Other books that might interest you

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  Economist Ken Rogoff On Whether...

  PBS NewsHour

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  The coronavirus pandemic is causing immense economic damage. The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits has surged as businesses nationwide close down and are forced to lay off workers. Has the country ever experienced anything like this? Paul Solman talks to Harvard University economist Ken Rogoff, whose book “This Time is Different” examines the history of financial crises.

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  The Fellowship - The Untold...

  Roger Friedland, Harold Zellman

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  Frank Lloyd Wright was renowned during his life not only as an architectural genius but also as a subject of controversy—from his radical design innovations to his turbulent private life, including a notorious mass murder that occurred at his Wisconsin estate, Taliesin, in 1914. But the estate also gave rise to one of the most fascinating and provocative experiments in American cultural history: the Taliesin Fellowship, an extraordinary architectural colony where Wright trained hundreds of devoted apprentices and where all of his late masterpieces—Fallingwater, Johnson Wax, the Guggenheim Museum—were born.Drawing on hundreds of new and unpublished interviews and countless unseen documents from the Wright archives, The Fellowship is an unforgettable story of genius and ego, sex and violence, mysticism and utopianism. Epic in scope yet intimate in its detail, it is a stunning true account of how an idealistic community devolved into a kind of fiefdom where young apprentices were both inspired and manipulated, often at a staggering personal cost, by the architect and his imperious wife, Olgivanna Hinzenberg, along with her spiritual master, the legendary Greek-Armenian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff. A magisterial work of biography, it will forever change how we think about Frank Lloyd Wright and his world.

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  Emmett Miller: An Obscure...

  Jack Norton

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  One of the strangest, most obscure, and intriguing stories from the last century of American music is that of Emmett Miller. He helped define the popular music of the last 75 years, and for the most part, today he is all but forgotten. Emmett Miller left many legacies which influenced the American musical landscape for generations. Certainly his singing style - the odd nasal pitch tone, along with the breaking of lines and bars in a song to a high yodel-like yelp - has been imitated by scores of singers since Miller first waxed his signature style to record in 1924. Jimmie Rodgers, Gene Autry, Lefty Fritzell, the Rhythm Wreckers, Bob Wills, Woody Guthrie, Howlin' Wolf, Leon Redbone and Bob Dylan all have been influenced by Miller's one-of-a-kind vocal abilities. Of equal importance was Miller's visionary fusion of blues and jazz, country and swing, black and white, comedy and crooning. 
  Whether he knew what he was doing at the time or not, Miller almost single-handedly tore down the strict boundaries of musical ideas of the era. Here was a young, white, Christian man from the south, singing hot-jazz and black music in the north. Performing as a blackface with some of the most influential jazz musicians of all time (Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, Eddie Lang, Jack Teagarden, and more). He created an entirely new style of country: pop. Country which swung. Country that was equally parts white and black, urban and rural. Country that was slurred through whiskey, girls, the road, and came out as the earliest forms of beatnik jive. Listening to Miller's music today, one can hear the startling sound of a man perfectly in sync with the present: he's influenced by the past, while he anticipated what was coming just around the bend. For fans of music history, musicology, Americana, country music, hillbilly, minstrelsy and vaudeville.

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  A Transport Journey in Colour -...

  Kevin McCormack, Martin Jenkins

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  Travel through the mid-twentieth century British Isles in this stunning collection of street photography featuring historic vehicles and buildings. 
   
  This remarkable book takes the reader on a nostalgic transport journey into streets throughout the British Isles some of which have hardly changed, except for the vehicles displayed, whilst others have been transformed or have, in some cases, altered virtually beyond all recognition. Hours of fascinating research using Google Street View has enabled the authors to indicate how their selected street scenes have changed and also how readers can explore these changes for themselves by accessing Google Street View. 
   
  The authors have managed to bring together some truly outstanding and often stunning images from a period when color coverage of transport subjects was in its infancy. As a result, the book includes many previously unpublished views taken between 1950 and 1975 the majority from collections held by Online Transport Archive, of which charity both authors are trustees. The richly varied street scenes depict not only buses, trams and trolleybuses but also people as well as railway locomotives, cars, lorries, vans, cinemas, churches, retail outlets and public houses. An absolute feast for the eye. Rich in variety and with a wealth of detailed captions. 
   
  “This is a highly readable and accessible book which will immerse the reader in scenes of a halcyon yesteryear. As the reader turns the pages, it would be understandable to feel mournful about the loss of manufacturers; coachwork builders, and the industrial scenes enclosed within. However, there is also cause to be thankful for the vision of the photographers to capture the everyday scenes which whilst no longer with us, have been captured and preserved for the benefit of posterity.” —Donna’s Book Blog 
   
  “A highly recommended read for all. Five stars.” —UK Historian

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  Ton-Up Lancs - A Photographic...

  Norman Franks

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  An updated and expanded photographic history of the famed military aircraft—and the men who flew them.   Aviation historian Norman Franks updates his classic book, The Lancaster, with new information and photos. The Avro Lancaster was a four-engine heavy bomber that played a crucial role in World War II, and this illustrated volume records the history of thirty-five of them, supported by stories from aircrew members.   The most famous of the bombers is “Queenie” (W5868), the only one of these Lancasters that survives, now in the Bomber Command Hall at the Royal Air Force Museum in London. Ton-Up Lancs delves into some of the controversies surrounding Queenie and other Lancasters, and also includes detailed listings of each raid these thirty-five Lancasters flew during from 1942 through 1945, together with the names of the pilot and crew that took them on sorties all over Hitler’s Third Reich and Northern Italy, on support missions before and after D-Day in June 1944, and attacks on V1 rocket launch sites situated in Northern France. The book also offers a view from one of the Lancaster’s former skippers on what it was like to fly a bomber tour of operations in Bomber Command.  

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  Constable

  Barry Venning

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  John Constable was the first English landscape painter to take no lessons from the Dutch. He is rather indebted to the landscapes of Rubens, but his real model was Gainsborough, whose landscapes, with great trees planted in well-balanced masses on land sloping upwards towards the frame, have a rhythm often found in Rubens. Constable’s originality does not lie in his choice of subjects, which frequently repeated themes beloved by Gainsborough. Nevertheless, Constable seems to belong to a new century; he ushered in a new era. The difference in his approach results both from technique and feeling. Excepting the French, Constable was the first landscape painter to consider as a primary and essential task the sketch made direct from nature at a single sitting; an idea which contains in essence the destinies of modern landscape, and perhaps of most modern painting. It is this momentary impression of all things which will be the soul of the future work. Working at leisure upon the large canvas, an artist’s aim is to enrich and complete the sketch while retaining its pristine freshness. These are the two processes to which Constable devoted himself, while discovering the exuberant abundance of life in the simplest of country places. He had the palette of a creative colourist and a technique of vivid hatchings heralding that of the French impressionists. He audaciously and frankly introduced green into painting, the green of lush meadows, the green of summer foliage, all the greens which, until then, painters had refused to see except through bluish, yellow, or more often brown spectacles. Of the great landscape painters who occupied so important a place in nineteenth-century art, Corot was probably the only one to escape the influence of Constable. All the others are more or less direct descendants of the master of East Bergholt.

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