From the internationally acclaimed author of The Book of Evidence and Ghosts comes a mesmerizing novel that is both a literary thriller and a love story as sumptuously perverse as Lolita. "A strange and dreamlike book . . . Banville has a breathtaking style."--Boston Globe.
The first volume of this engrossing biography was the winner of an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Biographical Study as well as a New York Times Notable Book for 1990. Here Sherry continues his fascinating account, emerging with a portrait of Graham Greene at the height of both his spying and literary careers. photos.
"This is an essential book for those interested in renaissance instrumentation as well as for potential players." --Early Music Review
"Sterling Scott Jones wrote a marvelous and very welcome work which can be warmly recommended to all musicians, musicologists, and instrument makers interested in early music, its instruments, and performance pratice.... This work is of the highest scholarly and, at the same time, practical value (which is extremely rare!): It certainly opens up a new era in the research and use of the lira da braccio." --RIdIM/RCMI Newsletter
"Sterling Scott Jone's exceptional book is... welcome as a practical study of the instrument, with its emphasis on iconography, and with its fingering charts, tuning instructions and playable musical examples." --The Consort: European Journal of Early Music
The 16th-century lira da braccio may be the missing link between the medieval fiddle and the modern violin. This is a brief history of the lira da braccio, a handbook for its use, and selected repertoire.
Vance Packard's number-one bestsellers - Hidden Persuaders (1957), Status Seekers (1959), and Waste Makers (1960) - taught the generation of Americans that came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s about the dangers posed by advertising, social climbing, and planned obsolescence. Like Betty Friedan and William H. Whyte, Jr., Packard (1914- ) is a journalist who played an influential role as the largely complacent 1950s gave way to the tumultuous 1960s. He is also one of the first social critics to foster and to benefit from the newly energized social and political consciousness of this period. Raised on a Pennsylvania farm, shaped by the New Deal at home and the rise of fascism abroad, and trained as a journalist, Packard turned to writing nonfiction books when he faced unemployment in 1956. In addition to his three best-known early works, his later books explore many of the forces shaping America, including invasion of privacy, changing sexual mores, the uprooting of families, and the rise of the ultra rich in the Reagan era. The titles of Packard's most famous works have become a part of our everyday vocabulary. Based in part on interviews with Packard, Daniel Horowitz's intellectual biography focuses on the period during which Packard wrote his major works of social criticism. Horowitz also traces the influence of the writer's early family life and education on his thought. Packard's life illuminates the dilemmas of a freelance social critic without inherited wealth or academic affiliation: the tension between making a living and sustaining independence; the problems posed by a dramatically fluctuating royalty income; and the impact of changing relationships with audience,publishers, intellectuals, academics, and new media such as television and the New Journalism. Packard's career also expands our understanding of how one era helped create the next, underscoring how the adversarial 1960s drew on the mass culture of the previous decade.
