Rice--National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations--delivers an inspiring account of a life in service to family and country.Although you may think you know Susan Rice--whose name became synonymous with Benghazi following her Sunday news show appearances after the deadly 2012 terrorist attacks in Libya--in Tough Love, the author reveals the truth of her surprising story with unflinching honesty. Often mischaracterized by political opponents, Rice emerges as neither a villain nor victim, but a strong, compassionate leader.Mother, wife, scholar, diplomat, and fierce champion of American interests and values, Rice connects the personal and the professional. Taught early, with tough love, how to compete and excel as an African American woman in settings where people of color are few, Susan shares wisdom learned along the way.Laying bare the family struggles that shaped her early life in Washington, D.C., she also examines the ancestral legacies that influenced her. Rice's elders--immigrants on one side and descendants of slaves on the other--had high expectations that each generation would rise. And rise they did, but not without paying it forward--in uniform and in the pulpit, as educators, community leaders, and public servants.Susan too rose rapidly. She served throughout the Clinton administration, becoming one of the nation's youngest assistant secretaries of state and, later, one of President Obama's most trusted advisors.Rice provides an insider's account of some of the most complex issues confronting the United States over three decades, ranging from "Black Hawk Down" in Somalia to the genocide in Rwanda and the East Africa embassy bombings in the late 1990s, to Libya, Syria, a secret channel to Iran, the Ebola epidemic, and the opening to Cuba during the Obama years. With unmatched insight and characteristic bluntness, she reveals previously untold stories behind recent national security challenges, including confrontations with Russia and China, the war against ISIS, the struggle to contain the fallout from Edward Snowden's leaks, the U.S. response to Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the surreal transition to the Trump administration.Intimate, sometimes humorous, but always candid, Tough Love culminates with an appeal to the American public to bridge our dangerous domestic divides in order to preserve our democracy and sustain our global leadership.

    Two generations of this remarkable family transformed and popularised the waltz, delighting all of Viennese society with their prolific compositions. But behind the melody lay a darker discord, as the Strausses tore themselves apart while Vienna itself struggled to secure its place in a rapidly changing world.In The Last Waltz John Suchet skilfully portrays this gripping story, capturing the family dramas, the tensions, triumphs and disasters, all set against the turbulent backdrop of Austria in the nineteenth century, from revolution to regicide.Discover the truth behind Vienna’s extraordinary musical dynasty.

    During the Britpop boom of the mid-90s, the astonishing success of Oasis brought Creation fame on the world stage. In 1999, however, McGee announced his shock departure as his label's influence over a generation of British music came to a confusing and disappointing end.

    Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields - except for the 270 students at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has accepted a job teaching English. Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime. Life at PUST is lonely and claustrophobic, especially for Suki, whose letters are read by censors and who must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but from her colleagues - evangelical Christian missionaries who don't know or choose to ignore that Suki doesn't share their faith. She is mystified by how easily her students lie, unnerved by their obedience to the regime. To them, everything in North Korea is the best, the tallest, the most delicious, the envy of all nations. Still, she cannot help but love them - their boyish enthusiasm, their eagerness to please, the flashes of curiosity that have not yet been extinguished. As the weeks pass, she begins to hint at the existence of a world beyond their own - at such exotic activities as surfing the Internet or traveling freely and, more dangerously, at electoral democracy and other ideas forbidden in a country where defectors risk torture and execution. The students in turn offer Suki tantalizing glimpses into their lives, from their thoughts on how to impress girls to their disappointment that soccer games are only televised when the North Korean team wins. Then Kim Jong-il dies, leaving the students devastated, and leading Suki to question whether the gulf between her world and theirs can ever be bridged.Without You, There Is No Us offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse of life in the world's most unknowable country, and at the privileged young men she calls "soldiers and slaves."

    At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women's colleges--Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates.The "glass universe" of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades--through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography--enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard--and Harvard's first female department chair.

    With a drive that comes from nothing but the love for what he does, he breaks through and then wrestles with the vagaries of the music industry, the nature of success and its inevitable consequences. Having recorded an expansive body of work and performed with fellow artists from across the spectrum and across every popular music genre, from rock, pop and dance to country, blues and soul, the one constant throughout has been his unique musical gifts and unmistakable voice.But how did a boy from a Welsh coal-mining family attain success across the globe? And how has he survived the twists and turns of fame and fortune to not only stay exciting, but actually become more credible and interesting with age? In this, his first and only autobiography, Tom revisits his past and tells the tale of his journey from wartime Pontypridd to LA and beyond. He reveals the stories behind the ups and downs of his fascinating and remarkable life, from the early heydays to the subsequent fallow years to his later period of artistic renaissance.It's the story nobody else knows or understands, told by the man who lived it, and written the only way he knows how: simply and from the heart. Raw, honest, funny and powerful, this is a memoir like no other from one of the world's greatest ever singing talents. This is Tom Jones and Over the Top and Back is his story.

    Ken McNab's And in the End: The Last Days of The Beatles is an in-depth look at the Fab Four's acrimonious final year...

     Step into the hidden world of death care and explore the challenge of removing the deceased from the often-difficult, regularly awkward, and sometimes downright bizarre circumstances in which they die, the art and science of embalming, and the intrigue of forensic pathology. Sias is a veteran death investigator, former funeral director/embalmer intern, and paramedic with twenty-eight years of emergency response experience.

    Lebrecht compellingly demonstrates that classical recording has reached its end point, but this is not simply an expos? of decline and fall. It is, for the first time, the full story of a minor art form, analyzing the cultural revolution wrought by Schnabel, Toscanini, Callas, Rattle, the Three Tenors, and Charlotte Church. It is the story of how stars were made and broken by the record business; how a war criminal conspired with a concentration-camp victim to create a record empire; and how advancing technology, boardroom wars, public credulity and unscrupulous exploitation shaped the musical backdrop to our modern lives. The book ends with a suitable shrine to classical recording: the author's critical selection of the 100 most important recordings, and the 20 most appalling.Filled with memorable incidents and unforgettable personalities, from Goddard Lieberson, legendary head of CBS Masterworks who signed his letters as God; to Georg Solti, who turned the Chicago Symphony into the loudest symphony on earth - this is at once the captivating story of the life and death of classical recording and an opinionated, insider's guide to appreciating the genre, now and for years to come.

    But as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system.The network has brought together some of the richest people on the planet. Their core beliefs—that taxes are a form of tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom—are sincerely held. But these beliefs also advance their personal and corporate interests: Many of their companies have run afoul of federal pollution, worker safety, securities, and tax laws.The chief figures in the network are Charles and David Koch, whose father made his fortune in part by building oil refineries in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. The patriarch later was a founding member of the John Birch Society, whose politics were so radical it believed Dwight Eisenhower was a communist. The brothers were schooled in a political philosophy that asserted the only role of government is to provide security and to enforce property rights.When libertarian ideas proved decidedly unpopular with voters, the Koch brothers and their allies chose another path. If they pooled their vast resources, they could fund an interlocking array of organizations that could work in tandem to influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and, they hoped, the presidency. Richard Mellon Scaife, the mercurial heir to banking and oil fortunes, had the brilliant insight that most of their political activities could be written off as tax-deductible “philanthropy.”These organizations were given innocuous names such as Americans for Prosperity. Funding sources were hidden whenever possible. This process reached its apotheosis with the allegedly populist Tea Party movement, abetted mightily by the Citizens United decision—a case conceived of by legal advocates funded by the network.The political operatives the network employs are disciplined, smart, and at times ruthless. Mayer documents instances in which people affiliated with these groups hired private detectives to impugn whistle-blowers, journalists, and even government investigators. And their efforts have been remarkably successful. Libertarian views on taxes and regulation, once far outside the mainstream and still rejected by most Americans, are ascendant in the majority of state governments, the Supreme Court, and Congress. Meaningful environmental, labor, finance, and tax reforms have been stymied.Jane Mayer spent five years conducting hundreds of interviews-including with several sources within the network-and scoured public records, private papers, and court proceedings in reporting this book. In a taut and utterly convincing narrative, she traces the byzantine trail of the billions of dollars spent by the network and provides vivid portraits of the colorful figures behind the new American oligarchy.Dark Money is a book that must be read by anyone who cares about the future of American democracy.

    Born the heir to the throne, she was declared a bastard when she was three years old, after her mother was executed for treason, witchcraft, and incest. During the reign of her sister, Mary I, she was a prisoner in the Tower of London, where she was expected to die. But when she became Queen, at the age of 25, she swiftly stunned the royal court by stepping into the seat of power with grace, intelligence, and an air of majesty that maddened and enchanted the men around her. For 44 years, Elizabeth I guided England through religious upheavals and plots to overthrow the government. Courted by all the most powerful princes in Europe, she baffled her advisors by refusing to marry any of them. And when England stood under threat of invasion by the most powerful nation in Europe, Elizabeth’s navy destroyed the Spanish Armada so decisively that it was seen as an act of God. In this book, you will discover why no English monarch has ever been more famous, more successful—or more deeply loved by her people.

    By following the teams that are inventing some of the world's best-loved toys, it spotlights the company's disciplined approach to harnessing creativity and recounts one of the most remarkable business transformations in recent memory. Brick by Brick reveals how LEGO failed to keep pace with the revolutionary changes in kids' lives and began sliding into irrelevance. When the company's leaders implemented some of the business world's most widely espoused prescriptions for boosting innovation, they ironically pushed the iconic toymaker to the brink of bankruptcy. The company's near-collapse shows that what works in theory can fail spectacularly in the brutally competitive global economy. It took a new LEGO management team – faced with the growing rage for electronic toys, few barriers to entry, and ultra-demanding consumers (ten-year old boys) – to reinvent the innovation rule book and transform LEGO into one of the world's most profitable, fastest-growing companies.  Along the way, Brick by Brick reveals how LEGO:- Became truly customer-driven by co-creating with kids as well as its passionate adult fans- Looked beyond products and learned to leverage a full-spectrum approach to innovation- Opened its innovation process by using both the "wisdom of crowds" and the expertise of elite cliques- Discovered uncontested, "blue ocean" markets, even as it thrived in brutally competitive red oceans- Gave its world-class design teams enough space to create and direction to deliver built a culture where profitable innovation flourishes Sometimes radical yet always applicable, Brick by Brick abounds with real-world lessons for unleashing breakthrough innovation in your organization, just like LEGO. Whether you're a senior executive looking to make your company grow, an entrepreneur building a startup from scratch, or a fan who wants to instill some of that LEGO magic in your career, you'll learn how to build your own innovation advantage, brick by brick.

    So how is it that this enigmatic couple—who publicize themselves as brother and sister though official documents say they're ex-husband-and-wife—became a multi-platinum musical sensation? From their early days as the darlings of Detroit rock scene to their current status as MTV celebs, they've defied expectations every step of the way. How did it happen that the simple idea of staying true to a lo-fi, blues-based sound became a revolutionary idea in the age digital conformity and complex studio production?Fell in Love with a Band: The Story of the White Stripes is the first biography by a Detroit journalist who has followed their career since the group's inception in 1997. From Meg White's novice attempts at banging the drums to their current incarnation as the face of indie rock. With never before seen photos and exclusive interviews with members of Detroit bands like Blanche and The Von Bondies, Fell in Love with a Band gets to the heart of this enigmatic rock band and for the first time tells the real story of their rise to fame and the power behind their sound.

    Why did a particular piece move him? How did the music work? Over time, he realized that his passion for this music was not enough. He needed to understand it. Take Bach, for starters. Who was he? How does one account for his music and its unshakeable hold on us today? As a critic, Tommasini has devoted particular attention to living composers and overlooked repertory. But, like all classical music lovers, the canon has remained central for him. In 2011, in his role as the Chief Classical Music Critic for the New York Times, he wrote a popular series in which he somewhat cheekily set out to determine the all-time top ten composers. Inviting input from readers, Tommasini wrestled with questions of greatness. Readers joined the exercise in droves. Some railed against classical music’s obsession with greatness but then raged when Mahler was left off the final list. This intellectual game reminded them why they loved music in the first place. Now in THE INDISPENSABLE COMPOSERS, Tommasini offers his own personal guide to the canon--and what greatness really means in classical music. What does it mean to be canonical now? Who gets to say? And do we have enough perspective on the 20th century to even begin assessing it? To make his case, Tommasini draws on elements of biography, the anxiety of influence, the composer's relationships with colleagues, and shifting attitudes toward a composer's work over time. Because he has spent his life contemplating these titans, Tommasini shares impressions from performances he has heard or given or moments when his own biography proves revealing. As he argues for his particular pantheon of indispensable composers, Anthony Tommasini provides a masterclass in what to listen for and how to understand what music does to us.

    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.