For the first time in his own words, the legendary musical genius of The Beach Boys reflects on his tumultuous life and astonishing 21st-century comeback to live performance and renewed creativity.Brian Wilson was the driving creative force behind The Beach Boys, a band that defined an era and charted nine consecutive gold albums and hit after unstoppable hit. But he was derailed in the 1970s by mental illness, drug use, and the shifting fortunes of the band he'd h...

The story of a football club born in a poverty-stricken corner of Glasgow—and its powerful rise to champion status and worldwide renown.Celtic is a club like no other. Its story is a unique one, of a football club founded to raise money to help alleviate poverty within the predominantly Irish immigrant community of Glasgow's East End. Yet, from its inception, Celtic has been a club open to all. From those humble and charitable origins, Celtic have gone on to become ...

"When you play with fire you get burnt," as Danny and his son Sean discover. The turbulent 1970s in Northern Ireland - fraught with shootings, bombings, and rioting ― left indelible scars on their lives. Their story presents a poignant narrative of a time when homes, families, and lives were mercilessly obliterated.Haunted by a dark, violent past, Danny seeks solace for his family by leaving a home turf marked by upheaval. But is truly running away from one's past an easy solution?...

Rave is one of the first distinct and significant youth subcultures to emerge since the early days of punk rockers and skinheads. A middle-class culture renowned for drug use computer-generated "techno" music and all-night dance parties rave has been described as everything from a drug cult to a neo-hippie community. Brian Wilson uses his ethnographic research on rave during the mid and late 1990s in Southern Ontario to discuss the ways in which young people participate in social and cultural...

Brian Douglas Wilson (June 20, 1942 - June 11, 2025) was an American musician, songwriter, singer, and record producer who co-founded the Beach Boys. Often called a genius for his novel approaches to pop composition and mastery of recording techniques, he is widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and significant songwriters of the 20th century. His best-known work is distinguished for its high production values, complex harmonies and orchestrations, vocal layering, and introspec...

This is the main book, not a summary bookhis is the main book not a summaryThis is the main book, not a summary bookDeveloping a positive thinking mindset involves cultivating optimistic thoughts and attitudes to enhance well-being and resilience. It requires acknowledging negative thoughts without dwelling on them, reframing challenges as opportunities, and focusing on gratitude and self-affirmation. By embracing positivity, one can attract positive outcomes, maint...

As the pages of life turn, we journey through the ever-changing seasons of the soul. Spring whispers of new beginnings, budding with the promise of growth and renewal. In summer's warmth, we bask in the fullness of our experiences, savouring moments of joy and abundance. Autumn arrives, painting our path with the colours of reflection and transition, as we gather the wisdom of the years gone by. And in the stillness of winter, we find solace in the quiet embrace of introspection, preparing...

John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age is the remarkable story of the spiritual search of one of Michigan's most successful entrepreneurs, a search that culminated in the Fetzer Institute whose ambitious mission is nothing less than the spiritual transformation of the world.John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age follows the spiritual sojourn of John E. Fetzer, a Michigan business tycoon. Born in 1901 and living most of his life in Kala...

In the spring of 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson boarded a train in Concord, Massachusetts, bound for a month-and-a-half-long tour of California—an interlude that became one of the highlights of his life. On their journey across the American West, he and his companions would take in breathtaking vistas in the Rockies and along the Pacific Coast, speak with a young John Muir in the Yosemite Valley, stop off in Salt Lake City for a meeting with Brigham Young, and encounter a diversity of communiti...

Type designer Ed Austin is on a losing streak. Divorced, and with his daughter studying abroad, he has only an old dog for a companion. His world has contracted into something simple, solitary—and safe. But after acquiring a dozen handwritten letters forgotten in the barn of an old Maine farmhouse, Ed finds himself haunted by thoughts of a nineteenth-century woman named Lydia Starbird. At first he’s enchanted by her penmanship, and then the life she describes in her letters—each addressed...

The Egúngún society is one of the least-studied and written-about aspects of African diasporic spiritual traditions. It is the society of the ancestors, the society of the dead. Its primary function is to facilitate all aspects of ancestor veneration. Though it is fundamental to Yorùbá culture and the Ifá/Òrìṣà tradition of the Yorùbá, it did not survive intact in Cuba or the US during the forced migration of the Yorùbá in the Middle Passage. Taking hold only in Brazil, the Egúngún cult h...

Viet Nam veteran S. Brian Willson was so shocked by the diabolical nature of the US war against Viet Nam -- irreversible knowledge, as he describes it -- and his own appalling ignorance from his cultural conditioning, that it sparked a lifetime of anti-war activism. This toxic jolt awakened him to the extent to which he and generations of American citizens had thoughtlessly succumbed to the relentless barrage of lies and propaganda that infest US American culture—from the military and poli...