Arts & Literature Books - Page 17

He Is . . . I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond

David Wild

Amazon Price: $16.50 List Price: $25.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Da Capo Press Amazon Marketplace: 49 new & used starting at $9.99

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> General AAS
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Entertainers

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

He is.., and I agree... 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Many times I have pondered the relevance of Neil Diamond in my own life and with the release of this book, it's like my head was cracked open and my own feelings emerged. Fans of Diamond will rejoice, as will fans of one of the most respected writers of our time, David Wild. A great read for all.

Editorial Review:

He Is . . . I Say examines Neil Diamond’s singular place in the pantheon of popular music and describes how an introspective kid from Brooklyn roads went from being a struggling songwriter in the Brill Building era to become a multi-platinum global superstar and the voice of a generation (or two). David Wild—who’s interviewed Neil Diamond for Rolling Stone, penned the liner notes to a number of Diamond’s anthologies, and produced Diamond’s scandal-free episode of Behind The Music—now dares to turn on his “Heartlight,” offering a moving and often hilarious salute to his own Jewish Elvis, one based on his interviews from over the years with the Solitary Man himself.

An illuminating snapshot of a beloved American icon , He Is . . . I Say endearingly speaks to the condition of being a Diamondhead in a hipper-than-thou world, while fully illustrating exactly what it is that makes the man and the artist so special.

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

Charles Seife

Amazon Price: $9.75 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin (Non-Classics) Amazon Marketplace: 54 new & used starting at $4.27

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Authors
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 134 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A concise and appealing look at the strangest number in the universe and its continuing role as one of the great paradoxes of human thought

The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. Now, as Y2K fever rages, it threatens a technological apocalypse. For centuries the power of zero savored of the demonic; once harnessed, it became the most important tool in mathematics. For zero, infinity's twin, is not like other numbers. It is both nothing and everything.

In Zero science journalist Charles Seife follows this innocent-looking number from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe, its rise and transcendence in the West, and its ever-present threat to modern physics. Here are the legendary thinkers--from Pythagoras to Newton to Heisenberg, from the Kabalists to today's astrophysicists--who have tried to understand it and whose clashes shook the foundations of philosophy, science, mathematics, and religion. Zero has pitted East against West and faith against reason, and its intransigence persists in the dark core of a black hole and the brilliant flash of the Big Bang. Today, zero lies at the heart of one of the biggest scientific controversies of all time, the quest for a theory of everything.

Readers of Fermat's Enigma, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Seeing and Believing, and Longitudewill find the revealingly illustrated Zero freshly informative, easy to understand, and--infinitely--fascinating.

Travels with Charley in Search of America: (Centennial Edition)

John Steinbeck

Amazon Price: $9.75 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin (Non-Classics) Amazon Marketplace: 59 new & used starting at $4.50

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Authors
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( S ) -> Steinbeck, John -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 188 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

State of the Nation 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck is on a journey to discover if he still knows the country he memorializes in almost all of his other works. Steinbeck manages to express in this memoir of his journey through America a whole host of emotions that many of us still feel today, a conflicting love for our country and disgust with our countrymen, appreciation for our past and worries about what we have become. Like all of his best works, the writing is natural, warm, and often funny. This is a beautiful book that captures America, both the good and the bad, in it's pages.

can't get much better than a Steinbeck 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Steinbeck's Travels with Charley was his last book I believe. This is a memoir of John Steinbeck's drive from Long Island, New York to the tip of Maine to California and back to Long Island. Of course it's well written, as you'd expect from any Nobel Prize winner in Literature, but it also captures that turbulent time in the early 1960s when Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to achieve Civil Rights and Khrushchev was banging his shoe in the United Nations.

Editorial Review:

With his dog Charley, John Steinbeck set out in his truck to explore and experience America in the 1960s. As he talked with all kinds of people, he sadly noted the passing of region speech, fell in love with Montana, and was appalled by racism in New Orleans.

Who's the Dummy Now?: Winner of America's Got Talent

Terry Fator

Amazon Price: $11.53 List Price: $16.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: New Holland Publishing Australia Pty Ltd Amazon Marketplace: 3 new & used starting at $11.53

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> Performing Arts -> Theater -> Puppets & Puppetry
Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> Performing Arts -> Theater -> Stagecraft
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Entertainers

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Who's the Dummy Now? 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This is a very insightful book. It tells what has made Terry Fator, Terry Fator. What he is today is because of his circumstances. It reminds us all not to let our past rule us. It was very welcoming to see that anyone and everyone can acheive success if we have motivation and if we have God on our side. It is really nice to read how one depends on God to help him through. One great book to read. I couldn't put it down. If you are lucky enough to meet this man, you will find that he is facinating and amazing man, not to mention a world class ventriloquist!!!

Editorial Review:

What happened to the boy who suddenly got everything he ever wanted?

He lived happily ever after.

Terry Fator overcame many odds—an abusive father, a peripatetic and isolated childhood, and decades of struggles—before winning America's Got Talent. In one year, he went from being a struggling entertainer to appearing on Oprah, Letterman and Ellen to sold-out shows in Las Vegas and signed as the major headliner on the Strip in Las Vegas at The Mirage. This is the story of the man with the million dollar voice.

Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America

Jonathan Gould

Amazon Price: $10.85 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Three Rivers Press Amazon Marketplace: 42 new & used starting at $9.52

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> Rock
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> History & Criticism
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> Musical Genres -> Rock

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Nearly twenty years in the making, Can’t Buy Me Love is a masterful work of group biography, cultural history, and musical criticism. That the Beatles were an unprecedented phenomenon is a given. In Can’t Buy Me Love, Jonathan Gould seeks to explain why, placing the Fab Four in the broad and tumultuous panorama of their time and place, rooting their story in the social context that girded both their rise and their demise.

Beginning with their adolescence in Liverpool, Gould describes the seminal influences––from Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry to The Goon Show and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland––that shaped the Beatles both as individuals and as a group. In addition to chronicling their growth as singers, songwriters, and instrumentalists, he highlights the advances in recording technology that made their sound both possible and unique, as well as the developments in television and radio that lent an explosive force to their popular success. With a musician’s ear, Gould sensitively evokes the timeless appeal of the Lennon-McCartney collaboration and their emergence as one of the most creative and significant songwriting teams in history. And he sheds new light on the significance of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as rock’s first concept album, down to its memorable cover art.

Behind the scenes Gould explores the pivotal roles played by manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin, credits the influence on the Beatles’ music of contemporaries like Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and Ravi Shankar, and traces the gradual escalation of the fractious internal rivalries that led to the group’s breakup after their final masterpiece, Abbey Road. Most significantly, by chronicling their revolutionary impact on popular culture during the 1960s, Can’t Buy Me Love illuminates the Beatles as a charismatic phenomenon of international proportions, whose anarchic energy and unexpected import was derived from the historic shifts in fortune that transformed the relationship between Britain and America in the decades after World War II.

From the Beats in America and the Angry Young Men in England to the shadow of the Profumo Affair and JFK’s assassination, Gould captures the pulse of a time that made the Beatles possible—and even necessary. As seen through the prism of the Beatles and their music, an entire generation’s experience comes astonishingly to life. Beautifully written, consistently insightful, and utterly original, Can’t Buy Me Love is a landmark work about the Beatles, Britain, and America.


From the Hardcover edition.

Magical Thinking: True Stories

Amazon Price: $15.56 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Macmillan Audio Amazon Marketplace: 28 new & used starting at $1.55

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Authors
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 166 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the number-one bestselling author of Running with Scissors and Dry comes Augusten Burroughs's most eagerly anticipated collection yet: true stories that give voice to the thoughts that we all have but dare not mention.

It begins with a Tang Instant-Breakfast Drink television commercial:

"Yes, you, Augusten. You were great. We want you." I can now trace my manic adult tendencies to this moment. It was the first time I felt deeply thrilled about something just a fraction of an instant after being completely crushed. I believe those three words "We want you" were enough to cause my brain to rewire itself, and from then on, I would require more than other people....- from Magical Thinking's "Commercial Break"

A contest of wills with a deranged cleaning lady. The execution of a rodent carried out with military precision and utter horror. Telemarketing revenge. A different kind of "roof work." Dating an undertaker who shows up in a minivan. This is the fabric of Augusten Burroughs's life: a collection of true stories that are universal in their appeal yet unabashedly intimate, stories that shine a flashlight into both dark and hilarious places. With Magical Thinking, Augusten Burroughs goes where other memoirists fear to tread.

A Fortunate Life

Robert Vaughn

Amazon Price: $17.13 List Price: $25.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Thomas Dunne Books Amazon Marketplace: 48 new & used starting at $14.44

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Actors & Actresses
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Entertainers
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A remarkable and delightful memoir of a life spent in the uppermost circles of acting, politics, and the world

 

Robert Vaughn was born an actor. His family worked in the theater for generations, and he knew from the very start that he would join them.  In his fifty-year career, Vaughn has made his mark in roles on stage, in film, and on television the world over. In A Fortunate Life, he describes some of the one-of-a-kind experiences he’s enjoyed in his celebrated career.             A Fortunate Life reveals the details of his early years in Hollywood, when he found himself appearing as often in the gossip magazines as on screen, and he recounts insider stories about such legendary figures as Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Charlton Heston, Oliver Reed, Jason Robards, Richard Harris, Yul Brynner, Elizabeth Taylor, and many more. Vaughn’s work in The Young Philadelphians, The Magnificent Seven, Superman III, and many other films won kudos from critics and peers alike. Worldwide recognition came when he starred in the smash hit series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and he vividly describes the extraordinary experience of becoming, quite suddenly, one of the world’s brightest stars. 
            Vaughn warmly recalls his romances with stars like Natalie Wood and his adventures with friends like Steve McQueen and James Coburn, but equally important was his involvement in the politics of the 1960s. The first actor to publicly speak out against the war in Vietnam, he served as national chairman of Dissenting Democrats, the largest antiwar organization in the U.S. He gave hundreds of speeches denouncing the war, debated William F. Buckley on national TV, and helped persuade his friend Robert F. Kennedy to run for president in 1968---only to see the race end in tragedy.
           With a wealth of moving, wonderfully entertaining and often jaw-dropping stories from the worlds of acting and politics, A Fortunate Life is a must-read for fans of Robert Vaughn and anyone who wants a glimpse behind the scenes of classic Hollywood.

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Vintage)

Neal Gabler

Amazon Price: $13.60 List Price: $20.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Vintage Amazon Marketplace: 47 new & used starting at $9.62

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> Design & Decorative Arts -> Graphic Design -> Animation
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Entertainers
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> People, A-Z -> ( D ) -> Disney, Walt

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 70 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Don't believe the hype! 1 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

What I have to say has already been said in several two-star reviews: for all its impressive length and alleged research, Gabler never gets a proper handle on Disney as either a man or a creative artist. The new Mike Barrier book is better. The old Richard Schickel book is better. The short chapter in Leonard Maltin's "Of Mice and Magic" is better. Heck, there are websites devoted to Disney that are better!

Somehow - I guess because of its length and sanctioning by the Disney organization - this has been annointed as the "definitve" Disney biography. But it misses by a mile. It's boring, pretentious, and very unsatisfying. You'll get much more of out the shorter, better-written book by Mike Barrier - a lifelong animation scholar who understands Disney in ways that Gabler simply can't.

Please believe me (as somebody who's read nearly everything about Disney, and has been a major animation buff/collector for 40 years) when I say that this disappointing book has been insanely overpraised!

Editorial Review:

The definitive portrait of one of the most important cultural figures in American history.

Walt Disney was a true visionary whose desire for escape, iron determination and obsessive perfectionism transformed animation from a novelty to an art form, first with Mickey Mouse and then with his feature films–most notably Snow White, Fantasia, and Bambi. In his superb biography, Neal Gabler shows us how, over the course of two decades, Disney revolutionized the entertainment industry. In a way that was unprecedented and later widely imitated, he built a synergistic empire that combined film, television, theme parks, music, book publishing, and merchandise. Walt Disney is a revelation of both the work and the man–of both the remarkable accomplishment and the hidden life.

Touch and Go: A Memoir

Studs Terkel

Amazon Price: $12.03 List Price: $16.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: New Press Amazon Marketplace: 45 new & used starting at $8.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Authors
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The extraordinary, widely praised memoir—"a masterpiece about a life which itself is a sort of masterpiece" (Oliver Sacks)

Chosen as a best book of the year in 2007 by the Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and Playboy, Studs Terkel's memoir Touch and Go is "history from a highly personal point of view, by one who has helped make it" (Kirkus).

Terkel takes us through his childhood and into his early experiences—as a law student during the Depression, as a young theatergoer, and eventually as an actor himself on both radio and the stage—offering a brilliant and often hilarious portrait of Chicago in the 1920s and '30s. Describing his beginnings as a disc jockey after World War II, his involvement with progressive politics during the McCarthy era, and later his career as an interviewer and oral historian, Touch and Go is a testament to Terkel's "generosity of spirit, sense of social justice and commitment to capture on his ever present tape recorder the voices of those who otherwise would not be heard" (The New York Times Book Review). It is a brilliant lifetime achievement from the man the Washington Post has called "the most distinguished oral historian of our time."

I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie

Pamela Des Barres

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Chicago Review Press Amazon Marketplace: 49 new & used starting at $7.48

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Entertainers
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> Women

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 58 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The stylish, exuberant, and remarkably sweet confession of one of the most famous groupies of the 1960s and 70s is back in print in this new edition that includes an afterword on the author's last 15 years of adventures. As soon as she graduated from high school, Pamela Des Barres headed for the Sunset Strip, where she knocked on rock stars' backstage doors and immersed herself in the drugs, danger, and ecstasy of the freewheeling 1960s. Over the next 10 years she had affairs with Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Keith Moon, Waylon Jennings, Chris Hillman, Noel Redding, and Jim Morrison, among others. She traveled with Led Zeppelin; lived in sin with Don Johnson; turned down a date with Elvis Presley; and was close friends with Robert Plant, Gram Parsons, Ray Davies, and Frank Zappa. As a member of the GTO's, a girl group masterminded by Frank Zappa, she was in the thick of the most revolutionary renaissance in the history of modern popular music. Warm, witty, and sexy, this kiss-and-tell–all stands out as the perfect chronicle of one of rock 'n' roll's most thrilling eras.