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  Joseph Haydn

  Jeremy Siepmann

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  No great composer’s story is more predominantly happy than Haydn’s, though even his has its share of clouds. A classic rags-to-riches tale, it sees him move from humble beginnings through decades as a liveried servant to his emergence as the most popular and successful composer of his time. One of the healthiest and least neurotic artists in musical history, he did more than any other single figure to pioneer the symphony, the piano sonata and the string quartet – and he was the first truly great practitioner of each. Brilliant, strikingly original and blessed not only with genius but an infectious sense of humour, he was also profound and modest, and his music, copiously illustrated here, has brought happiness and illumination to millions.

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  Tiny Dancer - The Incredible...

  Anthony Flacco

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  The astonishing story of a brave little girl from Afghanistan who not only survived horrific disfiguring burns, but was given a second chance at life.  Tiny Dancer is the amazing true story of Zubaida Hasan, a nine-year-old girl from the remote deserts of Afghanistan, who, in the summer of 2001, accidentally fell into a kerosene fire while heating water for a bath. Though she was horribly mutilated, her father refused to give up and exhaustively sought help to save his child.   When an American Green Beret soldier by chance sees Zubaida and her father on the street, he decides he must get involved. With assistance from many members of the US military, little Zubaida is given a second chance at life. She is flown to Los Angeles to begin a two-year journey through a series of surgeries performed by famed burn surgeon Dr. Peter Grossman. He and his wife, Rebecca, eventually take the child into their own home. This is a heartfelt and inspiring story of incredible courage equally matched by incredible kindness.   “Flacco’s depiction of Zubaida’s culture shock is remarkable. [His] empathy and ability to tell Zubaida’s story like he’s inside her head makes for an engrossing feel-good read.” —Publishers Weekly   “Interesting and affecting. . . . [A] genuinely moving story.” —Booklist  

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  Silk Parachute

  John McPhee

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  The brief, brilliant essay "Silk Parachute," which first appeared in The New Yorker over a decade ago, has become John McPhee's most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine other pieces here—highly varied in length and theme—McPhee ranges with his characteristic humor and intensity through lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird foods he has sometimes been served in the course of his reportorial travels, a U.S. Open golf championship, and a season in Europe "on the chalk" from the downs and sea cliffs of England to the Maas valley in the Netherlands and the champagne country of northern France. Some of the pieces are wholly personal.  
  In luminous recollections of his early years, for example, he goes on outings with his mother, deliberately overturns canoes in a learning process at a summer camp, and germinates a future book while riding on a jump seat to away games as a basketball player. But each piece—on whatever theme—contains somewhere a personal aspect in which McPhee suggests why he was attracted to write about the subject, and each opens like a silk parachute, lofted skyward and suddenly blossoming with color and form.  
  John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. The same year he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are.

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  Blank - Essays and Interviews

  M. NourbeSe Philip

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  Bla_K is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada's most important writers and thinkers. Through an engagement with her earlier work, M. NourbeSe Philip comes to realize the existence of a repetition in the world: the return of something that, while still present, has become unembedded from the world, disappeared. Her imperative becomes to make us see what has gone unseen by writing memory upon the margin of history, in the shadow of empire and at the frontier of silence. In heretical writings that work to make the disappeared perceptible, Bla_K explores questions of timeliness, recurrence, ongoingness, art, race, the body politic, and the so-called multicultural nation. Through these considerations, Philip creates a linguistic form that registers the presence of what has seemingly dissolved, a form that also imprints the loss and the silence surrounding those disappearances in its very presence.

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  Our Fellow Kentuckians - Rascals...

  James C Claypool

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  This fascinating volume profiles thirty-nine significant figures in Kentucky history, from Daniel Boone to Loretta Lynn, Muhammad Ali and many others.For years, Dr. James C. Claypool delivered an annual talk for the Kentucky Humanities Council entitled “Our Fellow Kentuckians,” which profiled a wide array of individuals with ties to the Commonwealth either by birth, residence, or family heritage. This volume expands on that famous talk, offering a rich and varied sampling of the personalities that have made Kentucky the place it is. From intrepid pioneers and statesmen to legendary athletes, inventors, entrepreneurs, and film stars, the selected individuals were chosen to represent the widest set of demographics. And as Claypool says in his introduction, “like a wine tasting, the sketches offered are meant to give readers a taste for more.”

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  The Yuletide Factor - Cause for...

  Tim Huff, Moira Brown, Anne...

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  The Yuletide Factor: Cause for Perpetual Comfort and Joy brilliantly rises to the level of Tim Huff’s previous best-selling and award-winning works, Bent Hope and Dancing with Dynamite, challenging a status quo population to look for, and become, “Christmas people,” every day of the year. But, make no mistake; this is not just “another” Christmas book, but rather one that will be equally at home in a springtime picnic basket or on a summertime dock chair as it will in a December stocking hung by the chimney with care. Beyond its exhilarating collection of seasonal short stories, The Yuletide Factor takes readers on a timeless journey, touching down when and where even nuances of the Christmas spirit have left indelible legacies, often at the unlikeliest of times and in the most improbable of places. Prepare yourself for an unpredictable adventure in faith, an unapologetic summons for goodness, a fascinating exploration of the human spirit, and a tender invitation to the soul.

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