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Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music
by Greg MilnerIN 1915, THOMAS EDISON PROCLAIMED THAT HE COULD RECORD A LIVE PERFORMANCE and reproduce it perfectly, shocking audiences who found themselves unable to tell whether what they were hearing was an Edison Diamond Disc or a flesh-and-blood musician. Today, the equation is reversed. Whereas Edison proposed that a real performance could be rebuilt with absolute perfection, Pro Tools and digital samplers now allow musicians and engineers to create the illusion of performances that never were. In between a century of sonic exploration into the balance between the real and the represented! Tracing the contours of this history,-Greg Milner fakes us through the major breakthroughs and glorious failures in the art and science of recording. An American soldier monitoring Nazi radio transmissions stumbles onto the open yet revolutionary secret of magnetic tape, Japanese and Dutch researchers build a first-generation digital audio format and watch as their "compact disc” is marketed by the music industry as the second coming of Edison yet derided as heretical by analog loyalists. The music world becomes addicted to volume in the nineties and fights a self-defeating "loudness war" to get its fix. From Les Paul to Phil Spector to King Tubby, from vinyl to pirated CDs to iPods, Milner pulls apart musical history to answer a crucial question: Should a recording document reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve upon or somehow transcend the music it records? The answers he uncovers will change the very way we think about music.
Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush
by Graeme ThompsonThe first ever in-depth study of Kate Bush's life and career, Under The Ivy features over 70 unique and revealing new interviews with those who have viewed from up close both the public artist and the private woman: old school friends, early band members, long-term studio collaborators, former managers, producers, musicians, video directors, dance instructors and record company executives.
No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power
by Gloria FeldtThrough interviews, historical perspective, and anecdotes, feminist icon Feldt examines why barriers to gender equality still exist in American society, and explains nine ways women can change how they think about power.
The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson
by George H. MayerPolitical biography of a beloved governor of Minnesota during the 1930s.
Torchlight to Valhalla
by Gale WilhelmFirst published in 1938, this is one of the classics of lesbian themed literature. Morgen is pursued by a young man but finds love with a woman instead.
Three Knocks on the Wall
by Evelyn Sibley LampmanMarty had just finished burying a dead robin in her pet cemetery near the tall wooden wall that surrounded the Hutchinson yard and house next door. Suddenly she heard it--knock, knock, knock --three knocks coming from the other side of the wall. For a moment Marty was too petrified to move. Knocking on a wall was something a crazy person might do and some people said old Mrs. Hutchinson was crazy, living alone with an unmarried daughter and seeing no one. Then the knocks came again. Marty soon learned the identity of the person on the other side of the ten-foot wall, and why she stayed there. What was harder to discover was a way to help her new invisible friend. For a long time, all Marty could do was to communicate through the wall and be patient. It was not until a deadly flu epidemic gripped the town and Marty could not come to the wall that her friend finally dared to step outside it. Evoking small town life in Oregon during World War I with vividness and a clear sense of time and character, Evelyn Sibley Lampman has created a very human and dramatic story that will carry its readers along to a most satisfying conclusion.
Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America
by Eugene RobinsonInstead of one black America, today there are four. There was a time when there were agreed-upon "black leaders," when there was a clear "black agenda," when we could talk confidently about "the state of black America"--but not anymore. -from Disintegration. The African American population in the United States has always been seen as a single entity: a "Black America" with unified interests and needs. In his groundbreaking book,Disintegration, Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Eugene Robinson argues that over decades of desegregation, affirmative action, and immigration, the concept of Black America has shattered. Instead of one black America, now there are four: a Mainstream middle-class majority with a full ownership stake in American society; a large, Abandoned minority with less hope of escaping poverty and dysfunction than at any time since Reconstruction's crushing end; a small Transcendent elite with such enormous wealth, power, and influence that even white folks have to genuflect; and two newly Emergent groups--individuals of mixed-race heritage and communities of recent black immigrants--that make us wonder what "black" is even supposed to mean. Robinson shows that the four black Americas are increasingly distinct, separated by demography, geography, and psychology. They have different profiles, different mindsets, different hopes, fears, and dreams. What's more, these groups have become so distinct that they view each other with mistrust and apprehension. And yet all are reluctant to acknowledge division. Disintegration offers a new paradigm for understanding race in America, with implications both hopeful and dispiriting. It shines necessary light on debates about affirmative action, racial identity, and the ultimate question of whether the black community will endure.
Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3 #17)
by Erik DavisStripping their famous name off the record was Led Zeppelin’s almost petulant attempt to let their Great Work stand on its own two feet. But the wordless jacket also lent the album charisma. Fans hunted for hidden meanings, or, in failing to find them, sensed a strange reflection of their own mute refusal to communicate with the outside world. This helped to create one of the supreme paradoxes of rock history: an esoteric megahit, a blockbuster arcanum....
Aimee & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943
by Edna Mccown Erica FischerA real-life love story between two women, one of them a Jew living illegally on the streets during WWII.
Hood
by Emma DonoghueIn the late '70's Irish convent school teenager Pen O'Grady fell in love with fellow student Cara Wall. Pen, an appealing heroine who is feisty yet vulnerable, and Cara, a free spirit who follows no path but her own, prove themselves to be up to the challenge of a love deemed unacceptable in Catholic Ireland. Their tumultuous relationship, full of love and passion and desire and flight, survives infidelities of all sorts--until they reach their late 20s, when Cara dies in a car accident. Through the elegant use of flashbacks intermingled with the harsh present-day reality of Cara's upcoming funeral, Pen reveals a sexy, beautifully written love story filled with the bittersweet reflections and emotional complexity of an intimate relationship. Above all, it is a graceful tale about coming to terms with loss.
Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801
by Emma DonoghueA groundbreaking work of lesbian scholarship, Passions Between Women discovers and brings together for the first time stories of lesbian desires, acts, and identities from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Where previous historians have concluded that a combination of censorship and ignorance excluded lesbian experience from written history before our era, Emma Donoghue has decisively proved otherwise. She dispels the myth that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lesbian culture was rarely registered in language and that lesbians of this period had no words with which to describe themselves. Far from being invisible, the figure of the woman who felt passion for women was a subject of confusion and contradiction: she could be put in a freak show as a "hermaphrodite," revered as a "romantic friend," or jailed as a "female husband." By examining a wealth of new medical, legal, and erotic source material, and rereading the classics of English literature, Emma Donoghue has uncovered narratives of an astonishing range of lesbian and bisexual identities in Britain between 1668 and 1801. Female pirates and spiritual mentors, chambermaids and queens, poets and prostitutes, country idylls and whipping clubs all take their place in her intriguing panorama of lesbian lives and revisionist and frankly sexual in its outlook, Passions Between Women boldly asserts that relationships between women were, more passionate than the "romantic friendships" oked by other scholarly works.
A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
by Emily W. SunsteinMary Wollstonecraft, author of the eighteenth-century classic, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a fascinating subject for biography. She did not march through life toward specific goals of feminism, but fought her way to personal independence with a passionate, stubborn intensity at a time when women--presumed inferior--were narrowly circumscribed by law, custom and religious belief. She demanded also a ration of happiness and sexual fulfillment, refusing to conform to the model of a submissive, decorative, domestically useful woman. Possessed of great intellectual ambitions, and largely self-educated, Mary Wollstonecraft rebelled against injustice everywhere she perceived it, and gradually became a political radical. Without money or family support, she yet refused to marry for security. In 1787 she went to live in London, where she supported herself by her writing, at thirty-three composing her great work and finding herself a famous and controversial figure. In private life she had never been able to find satisfaction, however; she desperately sought affection. After two disastrous infatuations, an illegitimate child, and two attempts at suicide, she fell in love with William Godwin, finally securing the domestic tranquillity and love she yearned for, tragically dying in childbirth a few months after her marriage. The question Mary Wollstonecraft's life poses is one of great interest today: What kind of life should a woman ask for herself? Mary Wollstonecraft wanted it all--career and family, independence and attachment, intellectual achievement and love. In A Different Face the complexities and contradictions of a remarkable woman are examined as the author, drawing extensively from Mary Wollstonecraft's own writings, endows the biography with the living voice of Mary Wollstonecraft herself. Excellently researched, it is a dramatic and readable biography, consistently fair to the courageous, exasperating and vivid personality of one of England's most extraordinary women.
Donny Hathaway Live (33 1/3 Ser. #117)
by Emily J. LordiIn January of 1979, the great soul artist Donny Hathaway fell fifteen stories from a window of Manhattan’s Essex House hotel in an alleged suicide. He was 33 years old and everyone he worked with called him a genius. Best known for “A Song for You,” “This Christmas,” and classic duets with Roberta Flack, Hathaway was a composer, pianist, and singer committed to exploring “music in its totality.” His velvet melisma and vibrant sincerity set him apart from other soul men of his era while influencing generations of singers and fans whose love affair with him continues to this day.
Gay Cuban Nation
by Emilio BejelWith Gay Cuban Nation, Emilio Bejel looks at Cuba's markedly homoerotic culture through writings about homosexuality, placing them in the social and political contexts that led up to the Cuban Revolution. By reading against the grain of a wide variety of novels, short stories, autobiographies, newspaper articles, and films, Bejel maps out a fascinating argument about the way in which different attitudes toward power and nationalism struggle for an authoritative stance on homosexual issues. Through close readings of writers such as José Martí, Alfonso Hernández-Catá, Carlos Montenegro, José Lezama Lima, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, and Reinaldo Arenas, whose heartbreaking autobiography, Before Night Falls, has enjoyed renewed popularity, Gay Cuban Nation shows that the category of homosexuality is always lurking, ghostlike, in the shadows of nationalist discourse. The book stakes out Cuba's sexual battlefield, and will challenge the homophobia of both Castro's revolutionaries and Cuban exiles in the States.
The Last Nude
by Ellis AveryInspired by real events in Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka's history, "The Last Nude" is a tour de force of historical imagination. Avery gives the reader a tantalizing window into a lost Paris, an age already vanishing as the inexorable forces of history close in on two tangled lives.
The Teahouse Fire
by Ellis AveryA sweeping debut novel drawn from a history shrouded in secrets about two women--one American, one Japanese--whose fates become entwined in the rapidly changing world of late-nineteenth-century Japan. When nine-year-old Aurelia Bernard takes shelter in Kyoto's beautiful and mysterious Baishian teahouse after a fire one night in 1866, she is unaware of the building's purpose. She has just fled the only family she's ever known: after her French immigrant mother died of cholera in New York, her abusive missionary uncle brought her along on his assignment to Christianize Japan. She finds in Baishian a place that will open up entirely new worlds to her and bring her a new family. It is there that she discovers the woman who will come to define the next several decades of her life, Shin Yukako, daughter of Kyoto's most important tea master and one of the first women to openly practice the sacred ceremony known as the Way of Tea. For hundreds of years, Japan's warriors and well-off men would gather in tatami-floored structures-- teahouses--to participate in an event that was equal parts ritual dance and sacramental meal. Women were rarely welcome, and often expressly forbidden. But in the late nineteenth century, Japan opened its doors to the West for the first time, and the seeds of drastic changes that would shake all of Japanese society, even this most civilized of arts, were planted. Taking her for the abandoned daughter of a prostitute rather than a foreigner, the Shin family renames Aurelia "Urako" and adopts her as Yukako's attendant and surrogate younger sister. Yukako provides Aurelia with generosity, wisdom, and protection as she navigates a culture that is not accepting of outsiders. From her privileged position at Yukako's side, Aurelia aids in Yukako's crusade to preserve the tea ceremony as it starts to fall out of favor under pressure of intense Westernization. And Aurelia herself is embraced and rejected as modernizing Japan embraces and rejects an era of radical change. An utterly absorbing story told in an enchanting and unforgettable voice, The Teahouse Fire is a lively, provocative, and lushly detailed historical novel of epic scope and compulsive readability.
Night Vision (Jane Lawless #14)
by Ellen HartMinneapolis amateur sleuth Jane Lawless tackles a terrifying case of a film star's stalker who reemerges to taunt his victim after years of silence.
Rest for the Wicked (Jane Lawless #20)
by Ellen HartDeAndre Moore came to Minneapolis from St. Louis with a purpose, but things aren't going as he planned. When it becomes clear he's in way over his head, DeAndre can think of only one person to call for help - his Uncle Nolan's business partner, newly licensed private investigator Jane Lawless. However, by the time Jane listens to his voice mail, she's hearing a voice from beyond the grave - DeAndre left the message only minutes before he was knifed to death outside a gentlemen's club. Soon his murder isn't the only one. With Nolan in the hospital, Jane sets out to find out who killed DeAndre, how his death is connected with the others, and what he was doing in Minneapolis in the first place. Rest for the Wicked is another outstanding addition to Ellen Hart's award-winning mystery series.
Sweet Poison (Jane Lawless #16)
by Ellen HartJane Lawless is at her wit's end keeping her Minneapolis restaurants running while volunteering on her father's campaign for governor. With an eleven-point lead, the race is Ray Lawless's to lose, but all that changes when his rival posts a list of violent criminals that are back on the streets early, thanks to Ray's work during his career as a defense lawyer. Corey Hodge is one of the convicts that took Ray's advice to plead guilty for a crime that he swears he didn't commit. Bitter from time served, revenge lurks in the back of his mind. Then one of Ray's young campaign volunteers is killed, and with the murder mirroring the crime Corey was convicted of, Jane has to bring the killer to justice to save her father's political career and to keep Corey from going to prison again. The high stakes and political intrigue that fuelSweet Poison, the latest in Lambda and Minnesota Book Award--winning author Ellen Hart's absorbing Jane Lawless series, make for an intense mystery of ambition and obsession.
Taken by the Wind (Jane Lawless Mysteries #21)
by Ellen HartPI and restaurateur Jane Lawless must track down two missing teenagers. Although Eric and Andrew have been trying to keep up a semblance of normal life, they know their thirteen-year-old son Jack has been having a tough time of it since they separated. They've been concerned, but now they're terrified--Jack has run away from home. It happened once before, just after the separation, but then it was only a matter of hours before Eric found him. This time, Jack disappeared with his cousin, and the two of them haven't been seen for more than twenty-four hours. Desperate, Eric and Andrew call on private investigator Jane Lawless, a friend of Andrew's from years ago. Despite the fact that her business partner, A. J. Nolan, is now in a wheelchair and struggling with depression, Jane agrees to help out. But after examining Eric and Andrew's home, Jane's first impression of the case isn't good--in fact, she's not convinced the boys ran away at all. She thinks they may have been abducted. . . or worse. Taken by the Wind, the latest riveting mystery from award-winning author Ellen Hart, is a race against the clock for Jane and the terrified parent of two missing boys.
The Cruel Ever After (Jane Lawless #18)
by Ellen HartThe shock that Minneapolis restaurateur Jane Lawless is in for when Chester Garrity, her ex-husband, returns to a city that he swore he'd never see again is nothing compared to Chester's own. After their divorce many years ago, he took off with his inheritance to travel the world, leaving Jane with enough seed money to open her first restaurant, which worked out well for Jane but less so for Chester. Now he's back and penniless, or as he would prefer to say, between fortunes. He's working an angle to make his next one by selling a priceless artifact recently looted from the Baghdad Museum, but it all falls through when he wakes up next to the dead body of his buyer with no memory of what happened the night before. Panicked, Chester flees the scene, eventually returning to cover his tracks only to find that someone has already taken care of that for him, but at what price? The Cruel Ever After, the newest Jane Lawless mystery from Lambda and Minnesota Book Award--winning author Ellen Hart, is filled with the intrigue and deception that makes it one of the most engrossing series on shelves today.
The Grave Soul (Jane Lawless Mysteries #23)
by Ellen HartWhen Guthrie Hewitt calls on restaurateur and private investigator Jane Lawless, he doesn't know where else he can turn. Guthrie has fallen for a girl-Kira Adler. In fact, he was planning to propose to her on Christmas Eve. But his trip home with Kira over Thanksgiving made him uneasy. All her life, Kira has been haunted by a dream-a nightmare, really. In the dream, she witnesses her mother being murdered. She knows it can't be true because the dream doesn't line up with the facts of her mother's death. But after visiting Kira's home for the first time, and receiving a disturbing anonymous package in the mail, Guthrie starts to wonder if Kira's dream might hold more truth than she knows. When Kira's called home again for a family meeting, Guthrie knows he needs Jane's help to figure out the truth, before the web of secrets Kira's family has been spinning all these years ensnares Kira too. And Jane's investigation will carry her deep into the center of a close-knit family that is not only fraying at the edges, but about to burst apart. InThe Grave Soul, Ellen Hart once again brings her intimate voice to the story of a family and the secrets that can build and destroy lives.
The Lost Women of Lost Lake (Jane Lawless #19)
by Ellen HartRestaurateur and part-time P. I. Jane Lawless is taking some much-needed time off at her family's lodge when her best friend, Cordelia, arrives with news that Tessa, one of their good friends, has taken a nasty fall and needs their help with rehearsals for a play that is set to open in a week. When Tessa isn't on crutches, she helps run the Thunderhook Lodge, the premier resort on Lost Lake. And while she clearly needs Jane and Cordelia's assistance, she isn't exactly acting all that grateful. A man who claims to be a journalist has arrived in Lost Lake with an old photograph and some questions for Tessa that go back decades. His questions have put her on edge, and when he shows up peeking through her kitchen window, everyone else is right there with her. As beloved as Tessa is, there are plenty of people who don't care about any so-called journalist and are happy to protect her, but how far are they willing to take it? And when will they need answers to questions that that only Tessa can provide? In The Lost Women of Lost Lake-the most engrossing mystery yet from Lambda and Minnesota Book Award-winning author Ellen Hart - Jane's only hope of protecting her friends from the secrets that are surfacing all around them is to uncover the whole truth before anyone else can.