Never pretty enough to please her gorgeous mother, Allie will do anything to gain her approval--even marry a man she doesn't love. Lt. Walter Novak--fearless in the cockpit but hopeless with women--takes his last furlough at home in California before being shipped overseas. Walt and Allie meet at a wedding and their love of music draws them together, prompting them to begin a correspondence that will change their lives. As letters fly between Walt's muddy bomber base in England and Allie's mansion in an orange grove, their friendship binds them together. But can they untangle the secrets, commitments, and expectations that keep them apart? A Distant Melody is the first book in the WINGS OF GLORY series, which follows the three Novak brothers, B-17 bomber pilots with the US Eighth Air Force stationed in England during World War II.
"A combination of memoir and music history, Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home is a journey of exploration by a member of one of the world's leading string quartets into the related ideas of home, displacement, and retreat in the lives and chamber music of four composers: Antonín Dvořák, Edward Elgar, Béla Bartók and Benjamin Britten. Dvórâk, Bartók, and Britten's American experiences, and Elgar's Piano Quintet and the English landscapes that inspired it, provide the author with a means for exploring the ways in which a piece of music may affirm or alter one's sense of home. The life experiences and notions of development and recapitulation in the music of these composers are the subject of a book that grapples with the universal human predicament of how best to balance past, present, and future, to remember faithfully and yet to move forward. Distant Melodies explores the experience of living with a piece of music over time and the ways in which engaging more closely with these composers has changed the author's own perception of home. This is a book for a wide and diverse audience: professional and amateur musicians, musicologists, and those who follow the careers of modern performing musicians, but more broadly for anyone for whom music provides solace and companionship. It helps us to understand how a piece of music and its associations can help us navigate our daily lives"--
This book of poetry spans two decades of my life and my heart. This book is not just a book of poetry. Rather, it is a book of insights about life that gleaned personally over two decades. More than the entertainment value the poems may provide, I share with you something much deeper. To assist you, I have tried to categorize the themes in chapters and provide explanatory endnotes and cross-references. My first poem, “RUNNING,” was written in 2002 during a time of turmoil in my life. I was looking for an answer as to why my life seemed to be going downhill. “RUNNING,” therefore, was written with a negative bias toward myself. The poems that followed were largely based on experiences that, in one way or another, also touched my heart. I call poetry ‘The Music of My Heart” because, in them, my heart speaks, singing a fanciful or heavy song, or something in between. I write in a style I call “freelance.” They may rhyme or they may not rhyme, or they might be a mixture of both. Almost all poems are metaphors. Almost all bear a message that is usually expressed in the last verse. I often personify “inanimate” objects. When I begin a poem, I have no idea, whatever, of what a poem is about to express. I just let my heart speak. I never plan a poem: a word or phrase randomly pops into my mind, I sit down, and I let my heart say what it tells me it has to say. Only at the end do I know what I have just written and give it a title. The first half of the book contains the lighter poems, and the second half contains heavier moods and themes. The transition occurs in PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND. The poems are sectioned according to theme, but there is considerable overlap. I have provided explanatory endnotes, especially for the poems of PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND which may have esoteric references (e.g., “DEVIL’S TABLE,” “THE DEVIL’S PRICE”). If, however, you, the reader, derive a personal insight/benefit from any given poem, I suggest you refrain from reading the endnote. Doing so could change the benefit you derive. I emphasize that this is your book to derive whatever you might. I purposely left UNIVERSE, the most important chapter, to the end, as UNIVERSE expresses the denouement of my life.
Lt. Raymond Novak prefers the pulpit to the cockpit, but at least his stateside job training B-17 pilots allows him the luxury of a personal life. As he courts Helen Carlisle, a young war widow and mother who conceals her pain under a frenzy of volunteer work, the sparks of their romance set a fire that flings them both into peril. After Ray leaves to fly a combat mission at the peak of the air war over Europe, Helen takes a job in a dangerous munitions yard and confronts an even graver menace in her own home. Will they find the courage to face their challenges? And can their young love survive until blue skies return? Filled with daring and romance, Blue Skies Tomorrow will capture readers' hearts.
Muscogee (Creek) writer and humorist Alexander Posey (1873 1908) lived most of his short but productive life in the Muscogee Nation, in what is now Oklahoma. He was an influential political spokesperson, an advocate for improving conditions in Indian Territory, and one of the most prominent American Indian literary figures of his era. One of Posey s dearest subjects was the Oktahutche River, which he so loved that he gave it voice in his poem, Song of the Oktahutche. His poetry, drawing from Romantic European and Euro-American influences such as Robert Burns and John Greenleaf Whittier, became a sort of Indian Territory pastoral in which the Greek nymph Echo shares a river with Stechupco, the Tall Man spirit of the Muscogees. Song of the Oktahutche collects for the first time all of Posey s poetry, which has until now been scattered in various rare volumes, either unpublished or replete with textual errors. His highly regarded poems constitute the largest body of Native poetry from the turn of the twentieth century. Matthew Wynn Sivils draws on extensive archival research to produce a complete, accurate, and meticulously annotated edition of Posey s poetry that will further enrich and personalize the legacy of this remarkable Native author.
Sherwood is the coming of age story of Colleen Reilly, a young woman caught between the idealism and realism of two men she meets during her stay in a TB sanitarium at the close of World War II. It is also the interracial love story of a Haitian immigrant and a headstrong girl who cant accept life confined behind conventional social screens. Both stories fuse in the shadowy figure of the Handyman, a man who refuses to condone what he sees at Sherwood. A forbidden room, an assault, and the theft of a book lead to two tragedies which change the lives of four men and four women forever. As Colleen struggles to escape the age-old plague of TB, she encounters a new oneand the whole truthas seen through the eyes of a five year old little boy.
How do East Asian cultural heritages in shape film? How are these legacies being revived, or even re-created, by contemporary filmmakers? This collection examines the dynamic interactions between East Asian culture heritages and cinemas in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.
