How does a fated love rise from a pleasant note to a passionate symphony? Budding musician Erin James knows all too well the noise of neglect and tragedy, and that her infatuation with her best friend Sheridan’s brother, Sean, is doomed never to blossom. For his part, Sean Murphy isn't in the market for a relationship. He's more interested in helping build his father's construction company. Even if he were, his sister's best friend isn't on his radar. Everything changes when Sheridan plays matchmaker. That night, a date quickly flares into irresistible passion. But as their love reaches a crescendo, personal tragedy threatens to end their harmonious, unlikely romance. When the music ends, will the lovers find a way to compose a life together? This book contains graphic sex and is not suitable for readers under the age of 18.

The New York Times bestseller "Blinder's book deserves its likely place near the top of reading lists about the crisis. It is the best comprehensive history of the episode... A riveting tale." - Financial Times One of our wisest and most clear-eyed economic thinkers offers a masterful narrative of the crisis and its lessons. Many fine books on the financial crisis were first drafts of history—books written to fill the need for immediate understanding. Alan S. Blinder, esteemed Princeton professor, Wall Street Journal columnist, and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, held off, taking the time to understand the crisis and to think his way through to a truly comprehensive and coherent narrative of how the worst economic crisis in postwar American history happened, what the government did to fight it, and what we can do from here—mired as we still are in its wreckage. With bracing clarity, Blinder shows us how the U.S. financial system, which had grown far too complex for its own good—and too unregulated for the public good—experienced a perfect storm beginning in 2007. Things started unraveling when the much-chronicled housing bubble burst, but the ensuing implosion of what Blinder calls the “bond bubble” was larger and more devastating. Some people think of the financial industry as a sideshow with little relevance to the real economy—where the jobs, factories, and shops are. But finance is more like the circulatory system of the economic body: if the blood stops flowing, the body goes into cardiac arrest. When America’s financial structure crumbled, the damage proved to be not only deep, but wide. It took the crisis for the world to discover, to its horror, just how truly interconnected—and fragile—the global financial system is. Some observers argue that large global forces were the major culprits of the crisis. Blinder disagrees, arguing that the problem started in the U.S. and was pushed abroad, as complex, opaque, and overrated investment products were exported to a hungry world, which was nearly poisoned by them. The second part of the story explains how American and international government intervention kept us from a total meltdown. Many of the U.S. government’s actions, particularly the Fed’s, were previously unimaginable. And to an amazing—and certainly misunderstood—extent, they worked. The worst did not happen. Blinder offers clear-eyed answers to the questions still before us, even if some of the choices ahead are as divisive as they are unavoidable. After the Music Stopped is an essential history that we cannot afford to forget, because one thing history teaches is that it will happen again.

A baffling murder on a remote country lane puts Alan Banks and his team to the test in the detective’s most intense and gripping case yet – from an author hailed by Louise Penny as “a writer at the top of his game.” With Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot investigating the young woman’s death, newly promoted Detective Superintendent Banks finds himself taking on the coldest of cases: a fifty-year-old assault allegedly perpetrated by beloved celebrity Danny Caxton. Now Caxton stands accused at the center of a media storm, and it’s Banks’ job to discover the shocking truth. As more women step forward with accounts of Caxton’s manipulation, Banks must piece together decades-old evidence – as the investigation leads him down the darkest of paths… Suspenseful, powerful, and surprising, When the Music’s Over is the finest novel to date from one of the foremost suspense writers at work today.

Presents the story of how French composer Olivier Messiaen was able to overcome the desolation of a World War II prison camp through the power of music.

A gritty and moving personal account of the struggle to provide humanitarian relief during Operation Restore Hope in war-torn Somalia. In 1993, Gareth Owen volunteered to go to Somalia with an Irish aid agency. Located in a remote desert outpost, he encountered the brutality of conflict and famine and experienced the hardships and struggles of an extraordinary race of desert warriors. He rubbed shoulders with the French Foreign Legion and Greek Special Forces and worked alongside a band of international aid workers striving to feed the Somali people. And as the country began to recover, he found himself losing connection with the Somalis as their resentment towards the international presence grew and violent confrontation erupted. In this accessible and engaging memoir, Owen, now Humanitarian Director at Save the Children UK, recounts the entanglement of violence and humanity at the heart of this notorious peacekeeping operation. This is a story of human resilience and contradictory friendships, of loyalty, courage and extraordinary endeavour — but mostly it is a story about the meaning of human connection in desperate circumstances. Part memoir, part history and part politics, When the Music's Over sees beyond the criticism of humanitarian intervention and challenges us to consider the enduring importance of international solidarity in a world where notions of common humanity and universal peace are increasingly being abandoned.

From its indefinite beginnings through its broad commercialization and endless reinterpretation, American rock-and-roll music has been preoccupied with an end-of-the-world mentality that extends through the whole of American popular music. In Apocalypse Jukebox, Edward Whitelock and David Janssen trace these connections through American music genres, uncovering a mix of paranoia and hope that characterizes so much of the nation’s history. From the book’s opening scene, set in the American South during a terrifying 1833 meteor shower, the sense of doom is both palpable and inescapable; a deep foreboding that shadows every subsequent development in American popular music and, as Whitelock and Janssen contend, stands as a key to understanding and explicating America itself. Whitelock and Janssen examine the diversity of apocalyptic influences within North American recorded music, focusing in particular upon a number of influential performers, including Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, John Coltrane, Devo, R.E.M., Sleater-Kinney, and Green Day. In Apocalypse Jukebox, Whitelock and Janssen reveal apocalypse as a permanent and central part of the American character while establishing rock-and-roll as a true reflection of that character.

This Will End in Tears is the first ever and definitive guide to melancholy music. Author Adam Brent Houghtaling leads music fans across genres, beyond the enclaves of emo and mope-rock, and through time to celebrate the albums and artists that make up the miserabilist landscape. In essence a book about the saddest songs ever sung, This Will End in Tears is an encyclopedic guide to the masters of melancholy—from Robert Johnson to Radiohead, from Edith Piaf to Joy Division, from Patsy Cline to The Cure—an insightful, exceedingly engaging exploration into why sad songs make us so happy.

"The best book yet about The Doors." --Booklist Now available as an ebook for the first time...the inside story of the Doors, by cofounder and keyboard player Ray Manzarek. Includes 16 pages of photos. "A refreshingly candid read...a Doors bio worth opening." --Entertainment Weekly No other band has ever sounded quite like the Doors, and no other frontman has ever transfixed an audience quite the way Jim Morrison did. Ray Manzarek, the band's co-founder and keyboard player, was there from the very start--and until the sad dissolution--of the Doors. In this heartfelt and colorfully detailed memoir, complete with 16 pages of photographs, he brings us an insider's view of the brief, brilliant history...from the beginning to the end. "An engaging read." --Washington Post Book World

Students of religion and Eastern thought will welcome this readable translation and practical commentary on the Uddhava Gita, a Hindu text in which Krishna's teachings introduced in the Bhagavad Gita are extended and nuanced. Krishna's Other Song: A New Look at the Uddhava Gita examines the entire Uddhava Gita in relation to other Hindu scriptures, especially the Bhagavad Gita, and shares its teachings in light of interreligious understanding and nonsectarian spirituality. This edition's elaborate commentary, written by a prominent American scholar of Hindu studies, who is also a practitioner, opens up the text's esoteric teaching to a Western audience for the first time, adding context and relevance that make the book accessible and its teachings practicable for a Western readership. A foreword, written by prominent Hinduism scholar Charles S. J. White joins the author's own introduction to lay out the Uddhava Gita's background, philosophical dimensions, and religious significance. This edition does not include the original Sanskrit, nor does it labor to translate each word verbatim. Rather, it gives the reader all 1,030 verses in plain English, offering accessible commentary that allows the meaning and relevance of the Uddhava Gita to unfold to one and all.