Quirky and wonderfully candid, Neil Young's second book of reminiscences is as compelling as his first book. He returns with more unforgettable stories about his six decades in the music business - but this is not your average rock biography. He centres this work on one of his life's passions, cars, using the framework of all the cars he's ever owned to construct a narrative of his life and career, exploring and demonstrating how memories are attached to objects. Young also expresses regret for the environmental impact of his past cars, and now passionately advocates the use of clean energy. 'Special Deluxe' is a mix of memoir and environmental politics by one of the most gifted and influential artists of our time.
Jimmie Walker was raised in a violent and abusive home in the Bronx. Starting in small clubs and eventually opening for Black Panther rallies, he ultimately became an icon playing J. J. Evans on Good Times. Walker was the first successful young black sitcom star, and his catchphrase--“Dyn-o-mite!”--remains an indicator of the era. He saw sudden and enormous fame in everything from comic books and a talking doll to pajamas, trading cards, a bestselling album, and TV Guide covers. In Dyn-o-mite!, Walker candidly talks about his rise and the considerable tensions on the set of Good Times that contradicted the show's image of a close-knit, blue-collar family struggling to survive in the projects. Walker made “Dyn-o-mite!” a catchword for the Baby Boomer generation. Today, Dyn-o-mite! will inspire that same generation to rediscover what once made America great--the freedom of thought, the freedom of speech, and the belief in the individual.
John Dupre, a junior at West Virginia University, is an English major on the Dean's List dressed up as a Beatnik cowboy, the folk-singing resident outsider before nonconformity became a youth uniform. Morgantown is a masterful ensemble piece centering around John and peopled by his unforgettable friends in the out crowd: Bill Cohen, the sharpshooting, knife-throwing Zen Buddhist Harvard scholar; Marge Levine, the political radical with the Nefertiti eyes; and William Revington, the scion of old money who has the world on a platter and can't think of a single thing to do with it. And then theres his girl-friends and sexual obsessions: Carol Rabinowitz, the Wyatt scholar and Jewish American Princess; Natalie, the folk-singing boy-girl with the mind of a scientist; Cassandra Markapolous, whom John loves but is not allowed to be in love with. And, there's the Alice in the photograph, the boy dressed up as a girl dressed up as another girl, on and on endlessly reflecting: a hall of mirrors that threatens to draw John into its vortex.
A veteran Twin Cities journalist and raconteur summons the life of the city after reporting and recording its stories for more than thirty years Two or three times a week, as a columnist, hustling freelance writer, and genuinely curious reporter, Jim Walsh would hang out in a coffee shop or a bar, or wander in a club or on a side street, and invariably a story would unfold—one more chapter in the story of Minneapolis, the city that was his home and his beat for more than thirty years. Fear and Loving in South Minneapolis tells that story, collecting the encounters and adventures and lives that make a city hum—and make South Minneapolis what it is. Here is a man who drives around Minneapolis in a van that sports a neon sign and keeps a running tally of the soldiers killed in Iraq. Here is another, haunted by the woman he fell in love with, and lost, many years ago at the Minnesota Music Café on St. Paul’s East Side. Here are strangers on a cold night on the corner of Forty-sixth and Nicollet, finding comfort in each other’s company in the wake of the shootings in Paris. And here are Walsh’s own memories catching up with him: the woman who joined him in representing “junior royalty” for the Minneapolis Aquatennial when they were both seven years old; the lost friend, Soul Asylum’s Karl Mueller, recalled while sitting on his memorial bench at Walsh’s go-to refuge, the Rose Gardens near Lake Harriet. These everyday interactions, ordinary people, and quiet moments in Jim Walsh’s writing create an extraordinary picture of a city’s life. James Joyce famously bragged that if Dublin were ever destroyed, it could be rebuilt in its entirety from his written works. The Minneapolis that Jim Walsh maps is more a matter of heart, of urban life built on human connections, than of streets intersecting and literal landmarks: it is that lived city, documented in measures large and small, that his book brings so vividly to mind, drafting a blueprint of a community’s soul and inviting a reader into the boundless, enduring experience of Fear and Loving in South Minneapolis.
Now, 2 owls are ready to play. Hippity-hop, bip-bop, jive and sway! Hootenanny, hootenanny--it's time for fun. Hootenanny, hootenanny--the party has begun! In this jazzy ebook with audio, a hilarious cast of owls are working their way from the bottom to the top of the Old Oak Tree for a party on a Saturday night. Along the way these owls sing, boogie and even choose dapper duds for their special affair. At last, the all “hoot and holler” at the hootenanny!
The first full-length biography of Carly Simon, from an acclaimed music journalist who has known her for decades. Carly Simon has won two Grammys and an Academy Award, and her albums have sold more than forty million copies.
This book examines the American Sixties, and how that period’s socio-political essence was reflected and refracted in certain forms of the period’s music. Its five main chapters bear the names of familiar musical categories: ’Folk,’ ‘Rock,’ ‘Jazz,’ ‘Avant-Garde,’ ‘Classical.’ But the book’s real subject matter—treated at length in the Prologue and the Epilogue but spread throughout all that comes between—is the Sixties’ tangled mess of hopes and frustrations, of hungers as much for self-identity as for self-indulgence, of crises of conscience that bothered Americans of almost all ages and regardless of political persuasion.
In the 1960s, a young American president helped initiate the civil rights movement, captured the imagination of a nation with the establishment of the Peace Corps, launched the space age, nurtured the birth of the computer/digital age, and began the escalation of a war in Southeast Asia that exacted a horrific toll on the lives and emotions of his countrymen. Sheltered by the foothills of the White Mountains from the world events swirling around it, Dartmouth College resplendently approached 1969—the 200th anniversary of its founding as a school for Native Americans. As the smallest of the Ivy League schools, it was known for its dedication to a rigorous undergraduate education, its isolation from urban centers and sports prowess, and the intriguing manifestations of its all-male culture. In Days of Splendor, Hours like Dreams, author and 1967 Dartmouth College graduate Charles “Chuck” A. Hobbie offers a detailed, frank, and unpretentious memoir. Hobbie remembers the splendor and the fullness of his undergraduate days in the last decade of Dartmouth’s all-male culture. He recounts the minutiae of his courses; friendships with classmates; his dates; and the faculty; academic, social, musical, and sporting events; the extraordinary beauty of the college’s location; and his evolving affection for the remarkable school where hours passed like dreams.
During his 50-year association with the Village Voice, Fred W. McDarrah (1926–2007) covered the city’s downtown scenes, producing an unmatched and encyclopedic visual record of people, movements, and events. McDarrah frequented the bars, cafés, and galleries where writers, artists, and musicians gathered, and he was welcome in the apartments and lofts of the city’s avant-garde cultural aristocracy. He captured every vital moment, from Jack Kerouac reading poetry, to Bob Dylan hanging out in Sheridan Square, to Andy Warhol filming in the Factory, to the Stonewall Riots. Through his lens, we see the legendary birth of ideas and attitudes that continue to shape the character and allure of New York today.