Showing 13–22 of 22 resultsSorted by latest
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£20.00
Songs that sell the most copies become hits, but some of those hits become something more – iconic recordings that not only inspire a generation but also alter the direction of music. In this follow-up to his classic ‘Anatomy of a Song’, writer and music historian Marc Myers tells the stories behind fifty-five more rock, pop, R&B, country and reggae hits through intimate interviews with the artists who wrote and recorded them. Part oral history, part musical analysis, ‘Anatomy of 55 More Songs’ ranges from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’ to Dionne Warwick’s ‘Walk On By’, The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ and Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’.
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£25.00
Over more than five decades, legendary architect Moshe Safdie has designed and built some of the world’s most talked-about and memorable structures – from the 1967 modular housing scheme in Montreal known as ‘Habitat’ and the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel to the Marina Bay Sands development and extraordinary Jewel Changi airport garden and waterfall in Singapore. Safdie is deeply committed to architecture as a social force for good, believing that any structural challenge can be solved in ways that enhance community and the human spirit. In this unique book, Safdie takes readers behind the veil of his profession to explain how an architect thinks and works – ‘from the spark of inspiration through the design process, the model-making, the politics, the engineering, the materials.’
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£12.99
Frank O’Hara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the ‘New American Poetry.’ This collection demonstrates beautifully the flawless rhythm underlying O’Hara’s conviction that to write poetry, indeed to live, ‘you just go on your nerve.’
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£20.00
Decades after the rise of rock music in the 1950s, the rock concert retains its allure and its power as a unifying experience – and as an influential multi-billion-dollar industry. In ‘Rock Concert’, acclaimed interviewer Marc Myers sets out to uncover the history of this compelling phenomenon, weaving together ground-breaking accounts from the people who were there. Myers combines the tales of icons like Joan Baez, Ian Anderson, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller, Roger Waters and Angus Young with figures such as the disc jockeys who first began playing rock on the radio; the audio engineers that developed new technologies to accommodate ever-growing rock audiences; music journalists, like Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe; and the promoters who organized it all, like Michael Lang, co-founder of Woodstock, to create a rounded and vivid account of live rock’s stratospheric rise.
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£10.99
On the night of December 2, 1943, the Luftwaffe bombed a critical Allied port in Bari, Italy, sinking seventeen ships and killing over a thousand servicemen and hundreds of civilians. Caught in the surprise air raid was the John Harvey, an American Liberty ship carrying a top-secret cargo of 2,000 mustard bombs to be used in retaliation if the Germans resorted to gas warfare. After young sailors began suddenly dying with mysterious symptoms, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Alexander, a doctor and chemical weapons expert, was dispatched to investigate. He quickly diagnosed mustard gas exposure, which both Churchill and Eisenhower denied. But Alexander’s breakthrough observations about the toxic effects of mustard on white blood cell were instrumental in ushering in a new era of cancer research.
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£8.99
P.J. O’Rourke says we’ve worked ourselves into a state of anger and perplexity, and it’s no surprise because perplexed and angry is what America has always been all about. This uproarious look at the current state of the United States includes essays like ‘The New Puritanism – and Welcome to It,’ about the upside of being ‘woke’ (and unable to get back to sleep); ‘Sympathy vs. Empathy,’ which considers whether it’s better to have an idea of how people feel or to bust their skulls to get inside their heads; ‘A Brief Digression on the Additional Hell of the Internet of Things’ because your juicer is sending fake news to your FitBit about what’s in your refrigerator; and many more.
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£8.99
Six captivating true-crime stories, spanning Mark Bowden’s long and illustrious career, cover a variety of crimes complicated by extraordinary circumstances. In ‘The Case of the Vanishing Blonde’, the veteran reporter revisits some of his most riveting stories and examines the effects of modern technology on the journalistic process.
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£8.99
A frank, smart and captivating memoir by the daughter of Apple founder Steve Jobs, ‘Small Fry’ is Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s poignant story of a childhood spent between two imperfect but extraordinary homes. Scrappy, wise and funny, young Lisa is an unforgettable guide through her parents’ fascinating and disparate worlds. Part portrait of a complex family, part love letter to California in the seventies and eighties, this is an enthralling book by an insightful new literary voice.
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£16.99
It is 1958. Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard, newly promoted after good service during Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Britain, is not looking forward to a Continental trip with his older brother, Rod. Rod was too vain to celebrate being 50 so instead takes his entire family on ‘the Grand Tour’ for his 51st birthday: Paris, Sienna, Florence, Vienna, Amsterdam. Restaurants, galleries and concert halls. But Frederick Troy never gets to Amsterdam. After a concert in Vienna he is approached by an old friend whom he has not seen for years – Guy Burgess, a spy for the Soviets, who says something extraordinary: ‘I want to come home’. Troy dumps the problem on MI5 who send an agent to de-brief Burgess – but the man is gunned down only yards from the embassy, and after that, the whole plan unravels with alarming speed and Troy finds himself a suspect.
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£8.99
This is a thrilling portrait of 1960s Berlin and Krushchev’s Moscow, centring around the exchange of two spies – a Russian working for the KGB, and an unfortunate Englishman.
