Biography: general Books
MD - Duke University Press Songs of the Unsung
Book SynopsisAn autobiography of Los Angeles jazz musician and activist Horace Tapscott (1934-1999). It covers his early life in segregated Houston, his move to California in 1943, life as a player in the Air Force band in the early fifties, and his travels with the Lionel Hampton Band.Trade Review"Songs of the Unsung is one of those special autobiographical narratives that comes along once in a while, and successfully captivates its reading audience with the complete candor of the person telling the story! This is an important sociological document, for it tells the life of Horace Tapscott, one of the most unique figures in the jazz of Black Los Angeles. . . . What is most unique about Songs of the Unsung is that it reveals a man who not only lived jazz, but contributed to it in meaningful ways, and was a walking masterpiece of the personal philosophy he advocated. He lived to teach, help others, perform, create. Horace Tapscott succeeded at each. Songs of the Unsung lets the reader see how he did it. Songs of the Unsung is excellent reading. This book entertains and enlightens at the same time, and is a fine reading experience!" -- Lee Prosser * Jazz Review *"Songs of the Unsung offers a glimpse into the life of a jazz musician who resolved not to abandon the place where he started out—the streets of South-Central." -- Jonathan Kirsch * Los Angeles Times *"[A] raw, intimate autobiography of L.A. free jazz pianist, trombonist, and composer Tapscott. . . . [T]his retrospective will enable jazz enthusiasts to revel in the life of a unique and talented underground musician. . . ." * Publishers Weekly *"[Isoardi] preserves Tapscott's part-preacher, part-hipster patois—in which, for example, he inflects the word 'out' to describe free jazz, police brutality, injustice, good luck, violent rage, unexpected generosity, spontaneous affection and insanity. Songs of the Unsung is a witness to hope, one man's determination to create art of lasting value and the power of music to connect people. It is, in the profoundest sense, 'out' " -- Jim Gerard * Washington Post *"[O]ffers fascinating insights into Tapscott's work as a composer and bandleader, as well as his memories of L.A. during the turbulent 1960s." -- Aaron Cohen * DownBeat *"A valuable firsthand account of American music and culture that will make a welcome addition to any collection." * Library Journal *"Horace Tapscott . . . emerges as an eternal symbol of all that is noble in the music in transition community. This highly advanced theme emerges from a detailed life history that is nothing short of stunning. . . . Songs of the Unsung is an important statement in the philosophy of improvised music. Highly recommended." -- James D. Armstrong, Jr. * Jazz Now *"Isoardi has done a fine job of preserving Tapscott's voice—the narrative is fluent, conversational in tone and packed with both colourful incident and tart social commentary. . . . [A]s a gripping account of a quietly heroic life, and as a rare document about the West Coast’s black cultural underground, Songs of the Unsung is essential reading." -- Graham Lock * Jazzwise *"Page after page, Tapscott offhandedly knocks down stereotypes about African-American communities, like pines behind an eruption. . . . Tapscott's controversial narrative, filled with stories about 'the cats' and their 'out' behavior is fascinating. . . . But more valuable than the book’s entertainment quotient is its map of possibilities." -- Greg Burk * LA Weekly *"The details and local lore of Songs are beautifully rendered, and Tapscott’s modesty and perseverance are qualities to behold." -- Hua Hsu * The Wire *"Songs of the Unsung . . . sets forth an astonishing, searingly honest view of one segment of music history that is indeed unsung. . . . [The] memoir reminds us with stunning candor that too much has happened under the radar of the jazz industry. . . . We need more books like Songs of the Unsung, by which we can come to understand creative musicians as agents of change at home, effecting local pockets of activity with universal ramifications. For Tapscott provides us with an unwritten truth behind this radically unfinished music called jazz." -- Vijay Iyer * Current Musicology *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Foreword / Steven Isoardi xi Preface xiii 1. Early Years in Houston 1 2. California 17 3. Setting the Pace 31 4. Central Avenue 42 5. Military Service 51 6. On the Road with Lionel Hampton 70 7. To Preserve and Develop Black Culture 82 8. The Fire This Time 105 9. In the Middle of It 117 10. Stayin’ Alive 125 11. The Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension 136 12. Settling into the Community 147 13. Movements to the Present 173 14. Reflections and Directions 187 Postscript: From the Funeral Service 213 Appendix: A Partial List of UGMAA Artists, 1961–1998 217 Discography I: Horace Tapscott 221 Discography II: Music from the Ark 236 Index 241
£40.50
MP-NCA Uni of North Carolina Free Joan Little The Politics of Race Sexual Violence and Imprisonment
Book SynopsisThrough the prism of Joan Little’s rape-murder trial and the Free Joan Little campaign, Christina Greene explores the intersecting histories of African American women, mass incarceration, sexual violence, and 1970s and 1980s social movements.
£78.40
University of Calgary Press Shipwreck at Cape Flora: The Expeditions of Benjamin Leigh Smith, England's Forgotten Arctic Explorer
Book SynopsisBenjamin Leigh Smith discovered and named dozens of islands in the Arctic but published no account of his pioneering explorations. He refused public accolades and sent stand-ins to deliver the results of his work to scientific societies. Yet, the Royal Geographic Society's Sir Clements R. Markham referred to him as a polar explorer of the first rank.Travelling to the Arctic islands that Leigh Smith explored and crisscrossing England to uncover unpublished journals, diaries, and photographs, archaeologist and writer P.J. Capelotti details Leigh Smith's five major Arctic expeditions and places them within the context of the great polar explorations in the nineteenth century.
£30.56
Temple University Press,U.S. Home Bound: Growing Up With A Disability
Book Synopsis"When I was growing up, I learned that if you were a girl you went to school and college, then you married, became a wife and had a family. . . . When I became disabled, my journey, I was pretty sure, was not going to take me in those directions. What was I supposed to be? What kind of life was I supposed to have?"Once polio had made her a quadriplegic, Cass Irvin didn't know where she fit in or what would become of her. Neither did her parents, teachers, counselors, or rehabilitation therapists. And so began her search for a place to call home.In this memoir, Cass Irvin tells of the remarkable journey that transformed her from a young girl too timid to ask for help to a community activist and writer who speaks forcefully about the needs of people with disabilities. As a young girl she was taken to Warm Springs, Georgia, where she learned about living as a disabled person and found a hero in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the famously if silently disabled president. Bright and inquisitive, Cass soon began to question the prevailing assumptions of a society that had no place for her and to question her own meekness.In time, her keen sense of injustice gave her the courage to fight for a college education. That personal victory emboldened her to find the means to live independently, but it also persuaded her that political work is the key to enabling all people with disabilities to live fulfilling lives. This book, then, is testimony to the importance of community building and organizing as well as the story of one woman's struggle for independence.Trade Review"Home Bound is a very important book. It's greatest strength is the political message that it delivers about disability. Breaking out of the familiar genres of disability books such as history, autobiography, inspirational, or catastrophe narratives, Irvin's book sets out a rhetoric of protest and consciousness-raising that mobilizes elements from more conventional disability books to create a fresh discourse of disability from inside the movement. She clearly and convincingly lays out the arguments for seeing disability as a sociopolitical issue, for recognizing its connections to the civil rights and women's movements, for disability pride, and for building community and a politicized consciousness. No other book that I know of attempts what this ambitious volume does."—Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture"Home Bound delivers a slice of history that is relatively well known to the public-at-large—Roosevelt, Warm Springs, JFK—as well as a slice that is relatively unknown—the disability rights movement. There is a remarkable ring of 'truth' and authenticity. There is also a freshness and honesty. [Irvin] writes with a certain rawness and enthusiasm. I loved the energy of this book and the people I visited and revisited as I read. Home Bound speaks across 'disability lines.' It is powerful, well-written, and hard to put down."—Dr. Fred Hafferty, Department of Behavioral Sciences, University of Minnesota"The author's courage to overcome obstacles makes this book an inspiration for readers living with any kind of disability, and non-disabled adults will gain increased understanding from her remarkable story."—ForeWord"Home Bound is like no other disability book I've ever read...this book is candid...interesting with the little details that make up the cornerstones of disability culturalization."—Albuquerque Tribune"...more than a life story, [it] is also a meditation on the experience of disability in America....It is not the remarkable life of the author that sets this book apart, it is the unembellished way that she writes about it."—Disabilities Studies Quarterly"A hard life lived well. This is what makes it an important book."—RALPH: The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy, and the Humanities"...an engaging read."—Quest magazineTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. From the Kitty Room 2. True Home: Warm Springs 3. Attendant Vibrations 4. The Radicalization of Cass 5. True Hero
£21.59
MP-NCA Uni of North Carolina Princess Noire The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone
£24.26
The University of Alabama Press Simon Baruch Rebel in the Ranks of Medicine 18401921 History Amer Science Technol History of American Science and Technology Series
Book SynopsisRecounts the remarkable life of a Prussian/Polish Jew who immigrated to the United States as a teenager in the 1850s and became one of the nation's best known physicians by the turn of the century.Trade ReviewIn this fine biography, Ward recounts the life and times of Simon Baruch, a nineteenthcentury physician best known today for his advocacy of public baths. A PrussianPolish Jewish teenage immigrant who came to the United States in 1855, Baruch became a prominent and controversial figure in American medicine…. Ward has skillfully blended primary and secondary sources to produce a vivid account of Civil War and South Carolina Reconstruction medicine, and of Baruch's many crusades to improve medical practice and to alleviate the suffering of the urban poor."" Bulletin of the History of Medicine“As Patricia Spain Ward shows in her new biography of Dr Simon Baruch, it is possible to use such an exceptional figure to illustrate an individual life and how American medicine was taught, practised, and advanced from the mid nineteenth century to the early twentieth century…. Simon Baruch, Rebel in the Ranks of Medicine, 18401921 is a fine biography that documents both a unique medical life and the context in which it occurred."" Medical History
£30.56
LIFERICH PUB Finding My Mother Finding Myself
£22.46
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Black Man in the Netherlands An AfroAntillean Anthropology
Book SynopsisFrancio Guadeloupe has lived in both the Dutch Antilles and the Netherlands. An anthropologist, he is a keen observer by honed habit. Simultaneously memoir and astute exploration, this book charts Guadeloupe's coming of age and adulthood in a Dutch world and movingly makes a global contribution to the understanding of anti-Black racism.
£81.75
Roswell Press Grains of Sand: Tales of a Paranormal Life
£15.26
New Degree Press From Harvard to Homeless
£11.39
Lerner Publishing Group G.O.A.T. Soccer Midfielders
£29.12
John Green Kyle O'reilly
£9.50
DrewCat Publishing Kind Regards: (Life of the Extraordinary Ordinary)
£11.64
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Sappho
Book SynopsisThis series of short incisive books introduces major figures of the ancient world to the modern general reader, including the essentials of each subject's life, works, and significance for later western civilisation. In the newly created tradition of the "Ancients in Action" series, Marguerite Johnson has written a fascinating and accessible account of what remains of the life and works of the Greek poet, Sappho. Sappho's ancient biography is covered in addition to the post-classical accounts of her life, which continue to appear, in a variety of creative and non-creative contexts, in contemporary literature and art. Sappho's poetry, essentially preserved in tantalising fragments, is discussed in a series of thematic chapters that include her religious writings, particularly directed to the goddess of love, Aphrodite; personal interpretations of mythological themes; marriage hymns; and love songs to female companions.
£25.99
West Virginia University Press The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns
£74.25
Women Speakers Association Voices of the 21st Century: Women Empowered Through Passion and Purpose
£13.29
Prakash Books The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin
£7.26
University of the West Indies Press Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women
Book SynopsisThe re-publication of Lionheart Gal marks an event unique in contemporary literature. It is the distillation of the Jamaican woman’s experience in fifteen compelling life stories from the internationally known Sistren Theatre Collective.Since 1977 the women of Sistren have been exploring the lives of Caribbean women, from which they create plays, workshops and screen prints for presentation throughout the Caribbean and elsewhere. This book is based on testimonies from Sistren collected and edited by Honor Ford-Smith into a vivid record of women’s lives. The stories retain all the emotional depth of works of the imagination; yet they are at the same time invaluable records of oral history. Scholars of language, culture, politics and literature will need this book; the general reader will revel in it.Trade ReviewThese 'sistren' dare to present themselves just as they are - the sounds of their days and their souls intact. - Alice Walker; It is an absorbing, refreshing, stimulating account of class prejudices, of the arrogance and sheer stupidity of male chauvinism, of the social ills of the Jamaican society and the heroic struggles of fifteen of its lionhearted women whose life stories made possible these 298 pages. - Sunday Sun; A triumphant book, a bell that rings for women all over the world. - Caribbean Times
£20.21
Notion Press, Inc. Justin Bieber
£9.54
HarperCollins Publishers The Letters of Virginia Woolf
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£38.25
MU - University of Texas Press Distaff Diplomacy The Empress Eug233nie and the Foreign Policy of the Second Empire
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£17.99
ABC-CLIO Student Companion to Tennessee Williams
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£40.00
Pan Macmillan The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank
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£8.54
Taylor & Francis Ltd Life Writing After Empire
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£43.99
Taylor & Francis Ltd Lillian Gilbreth Redefining Domesticity Lives of American Women
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£128.25
Taylor & Francis Ltd Nicolas Flamel
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£87.39
Taylor & Francis The Clairmont Family Journals 18551885
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£114.00
Taylor & Francis Artists and Their Autobiographies from Today to the Renaissance and Back
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£118.75
Taylor & Francis Ltd Analyst of the Imagination The Life and Work of Charles Rycroft
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£123.50
Taylor & Francis Ltd Face to Face with Children
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£999.99
Taylor & Francis Ltd The Routledge Introduction to American Life Writing
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£34.19
Taylor & Francis Ltd Orwell Reconsidered Routledge Studies in Radical History and Politics
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£128.25
Taylor & Francis Ltd Artistic and Political Patronage in Early Stuart England
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£37.99
Taylor & Francis Ltd The Routledge Introduction to American Life Writing
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£128.25
Taylor & Francis Ltd Life Writing Outside the Lines
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£128.25
Taylor & Francis The Elmhirsts of Dartington 6 Routledge Library Editions Utopias
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£128.25
Taylor & Francis Ltd The Elmhirsts of Dartington
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£33.99
Taylor & Francis Partners of the Imagination
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£128.25
Taylor & Francis Ltd Writing Life Writing
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£39.99
Taylor & Francis Sir Syed Ahmad Khan Reason Religion and Nation
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£128.25
Taylor & Francis Ltd From Scientific Psychology to the Study of Persons
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£18.99
Taylor & Francis Ltd The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modern Asian Educators
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£39.99
Taylor & Francis Ltd Partners of the Imagination
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£38.99
Taylor & Francis Ltd Mediating Memory
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£39.99
Taylor & Francis Ltd Biofictions
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£47.49
Taylor & Francis Ltd Literary Interventions in the Campaign Biography
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£36.99
Taylor & Francis Ltd Literary Interventions in the Campaign Biography
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£128.25
Taylor & Francis Ltd MacDiarmid The Terrible Crystal Routledge Revivals
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£99.75
