A DETERMINED GIRL ... Dindi can't do anything right, maybe because she spends more time dancing with pixies than doing her chores. Her clan hopes to marry her off and settle her down, but she dreams of becoming a Tavaedi, one of the powerful warrior-dancers whose secret magics are revealed only to those who pass a mysterious Test during the Initiation ceremony. The problem? No one in Dindi's clan has ever passed the Test. Her grandmother died trying. But Dindi has a plan.

This is the best-selling biography of the IRA resistance fighter and hunger-striker, Bobby Sands. In this updated, new edition, Denis O'Hearn draws from a wealth of interviews with friends, comrades, fellow prisoners and prison wardens, to provide a faithful and shocking insight into life in Northern Ireland's H-Block prisons, an exploration of the motivations and thoughts of the Republican strikers and the story of one of the world's most radical, inspirational figures.Following his journey from its very beginnings - an ordinary boy from a working-class background in Belfast to a highly politicised, articulate revolutionary whose death in HM Prison Maze sent reverberations around the world, Bobby Sands: Nothing But An Unfinished Song captures the atmosphere of the time and the vibrancy of the man: a militant anti-imperialist who held on to his humanity despite living through a bitter, ugly struggle.

At seventeen, Bobby Sands was interested in girls, soccer, and music. Ten years later he led his fellow prisoners on a protest against repressive conditions in Northern Ireland's H-Block prisons that grabbed the world's attention. After sixty-six days of refusing to eat, Sands died on May 5, 1981. Parliaments across the world stopped for a minute's silence in his honor. Bobby Sand's remarkable life and death have made him an Irish Che Guevara. Nothing But an Unfinished Song is the first biography to properly describe the motivation of the hunger strikers, recreating this period of history from within the prison walls. This powerful book illuminates for the first time this enigmatic, controversial and heroic figure.

THIS is a story of life among the Reformed Party of Bengal, the members of which have to some extent adopted western customs. It shows the change that touch with Europe has brought upon the people of India, but in their inner nature the Hindus are still quite different from western races. The ideals and traits of character that it has taken thousands of years to form are not affected by a mere external change. This story, it is true, touches on one side of Indian life only, for in a small book it is difficult to depict many of the numerous phases of our Society; still I trust it will give the western reader some insight into the Hindu nature.

Unfinished Music draws its inspiration from the riddling aphorism by Walter Benjamin that serves as its epigraph: "the work is the death mask of its conception." The work in its finished, perfected state conceals the enlivening process engaged in its creation. An opening chapter of this book examines some explosive ideas from the mind of J. G. Hamann, eccentric figure of the anti-rationalist Enlightenment, on the place of language at the seat of thought. These ideas are pursued as an entry into the no less radical mind of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whose bold idiosyncrasies, like Hamann's, disrupted the discourse of Enlightenment aesthetics. Bach is a central player here, his late music the subject of fresh inquiry. In several chapters on the late music of Beethoven, Bach reappears, now something of a spiritual alter ego in the search for a new voice. The improvisatory as a mode of thought figures prominently here, and then inspires a new hearing of the envisioning of Chaos at the outset of Haydn's Creation, aligned with Herder's efforts to come to an understanding of logos at the origin of thought. The improvisatory is at the heart of a chapter on Beethoven's brazen cadenzas for the Concerto in D minor by Mozart, another ghost in Beethoven's machine. Music seductively unfinished is the topic of other chapters: on some unstudied late sketches, finally rejected, for a famous quartet movement by Beethoven; on the enigmas set loose in several remarkable Mozart fragments; and on the romanticizing of fragment and its bearing on two important sonatas that Schubert left incomplete. In a final coming to terms with the imponderables of musical intuition, the author returns to Benjamin's epigraph, drawing together his foundational essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities with Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and with a draft for a famous passage in the andantino of Schubert's Sonata in A (1828). Unfinished Music explores with subtle insight the uneasy relationship between the finished work and the elusive, provocative traces of the profound labors buried in its past. The book will have broad appeal to the community of music scholars, theorists and performers, and to all those for whom music is integral to the history of ideas.

The life and times of Chilean folksinger Victor Jara, murdered in 1973 by the military after having worked to bring Salvador Allende into power and democracy to his country.

Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1. Lost -- Chapter 2. A Family Long Free -- Chapter 3. City of Sound -- Chapter 4. City of Dust -- Chapter 5. City of Song -- Chapter 6. City of Exile -- Chapter 7. The Lost Violin -- Chapter 8. Found -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

When we think of Otis Redding, we remember his classic hits, from 'The Dock of the Bay' and 'Shake' to 'Try a Little Tenderness' and 'Respect, ' a song we often forget that he penned before Aretha Franklin made it famous. We know his music, yet we know very little about his life, which ended tragically at the age of 26, at the height of his career. According to Jonathan Gould, that knowledge gap is a shame because, while Redding might not have been as gifted as Ray Charles or as smooth as Sam Cooke, Otis - not Marvin Gaye, not James Brown, not Stevie Wonder - is 'the purest distillation of what we talk about when we talk about 'soul.' Now, in this biography, we'll finally get a fitting look at the unfinished life of the man some call 'the King of Soul.' That said, this book is not just about Redding and his music; it is also about the times from which they emerged