eBook downloads, eBook resources & eBook authors
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.
(Limelight). An irreverent and engaging chronicle of popular music dating from the 1880s, when Tin Pan Alley was founded, to the present by a British-born songwriter and onetime pop star. "Brash, learned, funny, and perspicacious." The New Yorker
"After the Ball" is the story of the dramatic events of 1905, when James Hazen Hyde, the flamboyant young heir to the majority shares in the billion-dollar Equitable Life Assurance Society, became the central figure in the most far-reaching financial scandal of the era. 20 photos throughout.
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.
An inspirational and insightful guide for women who want to get it all by doing less. For women, a glass ceiling at work is not the only barrier to success - it's also the increasingly heavy obligations at home that weigh them down. Women have become accustomed to delegating, advocating and negotiating for themselves at the office, but when it comes to managing households, they still bear the brunt on their own shoulders. A simple solution is staring them in the face: negotiate with the men in their personal lives. In Drop The Ball, Tiffany Dufu explains how women can create all-in domestic partnerships that protect them against professional burn-out.
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.
At T-ball practice, Caleb is not very nice when the other children try to hit the ball, but when it is his turn, he finds that he is not much better.
Drawing on unpublished documents and oral histories, an illustrated examination of an iconic artwork of an artist who has made a lifework of tactical evasion. One wintry day in 1983, alongside other street sellers in the East Village, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He had neatly laid them out in graduated rows and spent the day acting as obliging salesman. He called the evanescent and unannounced street action Bliz-aard Ball Sale, thus inscribing it into a body of work that, from the late 1960s to the present, has used a lexicon of ephemeral actions and self-consciously “black" materials to comment on the nature of the artwork, the art world, and race in America. And although Bliz-aard Ball Sale has been frequently cited and is increasingly influential, it has long been known only through a mix of eyewitness rumors and a handful of photographs. Its details were as elusive as the artist himself; even its exact date was unrecorded. Like so much of the artist's work, it was conceived, it seems, to slip between our fingers—to trouble the grasp of the market, as much as of history and knowability. In this engaging study, Elena Filipovic collects a vast oral history of the ephemeral action, uncovering rare images and documents, and giving us singular insight into an artist who made an art of making himself difficult to find. And through it, she reveals Bliz-aard Ball Sale to be the backbone of a radical artistic oeuvre that transforms such notions as “art,” “commodity,” “performance,” and even “race” into categories that shift and dissolve, much like slowly melting snowballs.
William and Molly lead a life of small pleasures, riddles at the kitchen table, and games of string and orange peels. All around them a city rages with war. When the uprising began, William’s wife was taken, leaving him alone with their young daughter. They keep their heads down and try to remain unnoticed as police patrol the streets, enforcing a curfew and arresting citizens. But when an old friend seeks William out, claiming to know what happened to his wife, William must risk everything. He ventures out after dark, and young Molly is left to play, reconstructing his dangerous voyage, his past, and their future. An astounding portrait of fierce love within a world of random violence, The Curfew is a mesmerizing feat of literary imagination.
