New York advertising executive and lifelong atheist Sarah Sheppard is highly successful, in line for a partnership, and feeling on top of the world. When she's visited by a mysterious client who offers her a job to write and market a comprehensive addition to the world's religious texts, she thinks it's an elaborate joke and turns him down. But God works in mysterious ways and she quickly finds she has no choice but to take the assignment.Isolated at a remote estate in upstate New ...

Three women, united by love and kinship, struggle to conform to the social norms of the times in which they lived.In 1931, Katherine Henderson leaves behind her small town in Kansas and the marriage proposal of a local boy to live on her own and work at the Sears & Roebuck glove counter in Chicago. There she meets Annie—a bold, outspoken feminist who challenges Katherine's idea of who she thinks she is and what she thinks she wants in life.In 1997, Katherin...

Break out of the Yehudi Menuhin mold. This book is your ultimate resource for Yehudi Menuhin. Here you will find the most up-to-date 157 Success Facts, Information, and much more.In easy to read chapters, with extensive references and links to get you to know all there is to know about Yehudi Menuhin's Early life, Career and Personal life right away.A quick look inside: George Enescu - Biography, Music Academy of the West - Sponsors, Violin Sonata (Elgar), Nadia Boulanger, ...

As the Egyptian revolution gained momentum in the winter of 2011, a common refrain echoed across Cairo’s Tahrir Square: “The wall of fear came down!” Mass protests against fear and authoritarianism have also rumbled across the aggrieved streets and plazas of Tunis, Athens, Madrid, New York City, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Delhi, and beyond. While the scale of these new uprisings may be unprecedented, the refusal of fear is not unique to our time.Nothing to Lose but ...

Birdie Holloway is a typical eleven-year-old growing up in a small, corn-fed Kansas town in the early 1980s—that is until her best friend, Grace, is brutally murdered. Suddenly, everything changes for Birdie, and everything she believes she knows about her insulated small-town life is called into question. Obsessed in figuring out who killed her friend, Birdie spends years trying to find the murderer. Eventually, she connects with someone who is every bit as interested in the case as she i...

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at

If you enjoy great music but want to know more about how it came to be the way it is - without investing time in a graduate degree - here are the background stories of over 200 great compositions. If you're only just coming to experiment with great music, here are guideposts to help you understand and enjoy what you encounter. The stories and sounds behind the scenes: welcome to Classical Music Insights.

For readers who are unsure of the difference between an alto and a contralto, wonder exactly when to applaud at a concert, or aren't even sure what music they should be listening to in the first place, this is the perfect guideAll too often, potential classical music listeners are put off due to its perceived elitism. This book gleefully dispels this notion and many others as it works brilliantly to make classical music not only accessible, but also disarmingly sim...

A beautifully illustrated, totally engrossing celebration of the piano, and the composers and performers who have made it their own.With honed sensitivity and unquestioned expertise, Stuart Isacoff—pianist, critic, teacher, and author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization—unfolds the ongoing history and evolution of the piano and all its myriad wonders: how its very sound provides the basis for emotional expression and ...

In this compulsively readable, fascinating, and provocative guide to classical music, Norman Lebrecht, one of the world’s most widely read cultural commentators tells the story of the rise of the classical recording industry from Caruso’s first notes to the heyday of Bernstein, Glenn Gould, Callas, and von Karajan.Lebrecht compellingly demonstrates that classical recording has reached its end point–but this is not simply an expos? of decline and fall. It is, for the first time, the...

As featured in the Telegraph and on Radio 4's Today programme.'A magnificent treasury . . . a fascinating tour de force.' Observer'Year of Wonder is an absolute treat - the most enlightening way to be guided through the year.' Eddie RedmayneClassical music for everyone - an inspirational piece of music for every day of the year, celebrating composers from the medieval era to the pr...

Listen. What do you hear?We are surrounded by sounds all the time, but we tend not to hear them; our brains are very good at editing what our ears pick up. If we stop for a moment to listen, there they are: the ticking clock, traffic noise, fragments of conversation, a passing plane. These are examples of what the American composer John Cage called “illegal harmony”.In response to the noisiest century in history, modern composers have consistently flown in ...