“‘Soft Rock,’ they call it; low-key stuff with wide appeal.” So stated a 1971 Chicago Tribune article on the Carpenters. Over time, Soft Rock became the butt of jokes, yet during its heyday, it fit America’s changing mood, blending rebellion with conservatism. Easy explains how Soft Rock and associated genres emerged in the late 1960s and achieved broad recognition in the 1970s. Tracking hundreds of songs, Timothy Gray supplies Billboard’s chart rankings to show ...

The Catholic Biblical Theology of the Sacraments series provides readers with a deeper appreciation of God's gifts and call in the sacraments through a renewed encounter with God's Word. In this addition to the series, Michael Barber offers a biblical approach to anointing of the sick, drawing from both the Old and New Testaments.This book unpacks the riches of the Scriptures to explain what true healing in Christ involves. In addition, Barber demonstrates how an exegetical approac...

A Leading Catholic Teacher Offers a Biblical Theology of MarriageThe Catholic Biblical Theology of the Sacraments series provides readers with a deeper appreciation of God's gifts and call in the sacraments through a renewed encounter with God's Word.In The Bible and Marriage, leading Catholic teacher and popular speaker John Bergsma offers a biblical theology of marriage rooted in the Old and New Testaments that will be interesting and informative...

Explore the Catholic Church's teaching on confession, absolution, and penance in the BibleThis addition to the Catholic Biblical Theology of the Sacraments series provides readers with a deeper appreciation of God's gifts and call in the sacraments through a renewed encounter with God's Word.James Prothro offers a biblical theology of the sacrament of reconciliation--the restoration of the sinner through forgiveness and repentance. Prothro fleshes out the p...

A Leading Catholic Scholar Offers a Biblical Theology of the PriesthoodThis series on the seven Sacraments provides readers with a deeper appreciation of God's gifts and call in the Sacraments through a renewed encounter with God's Word.In this volume, a leading Catholic scholar offers a biblical theology of the priesthood rooted in the Old and New Testaments. Half a millennium after the Protestant Reformation and in the midst of an ongoing clerical crisis ...

A Top Catholic New Testament Scholar on the Rite of BaptismThis addition to the Catholic Biblical Theology of the Sacraments series provides readers with a deeper appreciation of God's gifts and call in the Sacraments through a renewed encounter with God's Word.New Testament scholar Isaac Morales, OP, offers a biblical theology of the initiatory rite of baptism that will be interesting and informative to the church catholic. Morales provides a synthetic bib...

Roots rock, Americana, alt country: what are they and why do they matter? Americans have been trying to answer these questions for as long as the music bearing these labels has existed. Music can function as an escape from the outside world or as an explanation of that world. Listeners who identify with the music’s message may shape their social understandings accordingly. Rock critics like Greil Marcus and Peter Guralnick, the titans of rock criticism, tap this fluid dichotomy, considerin...

Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan's life in music is revisited by his foremost interpreter -- weaving individual moods and moments into a brilliant history of their changing times.The book begins in Berkeley in 1968, and ends with a piece on Dylan's show at the University of Minnesota -- his very first appearance at his alma mater -- on election night 2008. In between are moments of euphoric discovery: From Marcus's liner notes for the 1967 Basement Tapes (pop music's m...

A fan from the moment the Doors' first album arrived, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Filmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over.Forty years after the singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, Greil Marcus muses on how one could drive from here to there, changing fom one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four Doors songs in an hour. Whatever the demands ...

New York Times, Spin, and Vanity Fair contributor Marc Spitz explores the first great cultural movement since Hip Hop: an old-fashioned and yet highly modern aesthetic that's embraced internationally by teens, twenty and thirty-somethings and even some Baby Boomers; creating hybrid generation known as Twee. Via exclusive interviews and years of research, Spitz traces Generation Twee's roots from the Post War 50s to its dominance in popular culture today.Vampire We...

**“A terrific biography of a rock innovator that hums with juicy detail and wincing truth. . . . Page after page groans with the folly of the ’60s drug culture, the tragedy of talent toasted before its time, the curse of wealth and the madness of wasted opportunity.”—The Atlanta Journal-ConstitutionNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES** • NAMED ONE OF THE FIVE BEST ROCK BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ROLLING STONE

The legendary critic and author of Mystery Train "ingeniously retells the tale of rock and roll" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).Unlike previous versions of rock 'n' roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs and dramatizes how each embodies rock 'n' roll as a thing in itself, in the story it tells, in...