"I'm not a working musician," the legendary Canadian jazz guitarist Sonny Greenwich once declared. "When I decide to play, I play to awake people spiritually. That's the only reason." For that, and for his stirring, distinctively linear style, he was hailed in 1970 as "the Coltrane of guitar players." In truth, though, Greenwich made music entirely on his own transcendent terms in the course of an uncompromising 50-year career that took him from the smallest of clubs in Toronto and Montreal to the Village Vanguard and Carnegie Hall in New York and back. Of Stars and Strings is an engaging study of a rare Canadian original, and a valuable contribution by Mark Miller to the history of jazz in Canada.
Country music grew up in Tennessee, drawing from sources in the white rural music of East and Middle Tennessee, from the church music of country singing conventions, and from the black music of the Memphis area. The author traces the vital role played by Tennessee and its musicians in the development of this unique American art form.
Self-contained and comprehensive, this definitive new edition provides a complete overview of the intersection of gravity, supergravity, and superstrings.
From the Royal Society, a peerless collection of all-new science writing Bill Bryson, who explored all - or at least a great deal of - current scientific knowledge in A Short History of Nearly Everything, now turns his attention to the history of that knowledge. As editor of Seeing Further, he has rounded up an extraordinary roster of scientists who write and writers who know science in order to celebrate 350 years of the Royal Society, Britain's scientific national academy. The result is an encyclopedic survey of the history, philosophy and current state of science, written in an accessible and inspiring style by some of today's most important writers. The contributors include Margaret Atwood, Steve Jones, Richard Dawkins, James Gleick, Richard Holmes, and Neal Stephenson, among many others, on subjects ranging from metaphysics to nuclear physics, from the threatened endtimes of flu and climate change to our evolving ideas about the nature of time itself, from the hidden mathematics that rule the universe to the cosmological principle that guides Star Trek. The collection begins with a brilliant introduction from Bryson himself, who says: "It is impossible to list all the ways that the Royal Society has influenced the world, but you can get some idea by typing in 'Royal Society' as a word search in the electronic version of the Dictionary of National Biography. That produces 218 pages of results — 4,355 entries, nearly as many as for the Church of England (at 4,500) and considerably more than for the House of Commons (3,124) or House of Lords (2,503)." As this book shows, the Royal Society not only produces the best scientists and science, it also produces and inspires the very best science writing.
