Crosby, Holiday, Sinatra, Fitzgerald, Garland, and Streisand were the major interpreters of the American songbook, and this is the interlocking story of their lives and careers. Here is the epic tale of how these artists dominated American popular music over a fifty-year period, a roller coaster ride that gains momentum through the 1930s and '40s, reaches a crest of magical creativity in the 1950s and early '60s, and then crashes down by the early...

When Quaker Pastor Sam Gardner is asked by the ill Unitarian minister to oversee a wedding in his place, Sam naturally agrees. It's not until the couple stands before him that he realizes they're two women. In the tempest of strong opinions and misunderstandings that follows the incident, Sam faces potential unemployment. Deeply discouraged, he wonders if his pastoral usefulness has come to an end. Perhaps it's time for a change. After all, his wife...

"Some pieces of music survive; most fall into oblivion. What gives the ten masterpieces selected for this book their extraordinary vitality? In this magisterial volume, Harvey Sachs, author of the highly acclaimed biography Toscanini, takes readers into the heart of ten great works of classical music--works that have endured because they were created by composers who had a genius for drawing music out of their deepest wellsprings. These masters--Mozart...

Rabbitlike aliens from outer space colonize Earth during humankind's Second World War in a delightfully funny and thought-provoking science fiction adventure. The Quozl just need somewhere to call home. A gentle race of extraterrestrial rabbits, they have a propensity for reproduction that has left their home planet, Quozlene, dangerously overpopulated, and in their search for greener and less-crowded pastures, they have discovered the perfect place...

Spring bursts into bloom-and a whole lot more-as murder-by-arrow rattles Benteen County, Kansas. Nothing ever happens in Benteen County, Kansas. Then, on a perfect spring morning, a member of the reality TV program filming in a local pasture dies with a Cheyenne arrow in his back. Sheriff English's brother, Mad Dog, the county oddball whose Amerind heritage has produced a born-again Cheyenne, is a prime suspect. Murder is a bad way to start the day....

The literary establishment tends to regard Bob Dylan as an intriguing, if baffling, outsider. That changed overnight when Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, challenging us to think of him as an integral part of our national and international literary heritage. No One to Meet places Dylan the artist within a long tradition of literary production and offers an innovative way of understanding his unique, and often controversial, methods...

Seduced by the government's offer of 320 acres per homesteader, Americans and Europeans rushed to Montana and the Dakotas to fulfill their own American dream in the first decade of the twentieth century. Jonathan Raban's stunning evocation of the harrowing, desperate reality behind the homesteader's dreams strips away the myth-while preserving the romance-that has shrouded our understanding of our own heartland.

Legendary writing coach Jack Hart spent twenty-six years at The Oregonian and has taught students and professionals of all stripes, including bloggers, podcasters, and more than one Pulitzer Prize winner. Good writing, he says, has the same basic attributes regardless of genre or medium. Wordcraft shares Hart's techniques for achieving those attributes in one of the most broadly useful writing books ever written. Originally published in 2006 as A...

Disco began as a gay, black, and brown underground New York City party music scene, which alone was enough to ward off most rockers. The difference between rock and disco was as sociological as it was aesthetic. At its best, disco was galvanizing and affirmative. Its hypnotic power to uplift a broad spectrum of the populace made it the ubiquitous music of the late '70s. Disco was a primal and gaudy fanfare for the apocalypse, a rage for exhibitionism,...

In two previous highly regarded books on the US Senate, Ira Shapiro chronicled the institution from its apogee in the 1970s through its decline in the decades since. Now, Shapiro turns his gaze to how the Senate responded to the challenges posed by the Trump administration and its prospects under President Biden. The Founding Fathers gave the US Senate many functions, but it had one fundamental responsibility-its raison d'etre: to provide the check...