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When Mattie Hart is diagnosed with ALS, her world is forever changed. Will she survive? And if so, how? Behind the shiny façade of her idyllic life, Mattie Hart feels as though she is gradually falling apart. After sixteen years of marriage, she has discovered that her husband, Jake, a high-profile defense attorney, is having yet another affair. But it is only when Jake finally confesses his infidelity and goes to live with his girlfriend that a far greater tragedy descends. Mattie is diagnosed with ALS, a neurodegenerative disease that severely affects her life expectancy and everything she holds dear. Racked with guilt over his wife’s diagnosis, Jake returns home to take care of Mattie. In this most daunting and unexpected of circumstances, Joy Fielding deftly reveals the astonishing power of love to defy the greatest odds and to heal the deepest wounds.

We are what we listen to. That's the premise of this study of 100 songs that have shaped and defined the American experience, from the Colonial period to the present. Well-known music author James Perone looks at 100 songs that helped tell America's story. He examines why each song became a hit, what cultural and social values it embodies, what issues it touches upon, what audiences it attracted, and what made it such a definitive part of American history and popular culture. The chart-topping singles presented here crossed gender, age, race, and class lines to appeal to the mass American audience. The book discusses patriotic songs, minstrel music, and sacred songs and hymns as well as music in the broad categories of pop, rock, hip hop, jazz, country, and folk. An introduction provides an overview of the history and significant issues raised by the songs as a whole. Individual songs are then presented chronologically, based on when they were written. The revealing commentary for each "hit" is not only interesting and fun, but reveals what it was like to live in the United States at a particular time by unveiling the social, economic, and political issues—as well as the musical tastes—that made life what it was.

This is the fifth novel portraying the life of a Lord family member, and it brings us up to date, well to 2010. Peter Lord is turning twenty-one, and as the heir to Fotheringham Manor he needs to decide both the future direction for the estate and a future for his own life. While pursuing his own future in green energy sources Peter tries an experiment on the estate to diversify the present list of activities. This change, this attempt to help a group of dis-advantaged teenagers by giving them a second chance, proves particularly challenging. Family and friends all rally round to minimise the damage and in so doing Peter unearths a previous unsolved mystery at Fotheringham. In the end Peter decides he intends to launch Renewable Energy Expertise as a producing and consulting company to help you help the planet. Quite some change from the rural woodland that was Fotheringham Manor in the last century.

(Book). It has been over 40 years since the untimely death of L.A.'s mystic and rock's Dionysus, Jim Morrison, yet the Doors have consistently inspired new generations of fans worldwide ever since. Highlighting one of the most influential, original, and outrageous American bands of the 1960s, The Doors FAQ is a dynamic, unorthodox exploration of this remarkable band and its enigmatic lead singer. Drawing upon unique sources, Rich Weidman digs deep and serves up fresh perspective on the music, from the garage to the hits to the outtakes; and on the band's members, from their roots, influences, and key industry partners to their rare talents, personal foibles, love affairs, and arrests. This volume also details every studio album and live recording, all the highs and lows of the Doors in concert (including the notorious 1969 Miami concert), Morrison's 40-day trial, and the death of the "Lizard King" in Paris in 1971, as well as post-Morrison milestones. Unlike the straightforward narratives of other Doors biographies, this inventive, ceremonious biographical collage leaves no stone unturned, covering the band both with Morrison and post-Morrison, including the 2010 When You're Strange documentary and the recent pardon of Morrison by the State of Florida for the Miami concert. Countless rare images from album art to ticket stubs to posters accompany the text, in this dazzling edition of solid rock scholarship.

Beautiful Monsters explores the ways in which "classical" music made its way into late twentieth-century American mainstream culture—in pop songs, movie scores, and print media. Beginning in the 1960s, Michael Long's entertaining and illuminating book surveys a complex cultural field and draws connections between "classical music" (as the phrase is understood in the United States) and selected "monster hits" of popular music. Addressing such wide-ranging subjects as surf music, Yiddish theater, Hollywood film scores, Freddie Mercury, Alfred Hitchcock, psychedelia, rap, disco, and video games, Long proposes a holistic musicology in which disparate musical elements might be brought together in dynamic and humane conversation. Beautiful Monsters brilliantly considers the ways in which critical commonplaces like nostalgia, sentiment, triviality, and excess might be applied with greater nuance to musical media and media reception. It takes into account twentieth-century media's capacity to suggest visual and acoustical depth and the redemptive possibilities that lie beyond the surface elements of filmic narrative or musical style, showing us what a truly global view of late twentieth-century music in its manifold cultural and social contexts might be like.

Cover -- Contents -- Introduction -- PART I. THE PRESTIGE COMBAT FILM -- 1. Movies and Memorials -- 2. Soundtracks and Scores -- PART II. DIALOGUE -- 3. Soldiers' Talk -- 4. Soldiers' Song -- 5. Disembodied Voices -- PART III. SOUND EFFECTS -- 6. Nothing Sounds Like an M-16 -- 7. Helicopter Music -- PART IV. MUSIC -- 8. Unmetered -- 9. Metered -- 10. Elegies -- 11. End Titles -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

As the lead singer of the Doors, Jim Morrison’s searing poetic vision and voracious appetite for sexual, spiritual, and psychedelic experience inflamed the spirit and psyche of a generation. Since his mysterious death in 1971, millions more fans from a new generation have embraced his legacy, as layers of myth have gathered to enshroud the life, career, and true character of the man who was James Douglas Morrison. In Jim Morrison, critically acclaimed journalist Stephen Davis, author of Hammer of the Gods, unmasks Morrison’s constructed personas of the Lizard King and Mr. Mojo Risin’ to reveal a man of fierce intelligence whose own destructive tendencies both fueled his creative ambitions and brought about his downfall. Gathered from dozens of original interviews and investigations of Morrison’s personal journals, Davis has assembled a vivid portrait of a misunderstood genius, tracing the arc of Morrison’s life from his troubled youth to his international stardom, when his drug and alcohol binges, tumultuous sexual affairs, and fractious personal relationships reached a frenzied peak. For the first time, Davis is able to reconstruct Morrison’s last days in Paris to solve one of the greatest mysteries in music history in a shocking final chapter. Compelling and harrowing, intimate and revelatory, Jim Morrison is the definitive biography of the rock idol in snakeskin and leather who defined the 1960s.