2012 I fell in love with Russia from afar when I was a child. Fate brought me to live there from 1977 to 1980, and I continued a dysfunctional love affair with her culture. When I first wrote this memoir twenty years later, in 2000, it was an expression of hope. Hope had seen me through those three years in the Soviet Union, and I wanted to record that for whoever needed to hear it. In 2000, the USSR as we knew it had collapsed, and the Russian and Ukrainian citizens that I had known were facing the task of founding a democratic society for the first time in their histories. Now, a dozen years later, the task is still ongoing, and the news out of Russia is that voices from the people are being heard as never before. The older generation that I had met in the '70s had seen their hopes for a benevolent communism dashed. The bright young adults of that time, conditioned to serve the state, are having to ask questions and make decisions about their leadership that were never possible before. So much has changed. So little has changed. My little memoir seems timely again, another small voice from the street.

Set against the Russian Revolution of 1905, a prelude to that of 1917, this novel explores the complexity of relationships and motivations that lead to acts of rebellion. As Anna finds new purpose to her life and falls in love, the violent struggle against the Tsar escalates. On 9 January 1905, a workers’ protest is massacred by Tsarist soldiers

The life of jazz trumpeter Roland Bernard "Bunny" Berigan (1908-1942) resembles nothing less than an ancient Greek tragedy: a heroic figure who rises from obscurity to dizzying heights, touches greatness, becomes ensnared by circumstances, and comes to a disastrous early end. Berigan was intimately involved in the commercial music business of the 1930s and 1940s in New York City. Berigan was a charismatic performer, one of the few musicians in the history of jazz to advance the art. His trumpet artistry made a deep and lasting impression on almost everyone who heard him play, while the body of recorded work he left continues to evoke a wide range of emotions in those who hear it. Too often writings about the Swing Era skip over the interrelationship between the music business and the music that the giants of jazz created. In Mr. Trumpet: The Trials, Tribulations, and Triumph of Bunny Berigan, Michael Zirpolo takes on this difficult task, exploring connections between the business of music and contemporary music makers and the culture of social dancing that drove it all. Through detailed research and insightful analysis, Zirpolo rectifies many heretofore misunderstood events in Berigan's life and in the Swing Era more generally. In this panoramic examination of Berigan's personal and professional lives, Mr. Trumpet maps the great musician's role in what was a truly golden age of American popular music and jazz, offering close looks at some of his greatest performances and film work, comprehensive listings of all known broadcast recordings made by Berigan and his bands, as well as numerous previously unpublished photos of the great jazz artist.

This is a chronology of the most famous songs from the years before rock 'n' roll. The top hits for each year are described, including vital information such as song origin, artist(s), and chart information. For many songs, the author includes any web or library holdings of sheet music covers, musical scores, and free audio files. An extensive collection of biographical sketches follows, providing performing credits, relevant professional awards, and brief biographies for hundreds of the era's most popular performers, lyricists, and composers. Includes an alphabetical song index and bibliography.

Songwriters dramatically captured the details of how Americans lived, thought and changed in the first half of the twentieth century. This book examines 1033 songs about WWI and WWII wars, presidents, Women’s Suffrage, Prohibition, the Great Depression, immigration, minority stereotypes, new modes of transportation, inventions, and the changing roles of men and women. America invited immigrants and went to war to ensure democracy but within its borders, lyrics display intolerant attitudes toward women, blacks, and ethnic groups. Songs covered labor strikes, communism, lynchings, women voting and working, love, sex, airships, radio, telephones, the lure of movies and new movie star role models, drugs, smoking, and the atom bomb.History books cannot match the humor, poignancy, poetry and thrill of lyrics in describing the essence of American life as we moved from a rural white male dominated society toward an urban democracy that finally included women and minorities.

Build and extend flexible Drupal sites and applications with this up-to-date, expert guide to Drupal 9 module development Key FeaturesExplore the essential Drupal 9 APIs for module developmentLearn how to implement data modeling, caching, architecture, and much more in your Drupal applicationsDiscover what’s new in the latest Drupal core releasesBook Description With its latest release, Drupal 9, the popular open source CMS platform has been updated with new functionalities for building complex Drupal apps with ease. This third edition of the Drupal Module Development guide covers these new Drupal features, helping you to stay on top of code deprecations and the changing architecture with every release. The book starts by introducing you to the Drupal 9 architecture and its subsystems before showing you how to create your first module with basic functionality. You’ll explore the Drupal logging and mailing systems, learn how to output data using the theme layer, and work with menus and links programmatically. Once you’ve understood the different kinds of data storage, this Drupal guide will demonstrate how to create custom entities and field types and leverage the Database API for lower-level database queries. You’ll also learn how to introduce JavaScript into your module, work with various file systems, and ensure that your code works on multilingual sites. Finally, you’ll work with Views, create automated tests for your functionality, and write secure code. By the end of the book, you’ll have learned how to develop custom modules that can provide solutions to complex business problems, and who knows, maybe you’ll even contribute to the Drupal community! What you will learnDevelop custom Drupal 9 modules for your applicationsMaster different Drupal 9 subsystems and APIsModel, store, manipulate, and process data for effective data managementDisplay data and content in a clean and secure way using the theme systemTest your business logic to prevent regressionStay ahead of the curve and write PHP code by implementing best practicesWho this book is for If you are a Drupal developer looking to learn Drupal 9 to write modules for your sites, this book is for you. Drupal site builders and PHP developers with basic object-oriented programming skills will also find this book helpful. Although not necessary, some Symfony experience will help with understanding concepts easily.

This volume presents a unique study of war songs created during and after World War II, known in Russia as the “Great Patriotic War”. The most popular war songs, such as “Katyusha”, “The Sacred War”, “Dark Night”, “My Moscow”, “In the Dugout”, “Victory Day”, provide illuminating insights into the musical culture of the former Soviet Union and modern Russia. In the year of the 70th anniversary of victory in the war, the book studies the cultural heritage of famous war songs from a new perspective, exploring the historical background of their creation and analysing their lyrics as part of Russian cultural heritage. The book also discusses the modifications required when translating the songs from Russian to English. It concludes with a description an educational project studying war songs at Moscow schools run under the auspices of UNESCO.

"In this splendid volume, Richard Sylvester treats Tchaikovsky's songs with great sympathy and understanding, with special emphasis on relating the texts to the music. The songs are presented chronologically, interspersed with insightful observations about their relevance to the composer's life. This book will be welcomed by performers and scholars, but its fluent readability and avoidance of unnecessary detail make it easily accessible to the general reader. A welcome bonus is a CD with 22 songs interpreted by outstanding singers of at least two generations." --George Jellinek, author, critic, and host of WQXR's nationally syndicated program The Vocal Scene