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A compelling and compassionate work that never fails to stimulate. After the Ball is required reading for straights interested in understanding a minority that comprises 10% of the population and for gays who ar learning that the revolution is far from over.
Set in 1905, against a backdrop of magnificence, excess and corrupting glamour, After the Ball's themes are stunningly fresh: greed and chicanery, flawed love between fathers and sons, and contradictory American attitudes about wealth. Glamorous, cultured and ambitious - but fatally young and naïve - James Hazen Hyde was twenty-three when he inherited the majority shares in the billion-dollar Equitable Life Assurance Society in 1899. Five years later, at the pinnacle of social and financial success, he made a fatal miscalculation, and set in motion the first great Wall Street scandal of the twentieth century. On the last night of January 1905, Hyde gave one of the most fabulous balls of the Gilded Age. Falsely accused of charging the party to his company, he was sucked into a maelstrom of allegations of corporate malfeasance that involved the era's most famous financiers and industrialists. “Wonderfully foreboding...exactly on pitch...a textured and compelling tragedy”—USA Today
First published in 1972, Ian Whitcomb's After the Ball is an exuberant account of the origins and explosion of popular music, informed by the author's store of experience in the field as a pop sensation of The Sixties. 'Brash, learned, funny and perspicacious.... The author of this free-wheeling, diverting history was a student at Trinity College, Dublin, when he created a rock hit 'You Turn Me On,' and experienced a brief, bewildering season as a touring rock celebrity. This book... is his effort to explain that experience to himself, and, well-educated man that he is, he goes all the way back to the first pop bestseller (in sheet music, of course), 'After The Ball,' and all the way forward to the 1960s.' New Yorker 'One of the best books on popular music to come along in the last few years.... Whitcomb's own involvement with music constantly surfaces to make the book both revealing and highly enjoyable.' Seattle Times
This award-winning novel tells the chilling, hilarious and touching tale of Percy, a seven year old boy in pre-World War II Hawaii, who creates ingenious ways of deal-ing with his parents' divorce in the face of an ancient Hawaiian curse placed on his family. This coming-of-age odyssey reads like a Salingeresque thriller of 1941's world of Hawaii, Hollywood film stars, movies, and celebrities of the day. You'll fall in love with little Percy, laugh at his escapades and cry at his misfortunes as he shares his quest to remove the ancient curse that he believes has destroyed his family, culminating with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Charles Kassel Harris was a well-regarded American songwriter and publisher of popular music. During his long career, he advanced the relatively new genre, publishing more than 300 songs. Hewas born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., into a family of ten children. His father was a fur trader and moved the family to Saginaw, MI, and Milwaukee, WI, where he grew up. As a youth, he wrote his first song, "Since Maggie Learned to Skate," in 1885 for the play The Skating Rink by Nat Goodwin. In 1892, he wrote his most famous piece, "After the Ball," a song about an old man recounting to his niece the story of his long-lost love. It caught the attention of John Philip Sousa, who played the tune at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, boosting sheet music sales to in excess of five million copies in the 1890s. "Break the News to Mother" - originally written in 1891 about a dying fire fighter - was rewritten in 1898 about a dying solder in the Spanish-American War and furthered his popularity. In 1895, Harris moved his music publishing operations from Milwaukee to New York City. Later, Harris wrote songs for musicals, working with Oscar Hammerstein the Elder. An innovative music publisher, Harris was one of the founders of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers in 1914 and also promoted copyright legislation that protected composers and publishers from theft of intellectual property and ensured that they were compensated for performance of their works.
To some sports is just a hobby. To others, it is a way of life. Athletics have become a primary component of American culture, as well as other cultures throughout the entire world. It provides principles of work ethic, leadership, teamwork, and unity. For the most part, fans can't help but appreciate the blood, sweat, and tears athletes shed during competition. Spectators should value the dedication that enables elite athletes to perform at high levels. Although championships can be fun to watch, one thing both athletes and fans should understand is that sports don't last forever. Seventy-eight percent of all former NFL players and 60 percent of all retired NBA players face bankruptcy or financial hardship within five years after retirement. The reason for these horrid statistics results from a number of different factors. The most common problem retired players face is their failure to develop a plan that will promote prosperity after they have played their last game. When the Air Comes Out of the Ball is an inspirational autobiography written by Gerald H. Inman, Jr. It serves to educate readers about both the glamour and rigor of professional sports. This will inspire young people to perceive and utilize their gifts as a window of opportunity to make their wildest dreams become reality.
"An award-winning author shares the inspiring and entertaining account of his pursuit to become a nationally competitive tennis player--at the age of sixty. Being a man or a woman in your early sixties is different than it was a generation or two ago, at least for the more fortunate of us. We aren't old.
A classic murder-mystery set among the struggling upper classes of 1920s Perthshire as, in the aftermath of the First World War, their comfortable world begins to crumble. Dandy Gilver, her husband back from the War, her children off at school and her uniform growing musty in the attic, is bored to a whimper in the spring of 1923 and a little light snooping seems like harmless fun. Before long, though, the puzzle of what really happened to the Duffy diamonds after the Armistice Ball has been swept aside by a sudden, unexpected death in a lonely seaside cottage in Galloway. Society and the law seem ready to call it an accident but Dandy, along with Cara Duffy's fiancé Alec, is sure that there is more going on than meets the eye. What is being hidden by members of the Duffy family: the watchful Lena, the cold and distant Clemence and old Gregory Duffy with his air of quiet sadness, not to mention Cara herself whose secret always seems just tantalizingly out of view? Dandy must learn to trust her instincts and swallow most of her scruples if he is to uncover the truth and earn the right to call herself a sleuth.
Owen loves playing ball. But it doesn't always "love" him back. And after a particularly disastrous day on the field, Owen is benched. He is feeling so low that he doesn't even notice the ball rolling through a hole in the fence until it's gotten away. In his effort to get it back, he discovers that he has more skills than he realizes.
