A complete step-by-step guide, Secrets of Singing provides everything needed to gain technical and musical vocal mastery. Some of the highlights include: basic principles of singing, mastery of the upper voice, achieving the power of an open throat, and phrasing and diction on a professional level. The package contains two CDs (one for high voice and one for low voice) and an almost 400-page information-packed book.

In this toe-tapping jazz tribute, the traditional "This Old Man" gets a swinging makeover, and some of the era's best musicians take center stage. The tuneful text and vibrant illustrations bop, slide, and shimmy across the page as Satchmo plays one, Bojangles plays two . . . right on down the line to Charles Mingus, who plays nine, plucking strings that sound "divine." Easy on the ear and the eye, this playful introduction to nine jazz giants will teach children to count--and will give them every reason to get up and dance! Includes a brief biography of each musician.

"Like many other South American Indian communities, the Suya Indians of Mato Grosso, Brazil, devote a great deal of time and energy to making music, especially singing. In paperback for the first time, Anthony Seeger's Why Suya Sing considers the reasons for the importance of music for the Suya - and by extension for other groups - through an examination of myth telling, speech making, and singing in an initiation ceremony." "This new paperback edition features a CD offering examples of the myth telling, speeches, and singing discussed, as well as a new afterword that describes the continuing use of music by the Suya in their recent conflicts with cattle ranchers and soybean farmers." -- Prové de l'editor.

This was the summer he discovered what he wanted--at a gruesome museum of criminology far off the beaten track of more timid tourists. Visions of torture inspired his fantasies like a muse. It would prove so terribly fulfilling. The bodies of four men have been discovered in the town of Bradfield. Enlisted to investigate is criminal psychologist Tony Hill. Even for a seasoned professional, the series of mutilation sex murders is unlike anything he's encountered before. But profiling the psychopath is not beyond him. Hill's own past has made him the perfect man to comprehend the killer's motives. It's also made him the perfect victim. A game has begun for the hunter and the hunted. But as Hill confronts his own hidden demons, he must also come face-to-face with an evil so profound he may not have the courage--or the power--to stop it... The Mermaids Singing is a chilling and taut psychological mystery from Val McDermid.

The sketches in this book and in my previous one, "The Cross at the Front," are attempts to show the soul of the soldier serving in France as I have seen it during the year and a half that I have been with him. It is a padre's privilege and duty to be the voice with which, in public worship, the soldiers speak to God; and through which their last thoughts are borne to their friends at home. He is their voice both when they are sick or wounded, and when they lie silent in the grave. He speaks of their hopes and fears, hardships and heroisms, laughter and tears. As best he may he tries to tell, to those who have a right and a longing to know, how they thought, and how they bore themselves in the great day of trial when all risked their lives and many laid them down. Soldiers, as a rule, are either inarticulate or do not care to speak of themselves; and the padre has to be their spokesman if ever their deeper thoughts and finer actions are to be known to their friends. To do this he may have to bring himself into the picture, or even illustrate a common thing in their lives by a personal experience of his own. To reveal life and thought at the Front in the third person, and without sacrificing truth and vividness, requires a degree of literary power and art which cannot be expected of a padre to whom writing is but a by-product, and not his main work. I have written but little of military operations--these things are not in my province. Moreover, they are not the things which are most revealing. The presence of Spring is first and most surely revealed by the flowers in our gardens and lanes; and the soldier is most clearly seen in the little things that happen on the march--in his billet or in the Dressing Station. Some things are not seen at all. They are only felt, and my opinion about them must be taken for what it is worth. One knows what the men are by their influence on one's own mind and life. I do not judge the morality and spirituality of our soldiers entirely by their habits and speech, for these are but outward and clumsy expressions of the inner life and are largely conventional. There is something else to put in the reckoning, and to find out what the soldiers are worth to us we must somehow get behind their words and actions and find out what they are worth to God, whose terrible wheel of war is shaping their characters. I appraise them mostly by the total effect of the impact of their souls on mine. I know their thoughts and feelings by the thoughts and feelings they inspire in me. "Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles?" There are certain thoughts and emotions that only come to me strongly when I am with the soldiers or when I am living again with them in memory, and so, I take these as their gift to me and judge the men by their influence on my character. Character is, in its influence, subtle as Spring. Words and actions by themselves are too coarse and conventional to do anything but mislead us in judging the quality of our men. "By their fruits ye shall know them." Not by their leaves. Fruit is seed. In the seed the tree reproduces itself. And reproduction, whether in physical, moral or spiritual life, is the test of vitality. To be continue in this ebook...

Though she died penniless and forgotten, Zora Neale Hurston is now recognized as a major figure in African American literature. Best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she also published numerous short stories and essays, three other novels, and two books on black folklore. Even avid readers of Hurston’s prose, however, may be surprised to know that she was also a serious and ambitious playwright throughout her career. Although several of her plays were produced during her lifetime—and some to public acclaim—they have languished in obscurity for years. Even now, most critics and historians gloss over these texts, treating them as supplementary material for understanding her novels. Yet, Hurston’s dramatic works stand on their own merits and independently of her fiction. Now, eleven of these forgotten dramatic writings are being published together for the first time in this carefully edited and annotated volume. Filled with lively characters, vibrant images of rural and city life, biblical and folk tales, voodoo, and, most importantly, the blues, readers will discover a “real Negro theater” that embraces all the richness of black life.

Another masterpiece from Jane Gardam and the second novel in the Old Filth trilogy 'She does fiction as it should be done, with confidence and insight' CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE 'Witty, subversive, moving' THE TIMES 'Full of the humour and eccentricity that have made Gardam one of the most enjoyable novelists writing today' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY Old Filth told the story of Sir Edward (Eddie) Feathers QC, aka Filth, his colonial upbringing and career, his long and comfortable marriage, his rivalries and friendships. The Man in the Wooden Hat picks up these threads from the perspective of Filth's wife, Betty. An orphan of the Japanese internment camps, a free spirit, a clever code-breaker at Bletchley Park, Betty has her own secret passions. No wonder she is drawn to Filth's hated rival at the Bar, the brash, forceful Veneering.