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There is a mystery in a chapel, and a man who must find the answer. Heavy-drinking, chain-smoking, television pro Ian Graham just wanted a new paying job, but when he arrives at Scotland’s mysterious Rosslyn Chapel to shoot a dramatic for-TV documentary, he’s thrown a different fate altogether - one from 1307 to be exact. When he wakes up seven hundred years away from his own life, Ian must live as an initiate of the Order of the Temple, seek the forgotten truth of Rosslyn’s past, and escape the doom of the Templars before he can’t return.
The mysterious true story of Connie Converse—a mid-century New York City songwriter, singer, and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognition—and one writer’s quest to understand her life This is the mesmerizing story of an enigmatic life. When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converse’s voice on a recording, he was convinced she could not be real. Her recordings were too good not to know, and too out of place for the 1950s to make sense—a singer who seemed to bridge the gap between traditional Americana (country, blues, folk, jazz, and gospel), the Great American Songbook, and the singer-songwriter movement that exploded a decade later with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. And then there was the bizarre legend about Connie Converse that had become the prevailing narrative of her life: that in 1974, at the age of fifty, she simply drove off one day and was never heard from again. Could this have been true? Who was Connie Converse, really? Supported by a dozen years of research, travel to everywhere she lived, and hundreds of extensive interviews, Fishman approaches Converse’s story as both a fan and a journalist, and expertly weaves a narrative of her life and music, and of how it has come to speak to him as both an artist and a person. Ultimately, he places her in the canon as a significant outsider artist, a missing link between a now old-fashioned kind of American music and the reflective, complex, arresting music that transformed the 1960s and music forever. But this is also a story of deeply secretive New England traditions, of a woman who fiercely strove for independence and success when the odds were against her; a story that includes suicide, mental illness, statistics, siblings, oil paintings, acoustic guitars, cross-country road trips, 1950s Greenwich Village, an America marching into the Cold War, questions about sexuality, and visionary, forward thinking about race, class, and conflict. It’s a story and subject that is by turn hopeful, inspiring, melancholy, and chilling.
Blind, deaf and unable to communicate from a young age, Helen Keller was eventually taught to read, write and speak with the help of an extraordinary teacher. This lead to a flowering of creativity and imagination in Keller, who went on to produce dozens of memoirs, essays, letters, and stories. The Song of the Stone Wall is a book-length poem that details Keller's participation in the construction of a wall on the grounds of her home that made it possible for her to roam farther safely.
