High Art

Music composed for television had, until recently, never been taken seriously by scholars or critics. Catchy TV themes, often for popular weekly series, were fondly remembered but not considered much more culturally significant than commercial jingles. Yet noted composers like John Williams, Henry Mancini, and Jerry Goldsmith learned and/or honed their craft in television before going on to major success in feature films.

Pat Conroy was America's poet laureate of family dysfunction. A larger-than-life character and the author of such classics as The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, Conroy was remembered by everybody for his energy, his exuberance, and his self-lacerating humor. Michael Mewshaw's The Lost Prince is an intimate memoir of his friendship with Pat Conroy, one that involves their families and those days in Rome when they were both young - when Conroy went from being a popular regional writer to an internationally best-selling author.

Filled with logical yet counterintuitive answers to ordinary and extraordinary problems - whether it be buying a new home or pivoting a failing business model - Mudd's HEAD (High Efficiency Analytic Decision-making) methodology provides listeners with a battle-tested set of guiding principles that promise to bring order to even the most chaotic problems, all in five practical steps.

Complete Edition Containing Shadow’s Rise, Shadow’s Descent, and Lords of Light! Yip Chi Chuan, a young martial and spiritual ascetic, must flee as the only home he has ever known, the ancient monastery of the Priests of K’un Lun, is destroyed by a newly ascendant extradimensional evil. Cast out and alone, Yip strikes out on a quest spanning the breadth of his home world of Ea’ae and into the greater macroverse beyond in an attempt to unseat an all-consuming Darkness rooted in his once vaunted order’s distant past. Will Yip, the last of his kind to walk the wide world beyond his ...

El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo's bodies. The mystery of Rothko's refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator's husband receives chemotherapy. Alfred de Dreux visits Gericault's workshop; Gustave Courbet's devilish seascapes incite viewers "to have sex, or to eat an apple"; Picasso organizes a cruel banquet in Rousseau's honor.... All of these fascinating episodes in art history interact with the narrator's life in Buenos Aires.

In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo's key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo's beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood.

Just say know! With drug education for children more important than ever, this nonfiction book draws on the experiences of the New York Times best-selling father-and-son team to provide all the information teens and 'tweens need to know about drugs, alcohol, and addiction. From David Sheff, author of Beautiful Boy, and Nic Sheff, author of Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines, comes the ultimate resource for learning about the realities of drugs and alcohol for middle-grade listeners.

A compendium of quotes and riffs by P.J. O'Rourke on subjects ranging from government to fishing to apps, to be published on what would have been his seventy-fifth birthday.

Louis Bromfield was a World War I ambulance driver, a Paris expat, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist as famous in the 1920s as Hemingway or Fitzgerald. But he cashed in his literary success to finance a wild agrarian dream in his native Ohio. The ideas he planted at his utopian experimental farm, Malabar, would inspire America's first generation of organic farmers and popularize the tenets of environmentalism years before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

In Wild Things, Vanity Fair contributing editor Bruce Handy revisits the classics of every American childhood, from fairy tales to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and explores the back stories of their creators, using context and biography to understand how some of the most insightful, creative, and witty authors and illustrators of their times created their often deeply personal masterpieces.

In Is College Worth It?, William J. Bennett and David Wilezol assess the problems of American higher education at various levels, from runaway costs to inferior academics to poor graduation rates to political indoctrination, and propose serious reforms and alternative methods for improving higher education so that it better serves our students.

Growing up on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1970s, in an apartment filled with dazzling literary and artistic characters, Priscilla Gilman worshiped her brilliant, adoring, and mercurial father, the writer, theater critic, and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman. But when Priscilla was ten years old, her mother, renowned literary agent Lynn Nesbit, abruptly announced that she was ending the marriage.

The River Thames always gives up its dead.... There’s a killer picking off victims from the wild swimming spots on the upper reaches of the Thames. The case takes Detective Inspector Leo George into the path of Jess Bridges, a private investigator who lives life close to the edge. Their enquiries lead them to author, Jago Jackson, whose book on secret wild swimming spots has turned him into a social media celebrity. Is Jago’s book the blueprint that the murderer is following?

George Chakiris famously played the angry gang leader Bernardo in the film version of West Side Story (1961), for which he won an Oscar for best supporting actor. My West Side Story is an insider's look at how this theatrical and cinematic landmark evolved from a conversation in Jerome Robbins's Manhattan apartment between him, Arthur Laurents, and Leonard Bernstein to ten Oscars, three Golden Globes, two Tony Awards, and a Grammy.

In Fantasies of Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein examines the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, civil rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Stein outlines how Simone gave voice to personal fantasies through releasing dozens of covers of her white male contemporaries.

Solitude is the inspirational core for many writers, artists, and thinkers. Alone with our thoughts, we can make discoveries that matter not only to us but to others. To be solitary is not only to draw sustenance from being alone, but to know that our ultimate responsibility is not only to our partner or our own offspring, but to a larger community. Fenton Johnson's lyrical prose and searching sensibility explores what it means to choose to be solitary and celebrates the notion that solitude is a legitimate and dignified calling.

Had Hitler succeeded in conquering Europe, he would have crowned himself Holy Roman Emperor. The Nazis had in their possession priceless artifacts that would give Hitler legitimacy in his subjects' eyes: the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire including the Spear of Destiny, alleged to have pierced Christ's side at the Crucifixion. Looted from the royal treasury in Vienna, Austria, the Crown Jewels were hidden in a secret bunker deep beneath Nrnberg castle, known to few.

Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman's bold, perennially new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty - a poet, a New Yorker, and an American - keeps company with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet's life and work.

Christopher Hitchens was for many years considered one of the fiercest and most eloquent left-wing polemicists in the world. But on much of today's left, he's remembered as a defector, a warmonger, and a sellout—a supporter of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who traded his left-wing principles for neoconservatism after the September 11 attacks. In How Hitchens Can Save the Left, Matt Johnson argues that this easy narrative gets Hitchens exactly wrong. Hitchens was a lifelong champion of free inquiry, humanism, and universal liberal values.

Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love - with a place, or a painting, or a person - and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss - from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde - Larissa Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself.