Clear, concise language sets the record straight on a diverse range of topics as Lawrence Potter presents answers to fifty-seven questions about the world we live in, stretching from "What is jihad?" to "is fair trade a good thing?" and "Is there still a war in Chechnya?" . Important information including the latest research on environmental issues and the history behind current events worldwide is presented in enough detail to be useful without overwhelming readers with too much making for a balanced, informed reference guide.Also covering... What is the problem with plastic bags? What did Sadaam do to the Kurds? What is the difference between a sunni and a shia and is it possible that global warming is not taking place in a thoroughly updated new edition complete with a new chapter explaining the problem of Afghanistan

    Recollections of Farrar's father are prominent throughout the stories. Ultimately, it is music and musicians that are given the most space and the final word since music has been the creative impetus and driving force for the past 35 years of his life.In writing these stories, he found a natural inclination to focus on very specific experiences; a method analogous to the songwriting process. The highlights and pivotal experiences from that musical journey are all represented as the binding thread in these stories, illustrated throughout with photography from his life. If life is a movie, then these stories are the still frames.

    Starting in the ramshackle but romantic capital of Havana, Peter Millar travels with ordinary Cubans, sharing anecdotes, life stories and political opinions to the far end of the island, the Guantanamo naval base and detention camp.

    His heart damaged by rheumatic fever as a youth, Berns was not expected to live to see 21. Although his name is little remembered today, Berns worked alongside all the greats of the era—Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, Burt Bacharach, Phil Spector, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, anyone who was anyone in New York rhythm and blues. In seven quick years, he went from nobody to the top of the pops—producer of monumental r&b classics, songwriter of “Twist and Shout,” “My Girl Sloopy,” “Piece of My Heart,” and others.His fury to succeed led Berns to use his Mafia associations to muscle Atlantic Records out of their partnership and intimidate new talents like Neil Diamond and Van Morrison, whom he had signed to his record label. Berns died at age 38 from a long-expected heart attack, just when he was seeing his grandest plans and life’s ambitions frustrated and foiled.

    It has been out of print since at least 1977 and was never published outside the USA.

    After a rejection from an elite New York conservatoire—a rejection she always believed stemmed from the color of her skin—she began performing jazz, blues, and classical songs in a bar to fund her music studies. In 1958 her rendition of the Gershwin standard “I Loves You Porgy” became a Top 40 hit, and her subsequent debut album Little Girl Blue launched what would become an extensive singing and songwriting career. Drawing on a wealth of original interviews with Simone’s closest associates, this extraordinary biography follows her sparkling career as well as her passionate belief in racial equality that eventually led her to undergo self-imposed exile from America in 1970. Featuring rare photographs and a review of Simone’s more than 40 albums and numerous hits, this is an extensive look at the complex and extremely talented diva.

    George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images.Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from founding member Steve McCall’s kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, A Power Stronger Than Itself uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings to light a major piece of the history of avant-garde music and art.

    The book focuses on the scene surrounding the extreme heavy metal subgenre black metal in Norway in the early 1990s, with a focus on the string of church burnings and murders that occurred in the country around 1993.

    Glen Campbell's boy-next-door persona belied his hedonistic, near-fatal lifestyle. It all started like a dream - the rise from ruthless poverty as one of twelve children in a small Arkansas town and the against-all struggle for stardom, first as a brilliant studio musician (behind artists such as Sinatra, Elvis, Ray Charles, and Nat King Cole), then as a solo performer who in the sixties and seventies sold some 45 million records (including the timeless classics "Wichita Lineman, " "Gentle on My Mind, " "By the Time I Get to Phoenix, " and, of course, "Rhinestone Cowboy") and hosted his own top-rated TV show. Too quickly, though, the dream became a nightmare of mad spending, multiple marriages, and abusive and all-too-public affairs, as well as wildly escalating alcohol and cocaine dependencies that threatened not only his career but his very existence. Now a Christian and in recovery, he has stepped back into the spotlight a whole man at last. With the help of bestselling author Tom Carter, Glen Campbell has given us a book that is both a star-studded show-biz memoir and a spiritual testimony that radiates great faith and emotion. Rhinestone Cowboy is his personal gift of thanks to the millions who have supported him through decades of good times and bad - and to the vast new audience who have grown to know him through his frequent appearances on cable television's 700Club and other Christian TV shows. "A lot of people are going to be surprised by my story, and I hope that a lot are going to be inspired, " Campbell declares. "All I know for sure is that it's time to tell it. And as honestly as I can, that's just what I've gone and done."

    Updated atlas contains maps of every U.S. state that are 35% larger than the standard atlas version plus over 350 detailed city inset and national park maps and a comprehensive, unabridged index. Road construction projects and updates highlighted for every state and conveniently located above the maps. Contains mileage chart showing distances between 77 North American cities and national parks with driving times map. Tough spiral binding allows the book to lay open easily. Other Features Best of the Road - Our editor's favorite road trips from our Best of the Road collection follows scenic routes along stretches of coastline, both east and west, to forests mountains, and prairies; and through small towns and big cities. For a weekend or a week there's something for everyone. Tell Rand! As much as we work to keep our atlases up to date, conditions change quickly and new construction projects begin frequently. If you know of something we haven't captured in our atlas, let us know at randmcnally.com/tellrand. Tourism websites and phone numbers for every U.S. state and Canadian province on map pages

    Cornell's lyrical compositions combine found materials in ways that reflect a very personal exploration of art and culture and that represent his belief in art as an uplifting voyage into the imagination. This stunning book is published to accompany the first retrospective of the artist's work in twenty-six years.In her essay, Cornell scholar Lynda Roscoe Hartigan focuses on the seminal experiences and concepts that shaped Cornell's evolution as an American artist with a singular style of seeing. His transformation of found materials, distillation of far-flung ideas and traditions, and mingling of the vernacular and the erudite resonate with the spirit of synthetic innovation associated with American art and culture. Additionally, eight thematic sections (Navigating a Career, Cabinets of Curiosity, Dream Machines, Bouquets of Homage, Nature's Theater, Geographies of the Heavens, Crystal Cages, and Chambers of Time)explore the major ideas that recur in his work. The book also includes a bibliography, numerous illustrations of the artist's source material and previously unpublished works, and much more.

    While paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, and lines from T. S. Eliot are quoted on the yearbook pages of alienated teenagers across the land, twentieth-century classical music still sends ripples of unease through audiences. At the same time, its influence can be felt everywhere. Atonal chords crop up in jazz. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalism has had a huge effect on rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward.The Rest Is Noise shows why twentieth-century composers felt compelled to create a famously bewildering variety of sounds, from the purest beauty to the purest noise. It tells of a remarkable array of maverick personalities who resisted the cult of the classical past, struggled against the indifference of a wide public, and defied the will of dictators. Whether they have charmed audiences with sweet sounds or battered them with dissonance, composers have always been exuberantly of the present, defying the stereotype of classical music as a dying art. The narrative goes from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties, from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies. We follow the rise of mass culture and mass politics, of dramatic new technologies, of hot and cold wars, of experiments, revolutions, riots, and friendships forged and broken. The end result is not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through its music.

    Music of the western classical tradition spanning some 14 centuries -- from the emergence of Gregorian chant to the sounds of the present day -- is illustrated by 150 musical examples.

    A Fast Ride Out of Here tells a story that is so shocking, so outrageous, so packed with excess and leading to such uproar and tragic consequences as to be almost beyond compare. Put simply, in terms of jaw-dropping incident, self-destruction and all-round craziness, Pete Way's rock'n'roll life makes even Keith Richards's appear routine and Ozzy Osbourne seem positively mild-mannered in comparison. Not for nothing did Nikki Sixx, bassist with LA shock-rockers Motley Crue and who 'died' for eight minutes following a heroin overdose in 1988, consider that he was a disciple of and apprenticed to Way.During a forty-year career as founding member and bassist of the venerated British hard rock band UFO, and which has also included a stint in his hell-raising buddy Ozzy's band, Pete Way has both scaled giddy heights and plunged to unfathomable lows. A heroin addict for more than ten years, he blew millions on drugs and booze and left behind him a trail of chaos and carnage. The human cost of this runs to six marriages, four divorces, a pair of estranged daughters and two dead ex-wives. Latterly, Way has fought cancer, but has survived it all and is now ready to tell his extraordinary tale. By turns hilarious, heart-rending, mordant, scabrous, self-lacerating, brutally honest and entirely compulsive, A Fast Ride Out of Here will be a monument to rock'n'roll debauchery on an epic, unparalleled scale and also to one man's sheer indestructability.

    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.