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  Simply Chopin

  William Smialek

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  Born in a small town near Warsaw, Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) was a musical prodigy who began giving public concerts and composed his first piano pieces at the age of seven. Following studies at the Warsaw Conservatory, he left his native Poland in 1830, eventually settling in Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. There he cultivated friendships with prominent musicians and intellectuals of the period and quickly achieved renown as a virtuoso performer and pioneering composer. However, by 1842, his lifelong health issues had become increasingly serious, and his brilliant career went into a precipitous decline, concluding with his untimely death at the age of thirty-nine.  
  In Simply Chopin, Dr. William Smialek presents an accessible and revealing portrait of a musical genius, including his artistic development, his tempestuous love life, and his towering artistic achievements. Relating Chopin’s life story to his historical place and time, Dr. Smialek intimately chronicles his influences and significant relationships, in particular, his long love affair with the writer George Sand. The book also draws on recent research to explore the compositional technique displayed in Chopin’s piano compositions, with commentary on his most important works.  
  Intended for a general readership, Simply Chopin is both a lucid introduction to a giant of classical music and an insightful look at a key moment in musical history, as nineteenth-century Europe turned toward Romanticism and the powerful idea of nationalism.

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  Sweet and Low

  Rich Cohen

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  Sweet and Low is the amazing, bittersweet, hilarious story of an American family and its patriarch, a short-order cook named Ben Eisenstadt who, in the years after World War II, invented the sugar packet and Sweet'N Low, converting his Brooklyn cafeteria into a factory and amassing the great fortune that would destroy his family.It is also the story of immigrants to the New World, sugar, saccharine, obesity, and the health and diet craze, played out across countries and generations but also within the life of a single family, as the fortune and the factory passed from generation to generation. The author, Rich Cohen, a grandson (disinherited, and thus set free, along with his mother and siblings), has sought the truth of this rancorous, colorful history, mining thousands of pages of court documents accumulated in the long and sometimes corrupt life of the factor, and conducting interviews with members of his extended family. Along the way, the forty-year family battle over the fortune moves into its titanic phase, with the money and legacy up for grabs. Sweet and Low is the story of this struggle, a strange comic farce of machinations and double dealings, and of an extraordinary family and its fight for the American dream.

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  Mies van der Rohe - A Critical...

  Franz Schulze, Edward Windhorst

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  An “excellent” new edition of the definitive biography of the architectural genius, with more than a hundred photos (Booklist, starred review).   Upon publication, this book was praised by the Chicago Tribune and “the most comprehensive book ever written about the master designer and, by any measure, the best,” while the Christian Science Monitor noted that “Schulze has both the gift of an architectural historian able to render Mies’s building innovations and that of a biographer able to paint the humanity and shortcomings of the man.” Newsweek called it “a revelation.”   Now, this biography of the iconic modernist architect and designer has been extensively updated, providing an even more enlightening and intimate portrait of a man who helped to create the twentieth century world.   “This excellent revised edition…has 138 illustrations, incisive descriptions of Mies’ innovative creations and a fascinating account of his Pyrrhic victory in a lawsuit against his disaffected client Edith Farnsworth.”—Booklist (starred review) “This authoritative biography of Mies van der Rohe has been updated through building records, the recollections of students and a court transcript. It's a gripping read.”—Christopher Woodward, Building Design

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  Close-up on Sunset Boulevard -...

  Sam Staggs

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  Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, a classic film noir and also a damning dissection of the Hollywood dream factory, evokes the glamour and ruin of the stars who subsist on that dream.  It's also one long in-joke about the movie industry and those who made it great-and who were, in turn, destroyed by it.  One of the most critically admired films of the twentieth century, Sunset Boulevard is also famous as silent star Gloria Swanson's comeback picture.Sam Staggs's Close-Up On Sunset Boulevard tells the story of this extravagant work, from the writing, casting and filming to the disastrous previews that made Paramount consider shelving it.  It's about the writing team of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett-sardonically called "the happiest couple in Hollywood"-and their raucous professional relationship.  It's about the art direction and the sets, the costumes, the props, the lights and the cameras, and the personalities who used those tools to create a cinematic work of art.Staggs goes behind the scenes to reveal: William Holden, endlessly attacked by his bitter wife and already drinking too much; Nancy Olson, the cheerful ingenue who had never heard of the great Gloria Swanson; the dark genius Erich von Stroheim; the once famous but long-forgotten "Waxworks"; and of course Swanson herself, who-just like Norma Desmond-had once been "the greatest star of them all."But the story of Sunset Boulevard doesn't end with the movie's success and acclaim at its release in 1950. There's much more, and Staggs layers this stylish book with fascinating detail, following the actors and Wilder into their post-Sunset careers and revealing Gloria Swanson's never-ending struggle to free herself from the clutches of Norma Desmond.Close-Up On Sunset Boulevard also chronicles the making of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical production of Sunset Boulevard and the explosive diva controversies that dogged it. The book ends with a shocking example of Hollywood life imitating Hollywood art. By the last page of this rich narrative, readers will conclude: We are those "wonderful people out there in the dark."

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  Sea and Sardinia

  D.H. Lawrence

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  Sea and Sardinia 
    
  by D.H.Lawrence 
    
  Narrated by Phil Benson 
    
  At the end of World War 1, D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda (‘the queen bee’), exiled themselves from England and set up home in Sicily. On the spur of the moment, Lawrence proposed a short trip to Sardinia. Setting off before dawn, they embarked on a whirlwind tour, by train to Palermo, ferry to Cagliari, and by train and bus to Terranova, returning to Rome by ferry. Back in Sicily Lawrence wrote Sea and Sardinia, one of the great travel journals of the twentieth century, in six weeks and entirely from memory. Alternately enthusiastic and grumpy, but always effusive, Lawrence’s journal sparkles with observations of the day-to-day detail of travel and characters encountered on the way 
    
  Production Copyright 2020 Voices of Today.

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  DotCon - The Greatest Story Ever...

  John Cassidy

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  The Internet stock bubble wasn't just about goggle-eyed day traderstrying to get rich on the Nasdaq and goateed twenty-five-year-olds  playing wannabe Bill Gates. It was also about an America that believed it had discovered the secret of eternal prosperity: it said something about all of us, and what we thought about ourselves, as the twenty-first century dawned. John Cassidy's Dot.con brings this tumultuous episode to life. Moving from the Cold War Pentagon to Silicon Valley to Wall Street and into the homes of millions of Americans, Cassidy tells the story of the great boom and bust in an authoritative and entertaining narrative. Featuring all the iconic figures of the Internet era -- Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, Steve Case, Alan Greenspan, and many others -- and with a new Afterword on the aftermath of the bust, Dot.con is a panoramic and stirring account of human greed and gullibility.

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