Chronicles the creation of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man—reprinted now as the Broadway Edition Composer Meredith Willson described The Music Man as “an Iowan’s attempt to pay tribute to his home state.” Now featuring a new foreword by noted singer and educator Michael Feinstein, this book presents Willson’s reflections on the ups and downs, surprises and disappointments, and finally successes of making one of America’s most popular musicals. Willson’s whimsical, personable writing style brings readers back in time with him to the 1950s to experience firsthand the exciting trials and tribulations of creating a Broadway masterpiece. Fresh admiration of the musical—and the man behind the music—is sure to result.
When God gives you a gift, I feel it is mandatory to share it for His glory. I seem to have been given the gift of conveying my thoughts through the written word. I’ve been encouraged by my family and several friends to write a book chronicling the ordeal of caring for Jimmie after an automobile accident left him a quadriplegic. The whole idea is daunting. But, after praying the prayer of Jabez, I feel compelled to “enlarge my territory” and share how God has moved in my life. When I established contact with the website, “Caring Bridge,” little did I know how far-reaching my journaling and witnessing would reach. “And Jabez called on the God of Israel saying, ‘Oh, that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain!’ So God granted him what he requested.” 1 Chronicles 4:10 (NKJV) To God be the glory... —Jane Corder Moore
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the most important books I’ve ever read—an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” – Bill Gates “Hans Rosling tells the story of ‘the secret silent miracle of human progress’ as only he can. But Factfulness does much more than that. It also explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.” —Melinda Gates "Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases." - Former U.S. President Barack Obama Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends—what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most. Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. --- “This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance...Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.” Hans Rosling, February 2017.
Michael Feinstein was just 20 years old when he got the chance of a lifetime: a job with his hero, Ira Gershwin. During their six-year partnership, Feinstein blossomed under Gershwin's mentorship and Gershwin was reinvigorated by the younger man's zeal. Now, in The Gershwins and Me, Michael Feinstein shares unforgettable stories and reminiscences from the music that defined American popular song, along with rare Gershwin memorabilia he's collected through the years. Includes an accompanying CD packed with Feinstein's original recordings of 12 Gershwins' songs.
Told in their separate voices, sixteen-year-old Prince Oliver, who wants to break free of his fairy-tale existence, and fifteen-year-old Delilah, a loner obsessed with Prince Oliver and the book in which he exists, work together to seek his freedom.
Despite using them every day, most software engineers know little about how programming languages are designed and implemented. For many, their only experience with that corner of computer science was a terrifying "compilers" class that they suffered through in undergrad and tried to blot from their memory as soon as they had scribbled their last NFA to DFA conversion on the final exam. That fearsome reputation belies a field that is rich with useful techniques and not so difficult as some of its practitioners might have you believe. A better understanding of how programming languages are built will make you a stronger software engineer and teach you concepts and data structures you'll use the rest of your coding days. You might even have fun. This book teaches you everything you need to know to implement a full-featured, efficient scripting language. You'll learn both high-level concepts around parsing and semantics and gritty details like bytecode representation and garbage collection. Your brain will light up with new ideas, and your hands will get dirty and calloused. Starting from main(), you will build a language that features rich syntax, dynamic typing, garbage collection, lexical scope, first-class functions, closures, classes, and inheritance. All packed into a few thousand lines of clean, fast code that you thoroughly understand because you wrote each one yourself.
In Paul Greci’s Hostile Territory, a catastrophic earthquake strands four teens in the Alaskan wilderness—and leaves them without a civilization to return to. Josh and three other campers at Simon Lake are high up on a mountain when an earthquake hits. The rest of the camp is wiped out in a moment—leaving Josh, Derrick, Brooke, and Shannon alone, hundreds of miles from the nearest town, with meager supplies, surrounded by dangerous Alaskan wildlife. After a few days, it’s clear no rescue is coming, and distant military activity in the skies suggests this natural disaster has triggered a political one. Josh and his fellow campers face a struggle for survival in their hike back home—to an America they might not recognize. An Imprint Book “In Greci’s intense survival tale with a thriller component, four teens endure a harrowing trek across the Alaskan wilderness . . . It’s clear that Greci (The Wild Lands) knows his landscape—Alaska’s beauty and natural hazards become their own vivid character in his handling.” —Publishers Weekly “Readers will feel like they are in Alaska alongside the characters... Recommended for teenagers who like postapocalyptic adventure or are fans of Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet.” —School Library Journal
“This book is epic.” —Cosmopolitan “A hopeful and moving love story.” —Publishers Weekly Fangirl meets Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda in this “sensitive and complex” (BCCB) coming-of-age novel from New York Times bestselling author Christina Lauren about two boys who fall in love in a writing class—one from a progressive family and the other from a conservative religious community. Three years ago, Tanner Scott’s family relocated from California to Utah, a move that nudged the bisexual teen temporarily back into the closet. Now, with one semester of high school to go, and no obstacles between him and out-of-state college freedom, Tanner plans to coast through his remaining classes and clear out of Utah. But when his best friend Autumn dares him to take Provo High’s prestigious Seminar—where honor roll students diligently toil to draft a book in a semester—Tanner can’t resist going against his better judgment and having a go, if only to prove to Autumn how silly the whole thing is. Writing a book in four months sounds simple. Four months is an eternity. It turns out, Tanner is only partly right: four months is a long time. After all, it takes only one second for him to notice Sebastian Brother, the Mormon prodigy who sold his own Seminar novel the year before and who now mentors the class. And it takes less than a month for Tanner to fall completely in love with him.
With striking photographs and personal insight, a compelling biography of the great American saxophonist and free jazz innovator Ornette Coleman. Ornette Coleman’s career encompassed the glory years of jazz and the American avant-garde. Born in segregated Fort Worth, Texas, during the Great Depression, the African-American composer and musician was zeitgeist incarnate. Steeped in the Texas blues tradition, he and jazz grew up together, as the brassy blare of big band swing gave way to bebop—a faster music for a faster, postwar world. At the luminous dawn of the Space Age and New York’s 1960s counterculture, Coleman gave voice to the moment. Lauded by some, maligned by many, he forged a breakaway art sometimes called “the new thing” or “free jazz.” Featuring previously unpublished photographs of Coleman and his contemporaries, this book tells the compelling story of one of America’s most adventurous musicians and the sound of a changing world.
Heads You Win is international #1 bestseller Jeffrey Archer’s most ambitious and creative work since Kane and Abel, with a final twist that will shock even his most ardent of fans. Leningrad, Russia, 1968: From an early age it is clear that Alexander Karpenko is destined to lead his countrymen. But when his father is assassinated by the KGB for defying the state, Alexander and his mother will have to escape Russia if they hope to survive. At the docks, they have an irreversible choice: board a container ship bound for America or one bound for Great Britain. Alexander leaves the choice to a toss of a coin... In a single moment, a double twist decides Alexander’s future. During an epic tale, spanning two continents and thirty years, we follow Alexander through triumph and defeat as he sets out on parallel lives as Alex in New York and Sasha in London. As this unique story unfolds, both come to realize that to find their destiny they must face the past they left behind as Alexander in Russia.
