Brusque, inventive, an eccentric loner who created some of the greatest music of our time while getting rich as a New York insurance broker, Charles Ives was an authentic American original. In this major biographical study, the author explores the unlikely drama of the composer's life, from his boyhood in a Connecticut village to his later years when, ignored or derided by the musical community, he shut himself up in angry silence. Then, with a high order of scholarship and crisply edged authority, the author goes on to point out the intelligence and continuity of Ives's major works - the songs, the Concord sonata, the magnificent New England Holidays (which include his famous Fourth of July), and the rest - and to trace their roots in nineteenth-century popular music, in jazz, in the homely transcendentalism of Thoreau and Hawthorne's dark Puritan dreams. Writing with a musician's understanding and sympathy, the author makes plain both the frustrations of Ives's creative life and the inevitability of his ultimate recognition, long after his death, as America's most important composer. In its rich musical insights, in its portrayal of a complex and fascinating artist, this book is a striking contribution to American cultural history.

The Law of the Heart is a vigorous challenge to the prevailing concept of the “antidemocratic” image of the self in the American literary and cultural tradition. Sam B. Girgus counters this interpretation and attempts to develop a new understanding of democratic individualism and liberal humanism in American literature under the rubric of literary modernism. The image of the individual self who retreats inward, conforming to a distorted “law of the heart,” emerges from the works of such writers as Cooper and Poe and composer Charles Ives. Yet, as Girgus shows, other American writers relate the idea of the self to reality and culture in a more complex way: the self confronts and is reconciled to the paradox of history and reality. In Girgus’ view, the tradition of pragmatic, humanistic individualism provides a foundation for a future where individual liberty is a major priority. He uses literary modernism as a bridge for relating contemporary social conditions to crises of the American self and culture as seen in the works of writers including Emerson, Howells, Whitman, Henry James, William James, Fitzgerald, Bellow, and McLuhan.

“One of the most beautiful novels I have ever read.” —New York Times Book Review A stunning, powerful novel about a couple that pushes against traditional expectations, moving with their dogs to the Irish countryside where they embed themselves in nature and make attempts to disappear from society. It is the winter following the summer they met. A couple, Bell and Sigh, move into a remote house in the Irish countryside with their dogs. Both solitary with misanthropic tendencies, they leave the conventional lives stretched out before them to build another—one embedded in ritual, and away from the friends and family from whom they’ve drifted. They arrive at their new home on a clear January day and look up to appraise the view. A mountain gently and unspectacularly ascends from the Atlantic, “as if it had accumulated stature over centuries. As if, over centuries, it had steadily flattened itself upwards.” They make a promise to climb the mountain, but—over the course of the next seven years—it remains unclimbed. We move through the seasons with Bell and Sigh as they come to understand more about the small world around them, and as their interest in the wider world recedes. Seven Steeples is a beautiful and profound meditation on the nature of love and the resilience of nature. Through Bell and Sigh, and the life they create for themselves, Sara Baume explores what it means to escape the traditional paths laid out before us—and what it means to evolve in devotion to another person, and to the landscape.

This edition of one of Rocky Mountain Books’ bestselling hiking guides contains the latest updates to routes, trails and roads in the areas around Cranbrook, Kimberley, Creston, Invermere, Radium and Fernie, located between the Rocky Mountains in the east and the Purcell Mountains in the west, including the Akamina Kishinena, Top of the World, Elk Lakes, St. Mary’s Alpine and Bugaboo Glacier Provincial Parks. This volume will entice hikers of all abilities. As with previous editions, readers will continue to appreciate the author’s detailed descriptions and personal anecdotes, complete with colour maps and photos, related to one of the most stunning areas in western Canada. Janice Strong continues to enhance the outdoor experience for hiking enthusiasts from across the country and around the world.

'Home Geography for Primary Grades' is a textbook on the subject of geography for children studying at the primary level. Divided into 45 chapters, the book covers topics such as how water is changed into vapor and vice versa, how compasses work, useful plants and how to identify them, as well as forms of lands and water bodies.

Sourdough bread fueled the labor that built the Egyptian pyramids. The Roman Empire distributed free sourdough loaves to its citizens to maintain political stability. More recently, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, sourdough bread baking became a global phenomenon as people contended with being confined to their homes and sought distractions from their fear, uncertainty, and grief. In Sourdough Culture, environmental science professor Eric Pallant shows how throughout history, sourdough bread baking has always been about survival. Sourdough Culture presents the history and rudimentary science of sourdough bread baking from its discovery more than six thousand years ago to its still-recent displacement by the innovation of dough-mixing machines and fast-acting yeast. Pallant traces the tradition of sourdough across continents, from its origins in the Middle East’s Fertile Crescent to Europe and then around the world. Pallant also explains how sourdough fed some of history’s most significant figures, such as Plato, Pliny the Elder, Louis Pasteur, Marie Antoinette, Martin Luther, and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, and introduces the lesser-known—but equally important—individuals who relied on sourdough bread for sustenance: ancient Roman bakers, medieval housewives, Gold Rush miners, and the many, many others who have produced daily sourdough bread in anonymity. Each chapter of Sourdough Culture is accompanied by a selection from Pallant’s own favorite recipes, which span millennia and traverse continents, and highlight an array of approaches, traditions, and methods to sourdough bread baking. Sourdough Culture is a rich, informative, engaging read, especially for bakers—whether skilled or just beginners. More importantly, it tells the important and dynamic story of the bread that has fed the world.

Adopting and transforming the Romantic fascination with mountains, modernism in the German-speaking lands claimed the Alps as a space both of resistance and of escape. This new 'cult of mountains' reacted to the symptoms and alienating forces associated with modern culture, defining and reinforcing models of subjectivity based on renewed wholeness and an aggressive attitude to physical and mental health. The arts were critical to this project, none more so than music, which occupied a similar space in Austro-German culture: autonomous, pure, sublime. In Modernism and the Cult of Mountains opera serves as a nexus, shedding light on the circulation of contesting ideas about politics, nature, technology and aesthetics. Morris investigates operatic representations of the high mountains in German modernism, showing how the liminal quality of the landscape forms the backdrop for opera's reflexive engagement with the identity and limits of its constituent media, not least music. This operatic reflexivity, in which the very question of music's identity is repeatedly restaged, invites consideration of musical encounters with mountains in other genres, and Morris shows how these issues resonate in Strauss's Alpine Symphony and in the Bergfilm (mountain film). By using music and the ideology of mountains to illuminate aspects of each other, Morris makes an original and valuable contribution to the critical study of modernism.

The story of an Albanian mountain girl.