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.

    The Devil and Dr. Barnes traces the near-mythical journey of a man who was born into poverty, amassed a fortune through the promotion of a popular medicine, and acquired the premier private collection of works by such masters as Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso. Ostentatiously turning his back on the art establishment, Barnes challenged the aesthetic sensibilities of an uninitiated, often resistant and scoffing, American audience. In particular, he championed Matisse, Soutine, and Modigliani when they were obscure or in difficult straits. Analyzing what he saw as the formal relationships underlying all art, linking the old and the new, Barnes applied these principles in a rigorous course of study offered at his Merion foundation. Barnes's own mordant words, culled from the copious printed record, animate the narrative throughout, as do accounts of his associations with notables of the era--Gertrude and Leo Stein, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey among them--many of whom he alienated with his appetite for passionate, public feuds. In this rounded portrait, Albert Barnes emerges as a complex, flawed man, who--blessed with an astute eye for greatness--has left us an incomparable treasure, gathered in one place and unforgettable to all who have seen it.

    infantry experience in northern Europe, A Foot Soldier for Patton takes the reader from the beaches of Normandy through the giddy drive across France, to the brutal battles on the Westwall, in the Ardennes, and finally to the conquest of Germany itself. Patton’s army is best known for dashing armored attacks, its commander combining the firepower of tanks with their historic lineage as cavalry. But when the Germans stood firm the greatest fighting was done by Patton’s long undersung infantry–the foot sloggers who were called upon to reduce enemy strong points, and who took the brunt of German counterattacks. Michael Bilder, a member of the 5th Infantry (“Red Diamond” division), played a unique role in the Third Army’s onslaught. A rifleman foremost, he was also a German-speaker, called upon for interrogations and special duties. Also a combat lifeguard,

    Stuck in a rut, baseball was dying. Then Steinbrenner bought the Yankees, a second-division club with wife-swapping pitchers, leaving the House That Ruth Built not with a slam but a simper. He vowed not to interfere—before soon changing his mind. Across town, Tom Seaver led the Mets’ stellar pitching line-up, and iconic outfielder Willie Mays was preparing to say goodbye. For months, the Mets, under Yogi Berra, couldn’t get it right. Meanwhile, the A’s were breaking a ban on facial hair while maverick owner Charlie Finley was fighting to keep them underpaid. But beneath the muttonchops and mayhem, lay another world. Elvis commanded a larger audience than the Apollo landings. A Dodge Dart cost $2,800, gas was a quarter per gallon. A fiscal crisis loomed; Vietnam had ended, the vice president resigned, and Watergate had taken over. It was one of the most exciting years in the game’s history, the first with the designated hitter and the last before arbitration and free agency. The two World Series opponents went head-to-head above the baby steps of a dynasty that soon dwarfed both league champions. It was a turbulent time for the country and the game, neither of which would ever be the same again.

    Some had lost limbs to scurvy and frostbite; some had succumbed to Arctic hysteria; all of them were starving, reduced to eating the rats that seemed impervious to the vise-like cold. All but a handful of the fifty-odd sled dogs were long dead, victims of rabies and lockjaw. Thousands of miles away, people in America were convinced the crew of the Advance was dead, too. But one person remained undaunted: Elisha Kent Kane, the unlikely captain of the ill-fated ship whose previous trip to the remote and mysterious Arctic had made him one of the most famous men in the United States. Small of stature, poetic, and sickly, Kane was nonetheless determined to fulfill his voyage’s mission: to find survivors of the celebrated Arctic expedition of Sir John Franklin, and to prove the existence of a legendary Open Polar Sea that circled the North Pole. Before William Peary and Frederick Cook, there was Kane, the man who set the stage for the golden age of Arctic exploration that would follow. Under his calm yet unrelenting leadership, the crew of the Advance spent two years exploring the frozen realm of the Arctic Archipelago, going farther north than any expedition had before. But when it was finally time to return home, the ice had other ideas.

    He served for over a decade with the US Army's 75th Ranger Regiment on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. In Iraq, Nicholas participated in the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, hunted Iraq's Most Wanted and experienced brutal street combat, including 160 night-time missions over one 90-day deployment in the insurgent stronghold of Mosul. While serving in Afghanistan, he was also part of the search and rescue operation for Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell (author of Lone Survivor), and was on the ground again when a Chinook helicopter was shot down resulting in the death of 38 men and one military working dog. It was the single greatest loss of special operations personnel to date.

    Ambrose's highly regarded history of the United States Military Academy features the original foreword by Dwight D. Eisenhower and a new afterword by former West Point superintendent Andrew J. Goodpaster.

    It started like a Hollywood thriller, secretly transporting from England $25 million in British gold bullion, delivered to the ship in unguarded bread trucks, a pre-war “Neutrality Patrol” that was really an unofficial hostile search for the far bigger and more powerful German battleship Prinz Eugen, and sneaking through the Panama Canal at night with the ship’s name and hull number covered for secrecy. Now, with the ship bulging with an unusual load of fuel and supplies, in the company of a large fleet quietly passing under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the crew was about to learn of their latest (but not last) and most improbable adventure yet as the captain made an announcement that would change the war and their lives forever, “We are going to Tokyo!”. Over three years, scores of battles and hundreds of thousands of ocean miles later, the Nashville and her crew had earned 10 Battle Stars, served from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, from the Aleutians to the Yangtze River, as McArthur’s flagship and suffered heavy casualties from a devastating kamikaze attack. Tokyo Rose reported her sunk, repeatedly. Earlier, with goodwill trips that included France, England, Scandinavia, Bermuda and Rio de Janeiro, the new, sleek Nashville built a pre-war reputation as a “glamour ship”. But with war came the secret missions, capturing the second and third Japanese POWs of the war, having a torpedo pass just under the stern, being strafed and bombed by Japanese planes, losing a third of the crew in a single devastating Kamikaze attack, swimming in shark infested waters protected by marines with machine guns, enjoying the beauty of Sydney and her people, planning a suicide mission to destroy the Japanese fishing fleet, and bombarding Japanese troops and airfields across the Pacific. The Nashville crew served their ship and country well. They came from Baltimore row-houses, New York walk-ups, San Francisco flats, Kansas wheat farms, Colorado cattle ranches, Louisiana bayous and Maine fishing towns. Many had never traveled more than 25 miles from home and had never seen the ocean until they joined the service. They were part Irish, part Italian, part Polish and All-American. Battered, burnt and bombed, they made the USS Nashville their home and lived and died as eternal shipmates. Historical narrative enriched with the personal stories of the crew, this is the story of a ship and crew of ordinary men who did extraordinary things.

    officials were turning the surveillance powers of the federal government -- designed to stop terrorist attacks -- against the Republican presidential team. These were the ruthless tactics of a Soviet-style police state, not a democratic republic.The Red Thread asks the simple question: Why? What is it that motivated these anti-Trump conspirators from inside and around the Obama administration and Clinton networks to depart so drastically from "politics as usual" to participate in a seditious effort to overturn an election?Finding clues in an array of sources, Diana West uses her trademark investigative skills, honed in her dazzling work, American Betrayal, to construct a fascinating series of ideological profiles of well-known but little understood anti-Trump actors, from James Comey to Christopher Steele to Nellie Ohr, and the rest of the Fusion GPS team; from John Brennan to the numerous Clintonistas still patrolling the Washington Swamp after all these years, and more.Once, we knew these officials by august titles and reputation; after The Red Thread, readers will recognize their multi-generational and inter-connecting communist and socialist pedigrees, and see them for what they really are: foot-soldiers of the Left, deployed to take down America's first "America First" and most anti-Communist president.If we just give it a pull, the "red thread" is very long and very deep.

    Nothing will ever compare to the amphetamine rush of my young life and the night I was nearly buggered by my girlfriend’s uncle in the Potteries...The opening line of Stuart Cosgrove’s Young Soul Rebels sets up a compelling and intimate story of northern soul, Britain’s most fascinating musical underground scene, and takes the reader on a journey into the iconic clubs that made it famous – The Twisted Wheel, The Torch, Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca and Cleethorpes Pier – the bootleggers that made it infamous, the splits that threatened to divide the scene, the great unknown records that built its global reputation and the crate-digging collectors that travelled to America to unearth unknown sounds.The book sweeps across fifty years of British life and places the northern soul scene in a social context – the rise of amphetamine culture, the policing of youth culture, the north–south divide, the decline of coastal Britain, the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry, the rise of Thatcherism, the miners’ strike, the rave scene and music in the era of the world wide web Books have been written about northern soul before but never with the same erudition and passion.

    The crime shocked the nation and was front-page news for several months. J. Edgar Hoover personally assigned his best FBI agents to the case, and within a short time, Parsons's husband and their live-in housekeeper, Anna Kupryanova, had become prime suspects. Botched ransom attempts, clashes between authorities and romantic intrigue kept the investigation mired in drama. The crime remained unsolved and has captivated Long Island audiences ever since. Former Suffolk County detective Steven C. Drielak reveals previously classified FBI documents and pieces together the mystery of the Alice Parsons kidnapping.

    This revealing collection of Civil War stories features gripping history, expert commentary, and unforgettable voices:Shelby Foote reflects on the southern perspectiveE.L. Doctorow discusses Sherman and The MarchSam Waterston performs the Gettysburg AddressHal Holbrook honors Iowa in the Civil WarSusan Stamberg reports from Lincoln’s summer retreatJames McPherson tours Gettysburg’s hallowed groundTony Horwitz explores the world of Civil War reenactorsPlus visits to battlefields at Manassas, Antietam, Gettysburg, and much more.The NPR American Chronicles series explores the historical events that continue to resonate in our lives. Expert commentary and unforgettable stories create vivid sound portraits of history’s greatest people and events, examined in multi-faceted and moving detail.

    Italian investigative journalist Paola Leopizzi Harris and French-born information scientist Dr. Jacques F. Vallée have teamed up to uncover the details of a New Mexico crash in 1945, fully two years before the well-known incident at Roswell and the famous sighting by pilot Kenneth Arnold in 1947.Over several site investigation surveys Harris and Vallée reconstructed the historic observations by three witnesses, two of whom are still living, who described to them the circumstances of the crash, with details of the recovery of a nearly-intact flying vehicle and its occupants by an Army detachment. Combining their long experience in field research around the world, the authors have documented the step-by-step efforts by the military to remove the object, an avocado-shaped craft weighting several tons, from the property where it crash-landed during a storm.Surprisingly, the literature of the field only includes a few passing mentions about the case, and only one (foreign) TV documentary has mentioned it, but the correlation between the crash of the extraordinary object and the explosion of the first atom bomb at White Sands, less than 20 miles away, has been missed. Harris and Vallée suggest that the correlation is significant for physical, geographic and biological reasons, quite apart from the obvious strategic implications.The witnesses were able to observe not only the actual crash of the object on their property but every step of the military efforts to lift it and take it away. Fearing retaliation, they remained silent for some 60 years about what they had seen and done over those nine days at the site while the recovery was proceeding. When placed in the context of the history of chemical and physical analysis of retrieved UFO debris--an area where Harris and Vallée have long collaborated—the devices observed by the witnesses raise a number of very important scientific questions.The Honorable Paul Hellyer, former Minister of National Defence of Canada, has stated: “Paola Harris and Jacques Vallée have spent much effort doing field research on location (…) It is now time that their discovery be revealed to the world.”Christopher Mellon, former deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, called the data “fresh reason to believe that our government is concealing physical proof of alien technology. Read the book, and if persuaded, join the millions of other Americans seeking a straight answer.”And Professor Paul Hynek added that the research “reveals a new UFO history.”

    The title of his most famous work, Ab Urbe Condita ("From the Founding of the City"), expresses the scope and magnitude of Livy's undertaking. He wrote in a mixture of annual chronology and narrative. Livy claims that lack of historical data prior to the sacking of Rome in 387 BC by the Gauls made his task more difficult. He wrote the majority of his works during the reign of Augustus. However, he is often identified with an attachment to the Roman Republic and a desire for its restoration. His writing style was poetic and archaic in contrast to Caesar's and Cicero's styles. Also, he often wrote from the Romans' opponent's point of view in order to accent the Romans' virtues in their conquest of Italy and the Mediterranean.

    We were halfway in when the Japanese machine guns got their range. Bullets slapped the water and whined as they ricocheted off the barge. Some of us ducked; some of us fell to the floor; and all of us prayed.” Here, in heart-stopping human detail, are twenty-one personal accounts told by the men themselves. They are the stories of men who lived in hell and lived to tell of it. There is the story of Sgt. Albert Schmid who was awarded the Navy Cross for his single-handed destruction of a flanking attack while on Guadalcanal. The account of Private Nicolli who was literally blown into the air like a matchstick and then, with a piece of shrapnel in his chest, managed to help a wounded comrade to the rear. “The luckiest man in the Solomons,” Sgt. Koziar, tells of how he had his tonsils removed with the assistance of a Japanese sniper’s bullet. These are just three of the twenty-one fascinating stories that were told to Gerold Frank and James Horan just months after these marines had returned from active duty to recover from the conflict in the Pacific. The valor of these marines is astounding, as twenty-one-year-old Corporal Conroy states in the book, “I don’t suppose I shall ever be able to sum up all the bravery, the guts, the genuine, honest courage displayed by the boys out in Guadalcanal. They were afraid, and yet they took it. They had what it takes . . .” The battles of Gavutu-Tanambogo, Tulagi, Tenaru, Matanikau and Guadalcanal are all covered through these accounts which take the reader right to the epicenter of the Pacific conflict. “telling of living conditions on the beaches and in the jungles where they fought, offering an insider’s view of foxholes, food, snipers, mosquitos, boondocks, shrapnel, their injuries, and their pain.” Great Stories of World War II Gerold Frank and James Horan were professional authors who wrote down the stories of these marines shortly after they had returned from active duty. The War in the South Pacific was first published in 1943 as Out in the Boondocks. Frank went on to become a prominent ghostwriter and passed away in 1998. Horan, author of more than forty books, died in 1981.