Other books that might interest you

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  The Wicked Wit of Queen...

  Karen Dolby

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  The Wicked Wit of Queen Elizabeth II is a celebration of the Queen's reign through some of her wittiest, most sarcastic and most humorous observations, revealing a fascinating side of her personality that often remains hidden from the public.  
  
  
  When thinking of the Queen, our perception is often one of dignity and authority. She is seen as a serious figure: the British monarch, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and the head of the Commonwealth. But as anyone who has ever met her will tell you, in person she has wicked sense of humour. 
   
  
  Occasionally unintentional, like asking guitar legend Eric Clapton, 'Have you been playing a long time?,' sometimes sarcastic, and at other times downright silly, royal humour touches on every aspect of life, while always retaining a strong sense of dignity.

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  Bob Fosse: The Life and Legacy...

  Charles River Editors

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  “The time to sing is when your emotional level is just too high to speak anymore, and the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you feel.” – Bob Fosse 
  	By the turn of the 20th century, American entertainment was still preoccupied with European-style operetta, as embodied in the works of cellist-composer Victor Herbert. Traditional dance forms moved from European stories to the American prairie in Oklahoma by the late 1940s, and what was once the property of Bavarian princes became the singing standards of cowboys riding through the corn fields in Oh What a Beautiful Morning and Out of My Dreams.  
  	In terms of original choreography, it was the age of Jerome Robbins that marked the first real departure from traditional dance on stage and in film. Robbins, born in 1918, became a five-time Tony winner and twice winner of an Academy Award. It was into this environment, featuring his West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, The King and I, and countless other productions, that an intriguing new choreographer made his entry riding the advent of American jazz. Only 10 years Robbin’s junior, Robert Louis Fosse, better known as Bob Fosse, followed his colleague’s example by mixing daring new jazz forms with virtually every traditional and popular genre to produce previously unseen modes of dance expression on Broadway and in film. 
  In the 1960s, Fosse emerged as one of the leading dancers, actors, choreographers, directors, screenwriters and film directors on Broadway and in Hollywood. He became famous for conquering several fields on the musical stage and film simultaneously in a way that no one has before or since. It is said that “only Busby Berkeley compares” to Fosse despite the fact that Berkeley was never a dancer, and that Fosse enjoyed eight Broadway hits to Berkeley’s one.

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  Fink - It Isn't Until it Is

  Fink

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  Released alongside the band’s ‘Acoustic Best Of’ record, It Isn’t Until It Is, Fin Tim and Guy recount the first 10 years of the band’s history through words and memories. “3 men. 1 manager, 1 record company. The first 10 years. The first 5 albums. 498 gigs in 60 countries. We thought we should write something down about the whole trip before the sands of time washed out all the detail. There will be lies, truths, harsh realities and rose-tinted spectacles, but this is the way we’re feeling it right now… and we figure it's way more interesting this way…”

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  On This Day: August 5

  Emily Goldstein

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  On This Day: August 5. Daily podcast of historical and noteworthy activity on this calendar day. Death of Marilyn Monroe; birth of Neil Armstrong; the US, USSR, and UK sign the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty; cave-in at the San Jose mine in Chile

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  Memorial Drive - A Daughter's...

  Natasha Trethewey

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  An Instant New York Times Bestseller  
  A New York Times Notable Book  
  One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 
  Named One of the Best Books of the Year by: The Washington Post, NPR, Shelf Awareness, Esquire, Electric Literature, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and InStyle 
  A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy 
   
  At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. 
  With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother’s life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985. 
   
  Memorial Drive is a compelling and searching look at a shared human experience of sudden loss and absence but also a piercing glimpse at the enduring ripple effects of white racism and domestic abuse. Animated by unforgettable prose and inflected by a poet’s attention to language, this is a luminous, urgent, and visceral memoir from one of our most important contemporary writers and thinkers.

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  The Princeton Fugitive Slave -...

  Lolita Buckner Inniss

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  A study of the life of a Maryland slave, his escape to freedom in New Jersey, and the trials that ensued. 
   
  James Collins Johnson made his name by escaping slavery in Maryland and fleeing to Princeton, New Jersey, where he built a life in a bustling community of African Americans working at what is now Princeton University. After only four years, he was recognized by a student from Maryland, arrested, and subjected to a trial for extradition under the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. On the eve of his rendition, after attempts to free Johnson by force had failed, a local aristocratic white woman purchased Johnson’s freedom, allowing him to avoid re-enslavement. The Princeton Fugitive Slave reconstructs James Collins Johnson’s life, from birth and enslaved life in Maryland to his daring escape, sensational trial for re-enslavement, and last-minute change of fortune, and through to the end of his life in Princeton, where he remained a figure of local fascination. 
   
  Stories of Johnson’s life in Princeton often describe him as a contented, jovial soul, beloved on campus and memorialized on his gravestone as “The Students Friend.” But these familiar accounts come from student writings and sentimental recollections in alumni reports—stories from elite, predominantly white, often southern sources whose relationships with Johnson were hopelessly distorted by differences in race and social standing. In interrogating these stories against archival records, newspaper accounts, courtroom narratives, photographs, and family histories, author Lolita Buckner Inniss builds a picture of Johnson on his own terms, piecing together the sparse evidence and disaggregating him from the other black vendors with whom he was sometimes confused. 
   
  By telling Johnson’s story and examining the relationship between antebellum Princeton’s Black residents and the economic engine that supported their community, the book questions the distinction between employment and servitude that shrinks and threatens to disappear when an individual’s freedom is circumscribed by immobility, lack of opportunity, and contingency on local interpretations of a hotly contested body of law. 
   
  Praise for The Princeton Fugitive Slave 
   
  “Fascinating historical detective work . . . Deeply researched, the book overturns any lingering idea that Princeton was a haven from the broader society. Johnson had to cope with the casual racism of students, occasional eruptions of racial violence in town and the ubiquitous use of the N-word by even the supposedly educated. This book contributes to our understanding of slavery’s legacy today.” —Shane White, author of Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street's First Black Millionaire 
   
  “Collectively, Inniss’s work provides an exciting model for future scholars of slavery and labor. Perhaps most importantly, Inniss skillfully and compassionately restores Johnson's voice to his own historical narrative.” —G. Patrick O'Brien, H-Slavery

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