A rich and evocative account of the life and work of one of the world's favorite composers -- from the acclaimed author of Mozart's Women.In 1712, a young German composer followed his princely master to London and would remain there for the rest of his life. That master would become King George II and the composer was George Freidrich Handel. Handel, then still only twenty-seven and largely self-taught, would be at the heart of music activity in London for the next four decades, composing masterpiece after masterpiece, whether the glorious coronation anthem, Zadok the Priest, operas such as Rinaldo and Alcina or the great oratorios, culminating, of course, in Messiah. Here, Jane Glover, who has conducted Handel's work in opera houses and concert halls throughout the world, draws on her profound understanding of music and musicians to tell Handel's story. It is a story of music-making and musicianship, but also of courts and cabals of theatrical rivalries and of eighteenth-century society. It is also, of course the story of some of the most remarkable music ever written, music that has been played and sung, and loved, in this country -- and throughout the world -- for three hundred years. 16 Pages of Color and B&W Illustrations
Pegasus Books
|
9781681778815
|
Hardcover
The Last Campaign
By Brands, H W
Bestselling historian and Pulitzer prize finalist H. W. Brands follows the lives of General William Tecumseh Sherman and Apache war leader Geronimo to tell the story of the Indian Wars and the final fight for control of the American continent.William Tecumseh Sherman and Geronimo were keen strategists and bold soldiers, ruthless with their enemies. Over the course of the 1870s and 1880s these two war chiefs would confront each other in the final battle for what the American West would be: a sparsely settled, wild home where Indian tribes could thrive, or a more densely populated extension of the America to the east of the Mississippi. Sherman was a well-connected son of Ohio who attended West Point and rose to prominence through his scorched-earth campaigns in the Civil War.
Doubleday
|
9780385547284
|
Hardcover
Icebound
By Pitzer, Andrea
The human story has always been one of perseverance - often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale of all might be that of 16th-century Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Europeans before and, on their third polar exploration, lost their ship off the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The men would spend the next year fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing hunger, and endless winter. In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer masterfully combines a gripping tale of survival with a sweeping history of the great Age of Exploration - a time of hope, adventure, and seemingly unlimited geographic frontiers. At the story's center is William Barents, one of the 16th century's greatest navigators whose larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to chart a path through the deepest, most remote regions of the Arctic ended in both tragedy and glory.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781982113346
|
Hardcover
Stalking Shakespeare
By Durkee, Lee
A darkly humorous and spellbinding real-life detective story that chronicles one Mississippi man's relentless search for an authentic, accurate portrait of William Shakespeare.Following his divorce, down-and-out writer and Mississippi exile Lee Durkee holed himself up in a Vermont fishing shack and fell prey to a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevalence of popular portraits, no one really knows what Shakespeare looked like. That the Bard of Avon has gotten progressively handsomer in modern depictions seems only to reinforce this point. Stalking Shakespeare is Durkee's fascinating memoir about an obsession gone awry, the 400-year-old myriad portraits attached to the famous playwright, and Durkee's own unrelenting search - via X-ray and infrared technologies - for a lost picture of the Bard painted from real life.
Scribner
|
9781982127145
|
Hardcover
Countdown to Pearl Harbor
By Twomey, Steve
A fascinating look at the twelve days leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - the warnings, clues and missteps - by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.In Washington, DC, in late November 1941, admirals compose the most ominous message in Navy history to warn Hawaii of possible danger, but they write it too vaguely. They think precautions are being taken, but never check to see if they are. A key intelligence officer wants more warnings sent, but he is on the losing end of a bureaucratic battle and can't get the message out. American sleuths have pierced Japan's most vital diplomatic code, and Washington believes it has a window on the enemy's soul - but it does not. In a small office at Pearl Harbor, overlooking the battleships at the heart of America's seafaring power, the Commander of the Pacific Fleet tries to figure out how much danger he really faces. His intelligence unit has lost track of Japan's biggest aircraft carriers, but assumes they are resting in a port far away. The admiral thinks Pearl is too shallow for torpedoes, so he never puts up a barrier. As he frets, a Japanese spy is counting the warships in the harbor and reporting to Tokyo. There were false assumptions, and racist ones: The Japanese aren't very good aviators and they don't have the nerve or the skill to attempt a strike so far from their home. There were misunderstandings, conflicting desires, painful choices. And there was a naval officer who, on his very first mission as captain of his very first ship, did exactly the right thing. His warning could have averted disaster, but his superiors reacted too leisurely. Japanese planes arrived moments later. Twomey's telescoping of the twelve days leading to the attack unravels the crucial characters and moments, and produces an edge-of-your seat drama with fascinating details about America at this moment in its history. By the end, the reader understands how assumption is the root of disaster, and how sometimes a gamble pays off.
Simon & Schuster
|
9781476776460
|
Print book
In the Forest of No Joy
By Daughton, J. P.
The epic story of the Congo-Ocan railroad and the human costs and contradictions of modern empire.The Congo-Ocan railroad stretches across the Republic of Congo from Brazzaville to the Atlantic port of Pointe-Noir. It was completed in 1934, when Equatorial Africa was a French colony, and it stands as one of the deadliest construction projects in history. Colonial workers were subjects of an ostensibly democratic nation whose motto read "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," but liberal ideals were savaged by a cruelly indifferent administrative state.African workers were forcibly conscripted and separated from their families, and subjected to hellish conditions as they hacked their way through dense tropical foliage -- a "forest of no joy"; excavated by hand thousands of tons of earth in order to lay down track; blasted their way through rock to construct tunnels; or risked their lives building bridges over otherwise impassable rivers.
W. W. Norton & Company
|
9780393541014
|
Hardcover
Clover Adams
By Dykstra, Natalie
The hidden story of one of the most fascinating women of the Gilded AgeClover Adams, a fiercely intelligent Boston Brahmin, married at twenty-eight the soon-to-be-eminent American historian Henry Adams. She thrived in her role as an intimate of power brokers in Gilded Age Washington, where she was admired for her wit and taste by such luminaries as Henry James, H. H. Richardson, and General William Tecumseh Sherman. Clover so clearly possessed, as one friend wrote, “all she wanted, all this world could give.”Yet at the center of her story is a haunting mystery. Why did Clover, having begun in the spring of 1883 to capture her world vividly through photography, end her life less than three years later by drinking a chemical developer she used in the darkroom? The key to the mystery lies, as Natalie Dykstra’s searching account makes clear, in Clover’s photographs themselves.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition
|
9780618873852
|
Hardcover
Rebirth of a Nation
By Lears, Jackson
Fascinating.... A major work by a leading historian at the top of his gameat once engaging and tightly argued. The New York Times Book Review Dazzling cultural history smart, provocative, and gripping. It is also a book for our times, historically grounded, hopeful, and filled with humane, just, and peaceful possibilities. The Washington Post An illuminating and authoritative history of America in the years between the Civil War and World War I, Jackson Learss Rebirth of a Nation was named one of the best books of 2009 by The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.,
Harper; 1 edition
|
9780060747497
|
Hardcover
Leave No Man Behind
By Brooks, Tony
On June 28th, 2005, a four-man Navy SEAL reconnaissance team under Operation Red Wings was ambushed in northeastern Afghanistan -- as depicted in the book and film Lone Survivor. A quick reaction force was dispatched. Turbine 33, carrying eight Navy SEALs and eight members of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, was struck by a rocket propelled grenade -- careening the dual rotor chinook toward the rugged peak of Sawtalo Sar. The result was the single deadliest incident in Afghanistan Special Operations history at the time. Commanders called on the largest element of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) , the 75th Ranger Regiment. The rescue mission: Operation Red Wings II. Author Tony Brooks gives a first-hand account of the daring recovery of Turbine 33 and the subsequent search for the remaining compromised Navy SEAL recon team -- one of whom was Marcus Luttrell, the lone survivor.
Diversion Books
|
9781635767353
|
Hardcover
Water
By Boccaletti, Giulio
Writing with authority and brio, Giulio Boc-caletti-honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Univer-sity of Oxford-shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civ-ilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers. Even as he describes how these societies were made possible by sea-level changes from the last glacial melt, he incisively examines how this type of farming led to irrigation and multiple cropping, which, in turn, led to a population explosion and labor specialization.
We see with clarity how irrigation's structure informed social structure (inventions such as the calendar sprung from agricultural necessity); how in ancient Greece, the communal ownership of wells laid the groundwork for democracy; how the Greek and Roman experiences with water security resulted in systems of taxation; and how the modern world as we know it began with a legal framework for the development of water infrastructure.
Extraordinary for its monumental scope and piercing insightfulness, Water- A Biography richly enlarges our understanding of our relationship to-and fundamental reliance on-the most elemental substance on earth.
Handel in London
By Glover, Jane
A rich and evocative account of the life and work of one of the world's favorite composers -- from the acclaimed author of Mozart's Women.In 1712, a young German composer followed his princely master to London and would remain there for the rest of his life. That master would become King George II and the composer was George Freidrich Handel. Handel, then still only twenty-seven and largely self-taught, would be at the heart of music activity in London for the next four decades, composing masterpiece after masterpiece, whether the glorious coronation anthem, Zadok the Priest, operas such as Rinaldo and Alcina or the great oratorios, culminating, of course, in Messiah. Here, Jane Glover, who has conducted Handel's work in opera houses and concert halls throughout the world, draws on her profound understanding of music and musicians to tell Handel's story. It is a story of music-making and musicianship, but also of courts and cabals of theatrical rivalries and of eighteenth-century society. It is also, of course the story of some of the most remarkable music ever written, music that has been played and sung, and loved, in this country -- and throughout the world -- for three hundred years. 16 Pages of Color and B&W Illustrations
The Last Campaign
By Brands, H W
Bestselling historian and Pulitzer prize finalist H. W. Brands follows the lives of General William Tecumseh Sherman and Apache war leader Geronimo to tell the story of the Indian Wars and the final fight for control of the American continent.William Tecumseh Sherman and Geronimo were keen strategists and bold soldiers, ruthless with their enemies. Over the course of the 1870s and 1880s these two war chiefs would confront each other in the final battle for what the American West would be: a sparsely settled, wild home where Indian tribes could thrive, or a more densely populated extension of the America to the east of the Mississippi. Sherman was a well-connected son of Ohio who attended West Point and rose to prominence through his scorched-earth campaigns in the Civil War.
Icebound
By Pitzer, Andrea
The human story has always been one of perseverance - often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale of all might be that of 16th-century Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Europeans before and, on their third polar exploration, lost their ship off the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The men would spend the next year fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing hunger, and endless winter. In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer masterfully combines a gripping tale of survival with a sweeping history of the great Age of Exploration - a time of hope, adventure, and seemingly unlimited geographic frontiers. At the story's center is William Barents, one of the 16th century's greatest navigators whose larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to chart a path through the deepest, most remote regions of the Arctic ended in both tragedy and glory.
Stalking Shakespeare
By Durkee, Lee
A darkly humorous and spellbinding real-life detective story that chronicles one Mississippi man's relentless search for an authentic, accurate portrait of William Shakespeare.Following his divorce, down-and-out writer and Mississippi exile Lee Durkee holed himself up in a Vermont fishing shack and fell prey to a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevalence of popular portraits, no one really knows what Shakespeare looked like. That the Bard of Avon has gotten progressively handsomer in modern depictions seems only to reinforce this point. Stalking Shakespeare is Durkee's fascinating memoir about an obsession gone awry, the 400-year-old myriad portraits attached to the famous playwright, and Durkee's own unrelenting search - via X-ray and infrared technologies - for a lost picture of the Bard painted from real life.
Countdown to Pearl Harbor
By Twomey, Steve
A fascinating look at the twelve days leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - the warnings, clues and missteps - by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.In Washington, DC, in late November 1941, admirals compose the most ominous message in Navy history to warn Hawaii of possible danger, but they write it too vaguely. They think precautions are being taken, but never check to see if they are. A key intelligence officer wants more warnings sent, but he is on the losing end of a bureaucratic battle and can't get the message out. American sleuths have pierced Japan's most vital diplomatic code, and Washington believes it has a window on the enemy's soul - but it does not. In a small office at Pearl Harbor, overlooking the battleships at the heart of America's seafaring power, the Commander of the Pacific Fleet tries to figure out how much danger he really faces. His intelligence unit has lost track of Japan's biggest aircraft carriers, but assumes they are resting in a port far away. The admiral thinks Pearl is too shallow for torpedoes, so he never puts up a barrier. As he frets, a Japanese spy is counting the warships in the harbor and reporting to Tokyo. There were false assumptions, and racist ones: The Japanese aren't very good aviators and they don't have the nerve or the skill to attempt a strike so far from their home. There were misunderstandings, conflicting desires, painful choices. And there was a naval officer who, on his very first mission as captain of his very first ship, did exactly the right thing. His warning could have averted disaster, but his superiors reacted too leisurely. Japanese planes arrived moments later. Twomey's telescoping of the twelve days leading to the attack unravels the crucial characters and moments, and produces an edge-of-your seat drama with fascinating details about America at this moment in its history. By the end, the reader understands how assumption is the root of disaster, and how sometimes a gamble pays off.
In the Forest of No Joy
By Daughton, J. P.
The epic story of the Congo-Ocan railroad and the human costs and contradictions of modern empire.The Congo-Ocan railroad stretches across the Republic of Congo from Brazzaville to the Atlantic port of Pointe-Noir. It was completed in 1934, when Equatorial Africa was a French colony, and it stands as one of the deadliest construction projects in history. Colonial workers were subjects of an ostensibly democratic nation whose motto read "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," but liberal ideals were savaged by a cruelly indifferent administrative state.African workers were forcibly conscripted and separated from their families, and subjected to hellish conditions as they hacked their way through dense tropical foliage -- a "forest of no joy"; excavated by hand thousands of tons of earth in order to lay down track; blasted their way through rock to construct tunnels; or risked their lives building bridges over otherwise impassable rivers.
Clover Adams
By Dykstra, Natalie
The hidden story of one of the most fascinating women of the Gilded AgeClover Adams, a fiercely intelligent Boston Brahmin, married at twenty-eight the soon-to-be-eminent American historian Henry Adams. She thrived in her role as an intimate of power brokers in Gilded Age Washington, where she was admired for her wit and taste by such luminaries as Henry James, H. H. Richardson, and General William Tecumseh Sherman. Clover so clearly possessed, as one friend wrote, “all she wanted, all this world could give.”Yet at the center of her story is a haunting mystery. Why did Clover, having begun in the spring of 1883 to capture her world vividly through photography, end her life less than three years later by drinking a chemical developer she used in the darkroom? The key to the mystery lies, as Natalie Dykstra’s searching account makes clear, in Clover’s photographs themselves.
Rebirth of a Nation
By Lears, Jackson
Fascinating.... A major work by a leading historian at the top of his gameat once engaging and tightly argued. The New York Times Book Review Dazzling cultural history smart, provocative, and gripping. It is also a book for our times, historically grounded, hopeful, and filled with humane, just, and peaceful possibilities. The Washington Post An illuminating and authoritative history of America in the years between the Civil War and World War I, Jackson Learss Rebirth of a Nation was named one of the best books of 2009 by The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.,
Leave No Man Behind
By Brooks, Tony
On June 28th, 2005, a four-man Navy SEAL reconnaissance team under Operation Red Wings was ambushed in northeastern Afghanistan -- as depicted in the book and film Lone Survivor. A quick reaction force was dispatched. Turbine 33, carrying eight Navy SEALs and eight members of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, was struck by a rocket propelled grenade -- careening the dual rotor chinook toward the rugged peak of Sawtalo Sar. The result was the single deadliest incident in Afghanistan Special Operations history at the time. Commanders called on the largest element of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) , the 75th Ranger Regiment. The rescue mission: Operation Red Wings II. Author Tony Brooks gives a first-hand account of the daring recovery of Turbine 33 and the subsequent search for the remaining compromised Navy SEAL recon team -- one of whom was Marcus Luttrell, the lone survivor.
Water
By Boccaletti, Giulio
Writing with authority and brio, Giulio Boc-caletti-honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Univer-sity of Oxford-shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civ-ilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers. Even as he describes how these societies were made possible by sea-level changes from the last glacial melt, he incisively examines how this type of farming led to irrigation and multiple cropping, which, in turn, led to a population explosion and labor specialization.
We see with clarity how irrigation's structure informed social structure (inventions such as the calendar sprung from agricultural necessity); how in ancient Greece, the communal ownership of wells laid the groundwork for democracy; how the Greek and Roman experiences with water security resulted in systems of taxation; and how the modern world as we know it began with a legal framework for the development of water infrastructure.
Extraordinary for its monumental scope and piercing insightfulness, Water- A Biography richly enlarges our understanding of our relationship to-and fundamental reliance on-the most elemental substance on earth.