Up from the Cradle of Jazz is the inside story of New Orleans music from the rise of rhythm and blues through the post-Hurricane Katrina resurrection.

In 1915, Thomas Edison proclaimed that he could record a live performance and reproduce it perfectly, shocking audiences who found themselves unable to tell whether what they were hearing was an Edison Diamond Disc or a flesh-and-blood musician. Today, the equation is reversed. Whereas Edison proposed that a real performance could be rebuilt with absolute perfection, Pro Tools and digital samplers now allow musicians and engineers to create the illusion of performances that never were. In between lies a century of sonic exploration into the balance between the real and the represented. Tracing the contours of this history, Greg Milner takes us through the major breakthroughs and glorious failures in the art and science of recording. An American soldier monitoring Nazi radio transmissions stumbles onto the open yet revolutionary secret of magnetic tape. Japanese and Dutch researchers build a first-generation digital audio format and watch as their "compact disc" is marketed by the music industry as the second coming of Edison yet derided as heretical by analog loyalists. The music world becomes addicted to volume in the nineties and fights a self-defeating "loudness war" to get its fix. From Les Paul to Phil Spector to King Tubby, from vinyl to pirated CDs to iPods, Milner's Perfecting Sound Forever pulls apart musical history to answer a crucial question: Should a recording document reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve upon or somehow transcend the music it records? The answers he uncovers will change the very way we think about music.

Erin and Darcy, answering personal ads as research for a TV show, discover a whole new New York sub-culture - adulterers, con men, the shy and frankly weird, all looking for love. And one man looking for something darker . . . A serial killer who has just got away with murder for fifteen years, and has promised himself just two more . . .

John Doe and his infant daughter, Jane, appeared on the steps of the Manor the night the earthquakes started and the gateway to the Otherworlds closed. The people on the remote island of Bluehaven have despised them ever since, blaming Jane and her father for their exile. Fourteen years after that night, the largest earthquake yet strikes. The Manor awakens, dragging John into its labyrinth. Accompanied by a pyromaniac named Violet and a trickster named Hickory, Jane must rescue her father and defeat an immortal villain who is trying to harness the mythical power of the Manor.

The New York Times bestselling author of the Tradd Street novels explores a Southern family’s buried history, which will change the life of the woman who unearths it, secret by shattering secret. Two years after the death of her husband, Merritt Heyward receives unexpected news—Cal’s family home in Beaufort, South Carolina, bequeathed by his reclusive grandmother, now belongs to Merritt. In Beaufort, the secrets of Cal’s unspoken-of past reside among the pluff mud and jasmine of the ancestral Heyward home on the Bluff. This unknown legacy, now Merritt’s, will change and define her as she navigates her new life—a life complicated by the arrival of her too young stepmother and ten-year-old half brother. Soon, in this house of strangers, Merritt is forced into unraveling the Heyward family past as she faces her own fears and finds the healing she needs in the salt air of the Lowcountry.

The Listening Book is about rediscovering the power of listening as an instrument of self-discovery and personal transformation. By exploring our capacity for listening to sounds and for making music, we can awaken and release our full creative powers. Mathieu offers suggestions and encouragement on many aspects of music-making, and provides playful exercises to help readers appreciate the connection between sound, music, and everyday life.

Harp