousand great musicians. Now, in The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia tells the story of this music as it has never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which it evolved. Here are the giants of jazz and the great moments of jazz history--Jelly Roll Morton (the world's greatest hot tune writer), Louis Armstrong (whose O-keh recordings of the mid-1920s still stand as the most significant body of work that jazz has produced), Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, cool jazz greats such as Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, and Lester Young, Charlie Parker's surgical precision of attack, Miles Davis's 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, Ornette Coleman's experiments with atonality, Pat Metheny's visionary extension of jazz-rock fusion, the contemporary sounds of Wynton Marsalis, and the post-modernists of the Knitting Factory. Gioia provides the reader with lively portraits of these and many other great musicians, intertwined with vibrant commentary on the music they created. Gioia also evokes the many worlds of jazz, taking the reader to the swamp lands of the Mississippi Delta, the bawdy houses of New Orleans, the rent parties of Harlem, the speakeasies of Chicago during the Jazz Age, the after hours spots of corrupt Kansas city, the Cotton Club, the Savoy, and the other locales where the history of jazz was made. And as he traces the spread of this protean form, Gioia provides much insight into the social context in which the music was born. He shows for instance how the development of technology helped promote the growth of jazz--how ragtime blossomed hand-in-hand with the spread of parlor and player pianos, and how jazz rode the growing popularity of the record industry in the 1920s. We also discover how bebop grew out of the racial unrest of the 1940s and '50s, when black players, no longer content with being entertainers, wanted to be recognized as practitioners of a serious musical form. Jazz is a chameleon art, delighting us with the ease and rapidity with which it changes colors. Now, in Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz, we have at last a book that captures all these colors on one glorious palate. Knowledgeable, vibrant, and comprehensive, it is among the small group of books that can truly be called classics of jazz literature.

    Written in a lively anecdotal style, entries include character descriptions, historical background, and much more.

      With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Gioachino Rossini (draft-dodging womanizer) to Johann Sebastian Bach (jailbird) to Richard Wagner (alleged cross-dresser), Secret Lives of Great Composers recounts the seamy, steamy, and gritty history behind the great masters of international music. You’ll learn that Edward Elgar dabbled with explosives; that John Cage was obsessed with fungus; that Berlioz plotted murder; and that Giacomo Puccini stole his church’s organ pipes and sold them as scrap metal so he could buy cigarettes. This is one music history lesson you’ll never forget!

    Said's essays and articles on music. Addressing the work of a variety of composers, musicians, and performers, Said carefully draws out music's social, political, and cultural contexts and, as a classically trained pianist, provides rich and often surprising assessments of classical music and opera."Music at the Limits" offers both a fresh perspective on canonical pieces and a celebration of neglected works by contemporary composers. Said faults the Metropolitan Opera in New York for being too conservative and laments the way in which opera superstars like Pavarotti have "reduced opera performance to a minimum of intelligence and a maximum of overproduced noise." He also reflects on the censorship of Wagner in Israel; the worrisome trend of proliferating music festivals; an opera based on the life of Malcolm X; the relationship between music and feminism; the pianist Glenn Gould; and the works of Mozart, Bach, Richard Strauss, and others.Said wrote his incisive critiques as both an insider and an authority. He saw music as a reflection of his ideas on literature and history and paid close attention to its composition and creative possibilities. Eloquent and surprising, "Music at the Limits" preserves an important dimension of Said's brilliant intellectual work and cements his reputation as one of the most influential and groundbreaking scholars of the twentieth century.

    The only difference between Ann and every other eighteen-year-old in the United States was that she was the editor of Tiger Beat, the hottest teen magazine in the country. Ann traveled the world, interviewing the Monkees, Paul Revere and The Raiders, David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman, the Bee Gees and the Osmonds. She schmoozed with the rich and famous in Hollywood, Hawaii and London, visited Elvis on the set of one of his movies, and joined the hottest rock stars in the recording studio. As a correspondent for the London-based New Musical Express, Ann covered America’s “British Invasion” from these shores. She jetted to San Francisco with Jefferson Airplane, and photographed the Rolling Stones and the Who. She made dinner for Harry Nilsson, rode in Bobby Sherman’s Rolls Royce, and had her heart broken by a superstar—a story she’s kept to herself until now. In Meow! My Groovy Life with Tiger Beat’s Teen Idols, Ann Moses is breaking her silence—about that heartbreaking rock-star romance, as well as what it was like to spend every day with the stars we all loved as kids, besides. She’ll squeal on Bobby Sherman (was he really that nice?), David Cassidy (was he really that snotty?), and the Monkees (which of them was a big meanie?). She’ll tell you everything she couldn’t tell you in the pages of Tiger Beat, back when it was her job to fuel your fantasy about your fave raves.

    composing breaks involved spooning baby food out of the jar. He taught his daughter to love the world in all its beauty and complexity. In public and private, Lenny was larger than life.In Famous Father Girl, Bernstein mines the emotional depths of her childhood and invites us into her family’s private world. A fantastic set of characters populates the Bernsteins’ lives, including: the Kennedys, Mike Nichols, John Lennon, Richard Avedon, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins, and Betty (Lauren) Bacall.An intoxicating tale, Famous Father Girl is an intimate meditation on a complex and sometimes troubled man, the family he raised, and the music he composed that became the soundtrack to their entwined lives. Deeply moving and often hilarious, Bernstein’s beautifully written memoir is a great American story about one of the greatest Americans of the modern age.Best Book of 2018 -- NPR, Library Journal