After a lifetime of research and debate on Australian and international history, Geoffrey Blainey is well-placed to introduce us to the people who have played a part and to guide us through the events which have created the Australian identityweaving in and out, again and again, over 50,000 years.

    Includes a foreword by Spike Lee.

    If you have read other books about him, read this one to discover more about his philosophy and spirituality based on his own works. It covers his entire life from birth to death. The Joy of Life distills the personality of Theodore Roosevelt into one medium-sized book. Quotes appear in this book which show him to be funny, hyperactive, energetic, exciting, enthusiastic, entertaining and lovable. His contemporaries say such things as: the more I see him the more and more I love him; work was an entertainment with him there; it was love at first sight; never have we laughed so much as when T.R. was our host. The book shows what motivated him at each stage of his life. During his Police Commissioner days he said to Jacob Riis, author of How the Other Half Lives, "I have read your book and I have come to help." Charging up San Juan hill he realized that he was destined to become a great leader of people like his Rough Riders: a mixed group who included cowboys, Indians, Ivy Leaguers, hispanics, marshals, negroes and Texas Rangers. His greatest effort was in conservation. He preserved millions of acres of land including wildlife refuges, national parks, national monuments and irrigation projects. He accomplished many things in his life but would have obtained a place in history for that alone.

    Legendary for an unusual combination of spiritual power, beauty, charisma, showmanship, intimidation, and shrewd business sense, Marie Leveau also was known for her kindness and charity, nursing yellow fever victims and ministering to condemned prisoners, and her devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. In separating verifiable fact from semi-truths and complete fabrication, Carolyn Morrow Long explores the unique social, political, and legal setting in which the lives of Laveau’s African and European ancestors became intertwined in nineteenth-century New Orleans.

    

    A dark-skinned, impoverished child, he grew up under low expectations, Jim Crow legislation, and vigilante terrorism. Yet he also grew up at the center of African American vernacular traditions from the Deep South, learning the ecstatic music of the Sanctified Church, blues played by street musicians, and the plantation tradition of ragging a tune.Louis Armstrong's New Orleans interweaves a searching account of early twentieth-century New Orleans with a narrative of the first twenty-one years of Armstrong's life. Drawing on a stunning body of first-person accounts, this book tells the rags-to-riches tale of Armstrong's early life and the social and musical forces that shaped him. The city and the musician are both extraordinary, their relationship unique, and their impact on American culture incalculable.

    But seeing the skeletons of oak trees killed by the salinity of the groundwater, and whole cemeteries sinking into swampland and out of sight, Tidwell also explains why each introduction may be a farewell—as the storied Louisiana coast steadily erodes into the Gulf of Mexico.Part travelogue, part environmental exposé, Bayou Farewell is the richly evocative chronicle of the author's travels through a world that is vanishing before our eyes.

    It brings together leading avant-garde composers of the early postwar period such as Elliot Carter, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen; pioneers of electroacoustic music such as Francois Bayle, Pauline Oliveros, Iannis Xenakis and Peter Zinovieff; minimalist and Fluxus-inspired artist-musicians such as Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Phil Niblock, Yoko Ono, Steve Reich and Terry Riley; and figures that have moved between classical/experimental realms and more pop terrain, such as Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Howie B., Arto Lindsay and Caetano Veloso. Obrist's interviews map the evolution of the new music in Europe and America across all of its genres, from musique concrete to the recent hybridizations between pop and avant-garde, as techniques from both realms cross-pollinate. A Brief History of New Music is an ideal introduction to the experimental and new classical music of the past half-century.

      It details her historic journey to American Samoa, taken where she was just twenty-three, where she did her first fieldwork.  Here, for the first time, she presented to the public the idea that the individual experience of developmental stages could be shaped by cultural demands and expectations.  Adolescence, she wrote, might be more or less stormy, and sexual development more or less problematic in different cultures.  The "civilized" world, she taught us had much to learn from the "primitive."  Now this groundbreaking, beautifully written work as been reissued for the centennial of her birth, featuring introductions by Mary Pipher and by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.

    Wexler has worked with the entire range of American genius: Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and others. 75 photographs.

    Julia Randsome is a transplanted Yankee, a supporter of women's rights, who against everyone's advice marries into one of the city's most prominent families. Though they occupy different universes in New Orleans, somehow all roads bring Kate and Julia to the same place . . . back to The District.As lush and provocative as New Orleans is itself, Storyville sweeps across lines of caste and blood, money, and desire--and into the voluptuous secrets of a city tempting as any on earth.The novel's atmosphere is redolent of honeysuckle and jasmine, caf� br�lot and cinnamon buns.--Newsday

    It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn't know who it was. By the end, exposing someone's address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn't know who it was. The '90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we're still groping to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job. Beyond epiphenomena like Cop Killer and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. On a '90s Thursday night, more people watched any random episode of Seinfeld than the finale of Game of Thrones. But nobody thought that was important; if you missed it, you simply missed it. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it. In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written would a sentence like, "The video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany" make complete sense. Chuck Klosterman has written a multi-dimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.

    It covered jazz, of course, but it also included Davis’s ruminations on race, politics and culture. Fascinated, Hef sent the writer—future Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Alex Haley, an unknown at the time—back to glean even more opinion and insight from Davis. The resulting exchange, published in the September 1962 issue, became the first official Playboy Interview and kicked off a remarkable run of public inquisition that continues today—and that has featured just about every cultural titan of the last half century.To celebrate the Interview’s 50th anniversary, the editors of Playboy have culled 50 of its most (in)famous Interviews and will publish them over the course of 50 weekdays (from September 4, 2012 to November 12, 2012) via Amazon’s Kindle Direct platform. Here is the interview with the rock legends The Beatles from the February 1965 issue.

    Find out the hidden history of the Knights Templar that really lead to their demise. The Knights Templar existed officially for less than 200 years. Founded to protect pilgrims who were travelling through the Holy Lands, their rise to power was sudden. They became some of the most feared warriors in the region, they had a mandate from God, they controlled perhaps the world’s first real banking system, and they waged war against anyone who tried to wrestle Christianity’s holiest grounds from the control of the Catholic Church. Within their short lifespan, they quickly became one of the most powerful societies in Europe, if not the world. But, just as they rose to power with relative speed, they fell from grace just as fast. Forged in the crucible of Middle Eastern conflict, their power was soon resented and feared. Before they could become even more powerful, the greatest nations in Europe and the Church turned on them. The once powerful Templars were hunted, caught, tortured, and eventually burned at the stake. According to their prosecutors, they were a devil-worshipping secret society who spat on the cross and plotted against the Pope. They were officially disbanded and their members treated with extreme contempt and prejudice. Or so goes the official story. In this book, we will not only look into the official history of the Knights Templar, but will examine the various ways their influence and ideas have tunnelled their way into the modern world. A group this powerful does not vanish overnight. Instead, their history has been linked to the Freemasons, to vicious curses, to the butchery of the Crusades, and even to Christian relics such as the Holy Grail. For many people, the Templars did not vanish and they did not relinquish their tight grip on the power structures of mediaeval Europe. Instead, they went underground. Read on to discover the dark and twisted secret history of the Knights Templar. Scroll back up and grab your copy now

    That combination of sounds. Three simple syllables, and yet packing so many mixed messages. To some people, it’s a paradise. To others, it’s a punch line. As Oh, Florida! shows, it’s both of these and, more important, it’s a Petri dish, producing trends that end up influencing the rest of the country. Without Florida there would be no NASCAR, no Bettie Page pinups, no Glenn Beck radio rants, no USA Today, no “Stand Your Ground,” . . . you get the idea.To outsiders, Florida seems baffling. It’s a state where the voters went for Barack Obama twice, yet elected a Tea Party candidate as governor. Florida is touted as a carefree paradise, yet it’s also known for its perils-alligators, sinkholes, pythons, hurricanes, and sharks, to name a few. It attracts 90 million visitors a year, some drawn by its impressive natural beauty, others bewitched by its manmade fantasies.Oh, Florida! explores those contradictions and shows how they fit together to make this the most interesting state. It is the first book to explore the reasons why Florida is so wild and weird-and why that’s okay. Florida couldn’t be Florida without that sense of the unpredictable, unexpected, and unusual lurking behind every palm tree. But there is far more to Florida than its sideshow freakiness. Oh, Florida! explains how Florida secretly, subtly influences all the other states in the Union, both for good and for ill.