John Peel is best known for his four decades of radio broadcasting. His Radio 1 shows shaped the taste of successive generations of music lovers. His Radio 4 show, Home Truths, became required listening for millions. But all the while, Peel was also tapping away on his beloved Olivetti typewriter, creating copy for an array of patient editors. He wrote articles, columns and reviews for newspapers and magazines as diverse as The Listener, Oz, Gandalf's Garden, Sounds, the Observer, the Independent and Radio Times. Now for the first time, the best of these writings have been brought together - selected by his wife, Sheila, and his four children. Music, of course, is a central and recurring theme, and he writes on music in all its forms, from Tubular Bells to Berlin punk to Madonna. Here you can read John Peel on everything from the perils of shaving to the embarrassments of virginity, and from the strange joy of Eurovision to the horror of being sick in trains. At every stage, the writing is laced with John's brilliantly acute observations on the minutiae of everyday life. This endlessly entertaining book is essential reading for Peel fans and a reminder of just why he remains a truly great Briton.

He became famous with Genesis but simply to call Peter Gabriel a pop star would be to sell him very short indeed. Peter Gabriel has pursued several overlapping careers; neither becoming a parody of his past self nor self-consciously seeking new images, he instead took his creativeness and perfectionism into fresh fields. In 1975 he diversified into film soundtracks and audio-visual ventures, while engaging in tireless charity work and supporting major peace initiatives. He has also become world music’s most illustrious champion since launching WOMAD festival. These, and several other careers, make writing Peter Gabriel’s biography an unusually challenging task, but Daryl Easlea has undertaken countless hours of interviews with key friends, musicians, aides and confidants. Updated and revised for 2018, Without Frontiers gets to the heart of the psychological threads common to so many of Gabriel’s disparate endeavours and in the end a picture emerges: an extraordinary picture of an extraordinary man. Extra features include integrated Spotify playlists, charting the best of Genesis’ output with Peter Gabriel, as well as an interactive digital timeline of his life, filled with pictures and videos of lives performances, interviews and more. ‘The peculiar, white-lipped dynamic between Gabriel and his erstwhile Charterhouse chums in Genesis is vividly evoked’ – Record Collector ‘A truly wonderful biography of one of the most amazing artists of our time. Highly recommended.’ – Douglas Harr, author of ‘Rockin’ the City of Angels’

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc explores the rise of youth as consumers of popular culture and the globalization of popular music in Russia and Eastern Europe. This collection of essays challenges assumptions that Communist leaders and Western-influenced youth cultures were inimically hostile to one another. While initially banning Western cultural trends like jazz and rock-and-roll, Communist leaders accommodated elements of rock and pop music to develop their own socialist popular music. They promoted organized forms of leisure to turn young people away from excesses of style perceived to be Western. Popular song and officially sponsored rock and pop bands formed a socialist beat that young people listened and danced to. Young people attracted to the music and subcultures of the capitalist West still shared the values and behaviors of their peers in Communist youth organizations. Despite problems providing youth with consumer goods, leaders of Soviet bloc states fostered a socialist alternative to the modernity the capitalist West promised. Underground rock musicians thus shared assumptions about culture that Communist leaders had instilled. Still, competing with influences from the capitalist West had its limits. State-sponsored rock festivals and rock bands encouraged a spirit of rebellion among young people. Official perceptions of what constituted culture limited options for accommodating rock and pop music and Western youth cultures. Youth countercultures that originated in the capitalist West, like hippies and punks, challenged the legitimacy of Communist youth organizations and their sponsors. Government media and police organs wound up creating oppositional identities among youth gangs. Failing to provide enough Western cultural goods to provincial cities helped fuel resentment over the Soviet Union’s capital, Moscow, and encourage support for breakaway nationalist movements that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Despite the Cold War, in both the Soviet bloc and in the capitalist West, political elites responded to perceived threats posed by youth cultures and music in similar manners. Young people participated in a global youth culture while expressing their own local views of the world.

Thoroughly researched history of one of Britain’s longest-established folk-rock groupsDetailed and comprehensive discographyEssential reading for any lover of ’70s and ’80s rock musicIncludes information provided to the author by surviving original members such as Rod Clements (leader of the current line-up) and Ray Laidlaw When singer-songwriter Alan Hull joined the group Brethren in 1969 and they were renamed Lindisfarne shortly afterwards, nobody could have foreseen that the name would still be around more than forty years later. It has been a chequered saga for them, from the members’ origins in the beat and folk boom of their teenage years, to their swiftly-won reputation as one of Britain’s most popular live attractions and the remarkable success of the chart-topping second album Fog on the Tyne, from the issues – which divided them into two camps in 1973 and a total disbandment two years later – to a reunion following two annual series of Christmas concerts in their native Newcastle and beyond. They survived the sudden death of Hull in 1995 and several changes in line-up until 2003, dispersing and then reforming again some ten years later. This tells the story of their long and colourful history, the ups and downs, and the singles, albums and concerts, which made them a unique name in popular music history. Illustrations: 35 colour photographs

Ben Franklin...Harriet Tubman...Lewis and Clark.... Share their inspiring stories through these fact-based, original plays. Includes background information, discussion questions, extension activities, and literature links. For use with Grades 4-8.

This daring speculative novel tackles terrorism and anti-immigrant hysteria, combining lyric intensity with the tools of science fiction.

The human, business, design, engineering, cold war, and tech story of how the Olivetti company's first desktop computer, the P101, came to be. Within eighteen months it had caught up with, and surpassed, IBM, the American giant that had become an arm of the American government. Secrest tells how Olivetti made inroads into the US market in 1959 by taking control of Underwood of Hartford CT as an assembly plant for Olivetti's own typewriters and future miniaturized personal computers. Within a week of the purchase, the US government filed an antitrust suit to try to stop it. In 1960 Adriano Olivetti died suddenly of a heart attack; eighteen months later the young engineer who had assembled Olivetti's team of electronic engineers was killed in a suspicious car crash. The Olivetti company and the P101 came to an insidious and shocking end. -- adapted from jacket

John Peel is best known for his four decades of radio broadcasting. His Radio 1 shows pretty much defined popular culture as it emerged and shaped the taste of successive generations of music lovers. His Radio 4 show, Home Truths, became required listening for millions. But all the while, Peel was also committing his laconic brilliance to paper, in articles and reviews for newspapers and magazines, his diaries and his letters. Now for the first time, these writings have been brought together. Selected by his wife, Sheila, and his four children, these writings amount to a second autobiography, telling the John Peel story as it happened. From his earliest journalism - and, as Peel admitted in the original synopsis of his autobiography: 'starting with crap pieces (opportunities for hilarious quotes from same "clouds are poems written in the sky")', he also wrote contributions for International Times, Oz, Gandalf's Garden and Disc and Music Echo, then Sounds, the Observer, the Independent, Radio Times and he was even briefly a correspondent for Bike magazine. Woven through these pieces are Peel's diary entries, letters and personal reflections from his family who are the subject of so many of them. This extraordinary, hilarious and moving book is a reminder of just why John Peel remains a truly great Briton and how much we still miss him...

From the first digital computer to the dot-com crash—a story of individuals, institutions, and the forces that led to a series of dramatic transformations. This engaging history covers modern computing from the development of the first electronic digital computer through the dot-com crash. The author concentrates on five key moments of transition: the transformation of the computer in the late 1940s from a specialized scientific instrument to a commercial product; the emergence of small systems in the late 1960s; the beginning of personal computing in the 1970s; the spread of networking after 1985; and, in a chapter written for this edition, the period 1995-2001. The new material focuses on the Microsoft antitrust suit, the rise and fall of the dot-coms, and the advent of open source software, particularly Linux. Within the chronological narrative, the book traces several overlapping threads: the evolution of the computer's internal design; the effect of economic trends and the Cold War; the long-term role of IBM as a player and as a target for upstart entrepreneurs; the growth of software from a hidden element to a major character in the story of computing; and the recurring issue of the place of information and computing in a democratic society. The focus is on the United States (though Europe and Japan enter the story at crucial points), on computing per se rather than on applications such as artificial intelligence, and on systems that were sold commercially and installed in quantities.

The Principal Chronicles is a collection of funny and poignant short stories that follow the arc of one man’s life and career in education. These works of creative non-fiction—or, to be precise, of semi-autobiographical, pseudo-non-fictional memoir—have been refined by many years of telling and re-telling to David Garlick’s friends, family and, especially, to fellow educators. Some stories, such as “You’ve Got to Eat a Pound of Dirt Before You Die” depict childhood and teenage hijinks. Others, such as “Elvis Presley and My Second Teaching Report,” deal with Garlick’s years in the classroom. Many stories, bearing such salient titles as “I Hate High School Swimming Pools” and “Sometimes—in Fact, Almost Always—They Grow Up,” detail his years as a high school vice-principal and principal. Garlick spins lively, engaging tales about the funny situations in which he has so often found himself, from his earliest years all the way to retirement and beyond. By turns candid, poignant, insightful, and surprising, and always gently humorous, these stories invite readers to laugh about humanity’s quirks and appreciate the many large and small ways that people show each other kindness every day.