High Art

Fun, bright, and playful, power pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, power pop has meant many things to many people. In Go All the Way, today's best and brightest writers go deep on what certain power pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go All the Way is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

Bobby was happy with colony life on Nibiru. His job at the Colonial Security Force and his family were all the man needed. Then two renegades escaped confinement in stasis and teleported from the LARC1 colony to Earth’s Stone Age to wipe humanity and its primordial cousins from existence. Now, armed only with a shugarra, Bobby must journey across our prehistoric world and through the realms that our extinct cousins once ruled. Can he and a band of misfit hominins overcome two dangerous aliens with god-like magic and their army of cannibals? High fantasy has long ventured through the ...

Filled with logical yet counterintuitive answers to ordinary and extraordinary problems - whether it be buying a new home or pivoting a failing business model - Mudd's HEAD (High Efficiency Analytic Decision-making) methodology provides listeners with a battle-tested set of guiding principles that promise to bring order to even the most chaotic problems, all in five practical steps.

In this Very Short Introduction Ritchie Robertson covers the life and work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832): scientist, administrator, artist, art critic, and supreme literary writer in a vast variety of genres. Looking at Goethe's poetry, novels, and drama pieces, as well as his travel writing, autobiography, and essays on art and aesthetics, Robertson analyzes some of the key themes in his works: love, nature, religion, and tragedy.

With only a guitar, a tatty copy of the Melody Maker, and his template for the perfect band, Andrew Matheson set out in 1971 to make musical history. His band, the Hollywood Brats, were prepunk prophets - uncompromising, ultrathin, wild, untamable, and outrageous. But thrown into the crazy world of the 1970s London music scene, the Brats ultimately fell afoul of the crooks and heavies that ran it and an industry that just wasn't ready for them.

Louis Bromfield was a World War I ambulance driver, a Paris expat, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist as famous in the 1920s as Hemingway or Fitzgerald. But he cashed in his literary success to finance a wild agrarian dream in his native Ohio. The ideas he planted at his utopian experimental farm, Malabar, would inspire America's first generation of organic farmers and popularize the tenets of environmentalism years before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

Christopher Hitchens was for many years considered one of the fiercest and most eloquent left-wing polemicists in the world. But on much of today's left, he's remembered as a defector, a warmonger, and a sellout—a supporter of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who traded his left-wing principles for neoconservatism after the September 11 attacks. In How Hitchens Can Save the Left, Matt Johnson argues that this easy narrative gets Hitchens exactly wrong. Hitchens was a lifelong champion of free inquiry, humanism, and universal liberal values.

El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo's bodies. The mystery of Rothko's refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator's husband receives chemotherapy. Alfred de Dreux visits Gericault's workshop; Gustave Courbet's devilish seascapes incite viewers "to have sex, or to eat an apple"; Picasso organizes a cruel banquet in Rousseau's honor.... All of these fascinating episodes in art history interact with the narrator's life in Buenos Aires.

In Fantasies of Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein examines the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, civil rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Stein outlines how Simone gave voice to personal fantasies through releasing dozens of covers of her white male contemporaries.

A compendium of quotes and riffs by P.J. O'Rourke on subjects ranging from government to fishing to apps, to be published on what would have been his seventy-fifth birthday.

Music composed for television had, until recently, never been taken seriously by scholars or critics. Catchy TV themes, often for popular weekly series, were fondly remembered but not considered much more culturally significant than commercial jingles. Yet noted composers like John Williams, Henry Mancini, and Jerry Goldsmith learned and/or honed their craft in television before going on to major success in feature films.

In Wild Things, Vanity Fair contributing editor Bruce Handy revisits the classics of every American childhood, from fairy tales to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and explores the back stories of their creators, using context and biography to understand how some of the most insightful, creative, and witty authors and illustrators of their times created their often deeply personal masterpieces.

Max Allan Collins became Spillane's friend and collaborator, continuing the Mike Hammer series for years after the author's death, building upon unfinished manuscripts the writer left behind. Now, with coauthor James Traylor, Collins has produced the first comprehensive and authoritative profile of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master. It is a must-listen for any fan of the author—or of the generations of crime writers that were influenced by his work.

In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo's key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo's beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood.

Dream of having a flourishing and fulfilling practice as a healer, but are wrestling with the “business of healing”? Countless healers today are stuck in jobs they hate—doing what they love at night, in fits and starts. Others are practicing their craft but struggling to make ends meet. And some never get off the ground because they have no idea how and where to start. Sound familiar? What do they all have in common? They’re far better healers than businesspeople. Yet, to succeed in a healing profession today, you have to be BOTH. Enter The High Income healer, written by Jill K. ...

Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love - with a place, or a painting, or a person - and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss - from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde - Larissa Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself.

Jonathan Swift's world-famous books - from Gulliver's Travels to A Modest Proposal - are unparalleled in their piercing critique of modern society. Half-orphaned, a Dubliner by birth, but a man who would always insist he was English, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a figure of great contradictions.

Are you ready to become a master bread-maker? Flour and Water is the ultimate guide to creating delicious artisanal bread in the comfort of your own home. This comprehensive eBook covers everything from the science of bread-making to advanced techniques and tools. In Chapter 1, you'll dive deep into the science behind bread-making, giving you a solid understanding of the process. You'll learn how to select the perfect flour in Chapter 2 and source and use water in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 covers essential techniques including kneading, proofing and shaping. In Chapter 5, you'll discover how to ...

Had Hitler succeeded in conquering Europe, he would have crowned himself Holy Roman Emperor. The Nazis had in their possession priceless artifacts that would give Hitler legitimacy in his subjects' eyes: the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire including the Spear of Destiny, alleged to have pierced Christ's side at the Crucifixion. Looted from the royal treasury in Vienna, Austria, the Crown Jewels were hidden in a secret bunker deep beneath Nrnberg castle, known to few.

StoryCorps OutLoud sets out across the country to record and preserve the stories of LGBT individuals along with their families and friends. OutLoud is a project undertaken in the memory of Isay's father, psychiatrist Dr. Richard Isay. Professionally credited for helping to persuade the mental-health community that homosexuality is not a mental disorder, Dr. Isay was himself a closeted gay man for many years.