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books tagged “sixties”
books tagged “sixties”
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1968: Marching in the Streetsby Tariq Ali, Susan WatkinsISBN 0684853604 (0-684-85360-4)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: '1968: Marching in the Streets'Book summary:1968: Marching in the Streets is a dynamic time line of the year that revolution swept the planet. With present tense prose, cartoons, and photographs, Tariq Ali (who was one of the founding editors of Black Dwarf, a London-based journal that pops up frequently in 1968) and Susan Watkins chronicle a year that saw everything from the assassinations of Che Guevara, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. to KKK death threats against 70-year-old philosopher Herbert Marcuse. The Black Panthers, the street riots in Paris, the revolutionary spirit in Czechoslovakia ... all this and more is vividly recreated with a nonjudgmental voice that allows events to speak for themselves. [via]
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Allen Ginsbergby Barry MilesISBN 0671507133 (0-671-50713-3)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
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Alone With America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950.by Richard HowardISBN 0689110006 (0-689-11000-6)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon--what Happened And Whyby Godfrey Hodgson, Hodgson, Godfrey (AFT)ISBN 0691122881 (0-691-12288-1)
Softcover, Princeton Univ Pr
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Angela Davis: An Autobiographyby Angela Yvonne DavisISBN 0717806677 (0-7178-0667-7)
Softcover, Intl Pub
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The Angela Y. Davis Readerby Angela Y. Davis, Joy JamesISBN 0631203613 (0-631-20361-3)
Softcover, Blackwell Pub
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Angela Y. Davis Reader'Book summary:For three decades, Angela Y. Davis has written on liberation theory and democratic praxis. Challenging the foundations of mainstream discourse, her analyses of culture, gender, capital, and race have profoundly influenced democratic theory, antiracist feminism, critical studies and political struggles.
Even for readers who primarily know her as a revolutionary of the late 1960s and early 1970s (or as a political icon for militant activism) she has greatly expanded the scope and range of social philosophy and political theory. Expanding critical theory, contemporary progressive theorists - engaged in justice struggles - will find their thought influenced by the liberation praxis of Angela Y. Davis.
The Angela Y. Davis Reader presents eighteen essays from her writings and interviews which have appeared in If They Come in the Morning, Women, Race, and Class, Women, Culture, and Politics, and Black Women and the Blues as well as articles published in women's, ethnic/black studies and communist journals, and cultural studies anthologies. In four parts - "Prisons, Repression, and Resistance", "Marxism, Anti-Racism, and Feminism", "Aesthetics and Culture", and recent interviews - Davis examines revolutionary politics and intellectualism.
Davis's discourse chronicles progressive political movements and social philosophy. It is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary political philosophy, critical race theory, social theory, ethnic studies, American studies, African American studies, cultural theory, feminist philosophy, gender studies. [via]
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Angle of Reposeby Wallace StegnerISBN 0606218971 (0-606-21897-1)
Hardcover, Demco Media
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Angle of Repose'Book summary:Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1971, Angle of Repose has also been selected by the editorial board of the Modern Library as one of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century.
Wallace Stegner's uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, husbands and wives. Set in many parts of the West, Angle of Repose is a story of discovery--personal, historical, and geographical--that endures as Wallace Stegner's masterwork: an illumination of yesterday's reality that speaks to today's.
"Angle of Repose is a long, intricate, deeply rewarding novel," wrote William Abrahams in the Atlantic Monthly. "[It] is neither the predictable historical-regional Western epic, nor the equally predictable four-decker family saga, the Forsytes in California, so to speak. . . . For all [its] breadth and sweep, Angle of Repose achieves an effect of intimacy, hence of immediacy, and, though much of the material is 'historical,' an effect of discovery also, of experience newly minted rather than a pageantlike re-creation. . . . Wallace Stegner has written a superb novel, with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction."
"Angle of Repose is a novel about Time, as much as anything--about people who live through time, who believe in both a past and a future. . . . It reveals how even the most rebellious crusades of our time follow paths that our great-grandfathers' feet beat dusty."
--Wallace Stegner [via]-
Another Countryby James BaldwinISBN 0679744711 (0-679-74471-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Another Country'Book summary:Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions--sexual, racial, political, artistic--that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the early 1970s. [via]
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Artists of American Folk Music: The Legends of Traditional Folk, the Stars of the Sixties, the Virtuosi of New Acoustic Musicby Phil HoodISBN 0688059163 (0-688-05916-3)
Softcover, Gage Learning Corporation
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The Beatles/1967-1970: Bass Recorded VersionsISBN 0634046098 (0-634-04609-8)
Softcover, Hal Leonard Corp
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Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Meby Richard FarinaISBN 0670154768 (0-670-15476-8)
Hardcover, Viking Press
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Beneath the Underdog: His World As Composed by Mingusby Charles Mingus, Nel KingISBN 0679737618 (0-679-73761-8)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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The Best and the Brightestby David HalberstamISBN 0679410627 (0-679-41062-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Best and the Brightest'Book summary:David Halberstams masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain.
Using portraits of Americas flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our countrys recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose? As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It is an American classic. [via] 
Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades A Biographyby Clinton HeylinISBN 0671791559 (0-671-79155-9)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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A Boy's Own Storyby Edmund White, Allan GurganusISBN 0679642544 (0-679-64254-4)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Boy's Own Story'Book summary:For more than two decades, Edmund White has been widely recognized as Americas preeminent gay writer. He has a novelists eye for the telling detail or the remarkable phrase and, like Proust himself, concentrates upon the minutiae of the past so that it might live again, wrote The New York Times Book Review. White possesses the rare combination of a po-etic sense of language and an ironic sense of humor, declared Newsweek. [He] is unquestionably the foremost American gay novelist. Commemorating the twentieth anni-versary of A Boys Own Story, this Modern Library edition presents Whites autobiographical novel together with an Introduction by prizewinning novelist Allan Gurganus and a new Afterword by the author himself.
A Boys Own Story, with equal parts stunning lyricism and unabashed humor, traces a nameless narrators coming-of-age in the 1950s. Struggling with his homosexuality, the narrator seeks the consolations of a fantastic imagination and fills his head with romantic expectations ( I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love. ) His distant, divorced parents exacerbate his hunger for emotional connection, and he endures the unhelpful attentions of a priest and a psychoanalyst. In time, he recognizes the need to be loved by the men in his life and, in the surprising conclusion, escapes his childhood forever with one unforgettable act.
With A Boys Own Story, American literature is larger by one classic novel, wrote The Washington Post Book World. No reader, straight or gay . . . can fail to experience shock after shock of recognition in these pages, and few, I would bet, will be able to withhold a one-to-one sympathy from the unnamed narrator, even when he is being, by the standards of only yesterday, shocking. [via]More editions of A Boy's Own Story:
Casualties of Rockby Quinton SkinnerISBN 0671039636 (0-671-03963-6)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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City of Spadesby Colin MacInnesISBN 074900116X (0-7490-0116-X)
Softcover, Intl Pub Marketing
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Contemporary American Poetryby A. Poulin, Michael WatersISBN 0618527850 (0-618-52785-0)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin College Div
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Contemporary American Poetry'Book summary:This highly respected anthology presents the works of 70 poets who have shaped the contours and direction of mainstream American poetry from 1960 to the present. Designed to provide a rich reading experience for both undergrad and graduate courses, more than 500 selections illustrate the variety and vitality of American poetry over the last few decades. For each poet, the collection features a generous sampling of their work along with a photo, biographical sketches, and bibliographies. [via]
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- Contemporary American Poetry 8th Ed + Contemporary Handbook of Literary Terms 2nd Ed: ISBN 0618723218 (0-618-72321-8)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin College Div - Contemporary American Poetry: ISBN 0618042997 (0-618-04299-7)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin College Div - Contemporary American Poetry: ISBN 0618527850 (0-618-52785-0)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin College Div
- Contemporary American Poetry 8th Ed + Contemporary Handbook of Literary Terms 2nd Ed: ISBN 0618723218 (0-618-72321-8)
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Cotton Candy on a Rainy Dayby Nikki GiovanniISBN 068808365X (0-688-08365-X)
Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day'Book summary:A pivotal work in Nikki Giovanni's career, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day is one of the most poignant and intorspective of all Giovanni's collections. Moving from the emotionally fraught political arena to the intimate realm of the personal, the poems in this volume express a conflicted consciousness and the disillusionment shared by so many during the early 1970s, when the dreams of the Civil Rights era seemed to have evaporated. First published in 1978, this classic will remind her readers why they were first drawn to Nikki Giovanni and enthrall new readers who are just now coming to these timeless poems.
As a witness to three generations, Nikki Giovanni has perceptively and poetically recorded her observations of both the outside world and the gentle yet enigmatic territory of the self. When her poems first emerged from the Black Rights Movement in the late 1960s, she immediately became a celebrated and controversial poet of the era. Written in one of the most commanding voices to grace America'ss political and poetic landscape at the end of the twentieth century, Nikki Giovanni's poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which she is beloved and revered.
A pivotal work in Nikki Giovanni's career, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day is one of the most poignant and introspective of all Giovanni's collections. Moving from the emotionally fraught political arena to the intimate realm of the personal, the poems in this volume express a conflicted consciousness and the disillusionment shared by so many during the early 1970s, when the dreams of the Civil Rights era seemed to have evaporated. First published in l978, this classic will remind her readers why they were first drawn to Nikki Giovanni and enthrall new readers who are just now coming to these timeless poems.As a witness to three generations, Nikki Giovanni has perceptively and poetically recorded her observations of both the outside world and the gentle yet enigmatic territory of the self. When her poems first emerged from the Black Rights Movement in the late 1960s, she immediately became a celebrated and controversial poet of the era. Written in one of themost commanding voices to grace America's political and poetic landscape at the end of the twentieth century, Nikki Giovanni's poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which she is beloved and revered.
"Nikki Giovanni is one of our national treasures. For decades she has offered her wit and wisdom, her bruising honesty, and, above all, her unbounded love through these poems as a healing for herself, her community, and her country." --Gloria Naylor [via]
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Cult Rockersby Wayne Jancik, Tad LathropISBN 068481112X (0-684-81112-X)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wildernessby Edward AbbeyISBN 0671695886 (0-671-69588-6)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness'Book summary:Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, the noted author's most enduring nonfiction work, is an account of Abbey's seasons as a ranger at Arches National Park outside Moab, Utah. Abbey reflects on the nature of the Colorado Plateau desert, on the condition of our remaining wilderness, and on the future of a civilization that cannot reconcile itself to living in the natural world. He also recounts adventures with scorpions and snakes, obstinate tourists and entrenched bureaucrats, and, most powerful of all, with his own mortality. Abbey's account of getting stranded in a rock pool down a side branch of the Grand Canyon is at once hilarious and terrifying. [via]
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Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the 60'sby Peter Collier, David HorowitzISBN 0684826410 (0-684-82641-0)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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- Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the 60's: ISBN 0671701282 (0-671-70128-2)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster - Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the 60's: ISBN 0671667521 (0-671-66752-1)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster - Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the '60s: ISBN 0684826410 (0-684-82641-0)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
- Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the 60's: ISBN 0671701282 (0-671-70128-2)
Do It; Scenarios of the Revolutionby Jerry RubinISBN 067120601X (0-671-20601-X)
Hardcover, Simon and Schuster
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Do You Believe in Magicby Annie GottliebISBN 0671660500 (0-671-66050-0)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984by Marvin J. Taylor, Lynn GumpertISBN 0691122865 (0-691-12286-5)
Softcover, Princeton Univ Pr
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Dreamerby Charles JohnsonISBN 0684854430 (0-684-85443-0)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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Dylan's Visions Of Sinby Christopher RicksISBN 067080133X (0-670-80133-X)
Hardcover, Viking
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Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965by Juan WilliamsISBN 0670814121 (0-670-81412-1)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dreamby Hunter S. ThompsonISBN 0679785892 (0-679-78589-2)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream'Book summary:Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the ne plus ultra of Hunter S. Thompson and the whole gonzo clan he spawned. Written in the lurid afterglow of the 1960s, Fear and Loathing is a loosely connected series of mad dashes across the desert, trashed hotel rooms, and goofs on the brutish, naïve, or merely unhip, perpetrated by Thompson and his mammoth Samoan attorney. The pair start out high on a medicine cabinet's worth of elixirs, powders, and pills, and stay that way for 200 pages. They careen through an unsettling landscape of paranoia and alienation, but that doesn't mean the book isn't a riot. Here's a small taste: "By this time, the drink was beginning to cut the acid and my hallucinations were down to a tolerable level. The room service waiter had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, but I was no longer seeing huge pterodactyls lumbering around the corridors in pools of fresh blood."
Though somewhat dated (it appeared serially in Rolling Stone throughout November 1971), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a book of real vitality and Rabelaisian wit. A document of the counterculture after it was well past ripe and deep into rot, the book is a wild ride, a paranoid ramble that is thoroughly exhilarating and worth the trip. No pun intended. [via]
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories, Tie-In Editionby Hunter S. ThompsonISBN 0679602984 (0-679-60298-4)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories, Tie-In Edition'Book summary:Dr. Thompson made the list of inspirational scribes when I polled in a recent writing workshop, and why not? Back in a spiffy Modern Library edition, replete with additional essays, I find in this iconographic work that HST both invoked--and provoked--an era that was not so much the '60s proper, but rather the mean, shadow-filled death of that time, which is still playing out. Thank God Thompson was there to explode the myth of "objective" journalism and help pave the way for the pens and voices that followed. [via]
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The Fire Next Timeby James BaldwinISBN 067974472X (0-679-74472-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fire Next Time'Book summary:It's shocking how little has changed between the races in this country since 1963, when James Baldwin published this coolly impassioned plea to "end the racial nightmare." The Fire Next Time--even the title is beautiful, resonant, and incendiary. "Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?" Baldwin demands, flicking aside the central race issue of his day and calling instead for full and shared acceptance of the fact that America is and always has been a multiracial society. Without this acceptance, he argues, the nation dooms itself to "sterility and decay" and to eventual destruction at the hands of the oppressed: "The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream."
Baldwin's seething insights and directives, so disturbing to the white liberals and black moderates of his day, have become the starting point for discussions of American race relations: that debasement and oppression of one people by another is "a recipe for murder"; that "color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality"; that whites can only truly liberate themselves when they liberate blacks, indeed when they "become black" symbolically and spiritually; that blacks and whites "deeply need each other here" in order for America to realize its identity as a nation.
Yet despite its edgy tone and the strong undercurrent of violence, The Fire Next Time is ultimately a hopeful and healing essay. Baldwin ranges far in these hundred pages--from a memoir of his abortive teenage religious awakening in Harlem (an interesting commentary on his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain) to a disturbing encounter with Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad. But what binds it all together is the eloquence, intimacy, and controlled urgency of the voice. Baldwin clearly paid in sweat and shame for every word in this text. What's incredible is that he managed to keep his cool. --David Laskin [via]
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Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977by Jim MillerISBN 0684808730 (0-684-80873-0)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977'Book summary:Where did rock and roll come from? And what has it come to?
These are the sorts of questions that cultural historian and veteran music journalist Jim Miller raises in his challenging new book about the rise -- and arrested development -- of rock and roll. Concentrating on the music in its early, formative decades, he explores how rock and roll was transformed from a joyous and sometimes earthy dance music in the 1940s into an abrasive, often angry art music by the end of the 1970s. Along the way, he celebrates a culture of youthful exuberance -- and critically analyzes how it was organized into a billion-dollar global industry.
Arguing that rock underwent its full creative evolution in little more than twenty-five years, Miller traces its roots from the jump blues of the late Forties to the disc jockeys who broadcast the music in the early Fifties. He shows how impresarios such as Alan Freed and movie directors such as Richard Brooks (in "Blackboard Jungle)" joined black music to white fantasies of romance and rebellion, then mass-marketed the product to teenagers. Describing how early rock and roll developed as a distinct form of music, he profiles a host of brash innovators: singers like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, songwriters like Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and British bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Chronicling the drug-laced early "acid tests" of the Grateful Dead, the mixed-media "happenings" of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, and the utopian atmosphere at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, Miller describes how the counterculture of the late Sixties, came together -- and then fell apart.
Still, it was in these very years that rock androll proved itself to be the most profitable style of music in the history of show business -- something Miller analyzes by looking at the promotion of rock icons like David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen. At the same time, he candidly recounts how trendsetting performers from Jim Morrison to Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols became ever more crude and outrageous and ugly -- "as if to mark the triumph," Miller remarks, "of the psychopathic adolescent."
"Flowers in the Dustbin" is steeped in the history of rock, richly anecdotal and entertaining, yet original in its analysis. Provocative and brilliantly written, it is full of fresh insights that deepen our understanding of rock's place in the social history of our time. [via]
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Flowers in the Dustbin: The Risk of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977by James MillerISBN 0684865602 (0-684-86560-2)
Softcover, Fireside
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Flowers in the Dustbin: The Risk of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977'Book summary:It appears that Flowers in the Dustbin author James Miller has just about had his fill of rock & roll. After chronicling a succession of triumphs in the development of the genre and its allied ancestors and offspring, here the veteran music scribe and editor of the superb first edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll surveys an environment tainted by "the Muzak of the Millennium" and "artifacts of stunning ugliness" (exemplified by Marilyn Manson and Wu-Tang Clan). Miller ponders, "What if rock and roll, as it had evolved from Presley to U2, had destroyed the very musical sources of its own vitality?" The erudite yet eminently readable author doesn't answer his query in these pages, but he does prompt a longing for a time when pop culture moved too fast and impulsively to be processed and packaged.
Miller makes it his mission to tell the story of the "explosive growth" of rock & roll by recounting creative and commercial breakthroughs, dating from Wynonie Harris's 1947 recording of the jump-blues hit "Good Rockin' Tonight" through the last-gasp mutiny of the Sex Pistols and the death of Elvis Presley in 1977. In between, the development of top-40 radio begets the payola scandal of the '50s, Norman Mailer's "white Negro" becomes the model in a line of ever-more-self-conscious mavericks, and the 1960s trinity of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan pile remarkable musical and lyrical innovations atop one another like gifted children eager for attention. Once rock had reached its zenith, from the author's perspective, it didn't so much crumble as settle into regurgitated mush. That Miller is able to chronicle these dour developments in such an involving manner is testimony to his talent as a writer and historian, and to the thrill of rock & roll when it's right. --Steven Stolder [via]
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Ginsberg: A Biographyby Barry MilesISBN 0753504863 (0-7535-0486-3)
Softcover, St Martins Pr
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Growing Up Undergroundby Jane AlpertISBN 0688006558 (0-688-00655-8)
Hardcover, Morrow
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Hell's Angelsby Hunter S. ThompsonISBN 067960331X (0-679-60331-X)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hell's Angels'Book summary:"California, Labor Day weekend . . . early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur. . . The Menace is loose again." Thus begins Hunter S. Thompson's vivid account of his experiences with California's most no-torious motorcycle gang, the Hell's Angels. In the mid-1960s, Thompson spent almost two years living with the controversial An-gels, cycling up and down the coast, reveling in the anarchic spirit of their clan, and, as befits their name, raising hell. His book successfully captures a singular moment in American history, when the biker lifestyle was first defined, and when such countercultural movements were electrifying and horrifying America. Thompson, the creator of Gonzo journalism, writes with his usual bravado, energy, and brutal honesty, and with a nuanced and incisive eye; as The New Yorker pointed out, "For all its uninhibited and sardonic humor, Thompson's book is a thoughtful piece of work." As illuminating now as when originally published in 1967, Hell's Angels is a gripping portrait, and the best account we have of the truth behind an American legend.
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Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Gram Parsonsby Ben Fong-TorresISBN 067170513X (0-671-70513-X)
Hardcover, Pocket Books
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I Lost It at the Movies.by Pauline KaelISBN 0714529753 (0-7145-2975-3)
Softcover, Marion Boyars
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In the Lake of the Woodsby Tim O'BrienISBN 061870986X (0-618-70986-X)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In the Lake of the Woods'Book summary:Tim O'Brien has been writing about Vietnam in one way or another ever since he served there as an infantryman in the late 1960s. His earliest work on the subject, If I Die in a Combat Zone, was an intensely personal memoir of his own tour of duty; his books since then have featured many of the same elements of fear, boredom, and moral ambiguity but in a fictional setting. In 1994 O'Brien wrote In the Lake of the Woods, a novel that, while imbued with the troubled spirit of Vietnam, takes place entirely after the war and in the United States. The main character, John Wade, is a man in crisis: after spending years building a successful political career, he finds his future derailed during a bid for the U.S. Senate by revelations about his past as a soldier in Vietnam. The election lost by a landslide, John and his wife, Kathy, retreat to a small cabin on the shores of a Minnesota lake--from which Kathy mysteriously disappears.
Was she murdered? Did she run away? Instead of answering these questions, O'Brien raises even more as he slowly reveals past lives and long-hidden secrets. Included in this third-person narrative are "interviews" with the couple's friends and family as well as footnoted excerpts from a mix of fictionalized newspaper reports on the case and real reports pertaining to historical events--a mélange that lends the novel an eerie sense of verisimilitude. If Kathy's disappearance is at the heart of this work, then John's involvement in a My Lai-type massacre in Vietnam is its core, and O'Brien uses it to demonstrate how wars don't necessarily end when governments say they do. In the Lake of the Woods may not be true, but it feels true--and for Tim O'Brien, that's true enough. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967-1974by Toni SamekISBN 0786409169 (0-7864-0916-9)
Softcover, McFarland & Co Inc Pub
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967-1974'Book summary:Between 1967 and 1974, a number of librarians came together to push for change in the American Library Association. They soon prompted a majority of the profession to examine their role in the dissemination and preservation of culture and to ask basic questions about the terrain that the profession defends. A particular concern was the limitations to intellectual freedom (if any) that might arise in the pursuit of other perhaps equally worthy goals. The questions raised by this advocacy group were based on a relatively new concept of librarianly social responsibility that was partly an outgrowth of the civil rights and antiwar agitation of the period and partly a continuation of the proud traditions of the alternative press movement in the United States. The resulting dissension and turmoil exposed an inherent discrepancy not only between the rhetoric of ideals within the profession and the reality of practice but between librarians as agents of change-librarians' having a social agenda-and professional "neutrality" or the provision of information for all sides without taking sides. These conflicts have never been resolved. The reader will find in this book a fully researched presentation of the years of ferment and political infighting that brought the issues into such sharp focus. [via]
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Jacqueline Susann's Doloresby Jacqueline SusannISBN 0688030572 (0-688-03057-2)
Hardcover, Morrow
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jacqueline Susann's Dolores'Book summary:From the dust jacket: DOLORES is Jacqueline Susann's last book. It is the intense, tragic story of Dolores Ryan, the beautiful and fashionable young widow of an assassinated American President. After his death, Dolores finds herself to poor to sustain her extravagant tastes and too lonely to be fulfilled as a woman. The novel details her quest for money and for men. [via]
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John's Secret Dreams: The Life Of John Lennonby Doreen Rappaport, Bryan CollierISBN 0786808179 (0-7868-0817-9)
Hardcover, Disney Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'John's Secret Dreams: The Life Of John Lennon'Book summary:
John Lennon's influence on music and culture is legendary. From a young age he dreamed of fame and fortune. When he achieved it as one of the Beatles, he recognized the need for a deeper meaning in life. His inner search for happiness shaped his life and brought new dimension to the world of rock 'n' roll.
As a follow-up to their award-winning title, Martin's Big Words, Doreen Rappaport and Bryan Collier present John Lennon's life through a combination of narrative and song lyrics, cut-paper collage and watercolor art-capturing the energy and the essence of a man whose vision and creative genius continue to inspire people today. [via]More editions of John's Secret Dreams: The Life Of John Lennon:
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Libraby Don DelilloISBN 0670823171 (0-670-82317-1)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Libra'Book summary:In his ninth novel, DeLillo (White Noise) gives the American psyche what it has been awaiting for 25 years--an eerily convincing fictional speculation on the events leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. [via]
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A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Deadby Dennis McNallyISBN 0767911865 (0-7679-1186-5)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Penguin Lifeby Marshall FradyISBN 0670882313 (0-670-88231-3)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Penguin Life'Book summary:Unheroic in appearance, given to "deacon-sober suits" and "ponderous gravity," Martin Luther King Jr. ushered in an epochal era of change in the United States. Closely watching King's journey from Montgomery to Birmingham to the Lincoln Memorial to Memphis was journalist Marshall Frady, who honors the minister's achievement and spirit in this lucid biography.
"Almost a geological age ago, it seems now--that great moral saga of belief and violence that unfolded in the musky deeps of the South during the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties." So Frady opens his account, which traces King's transformation from withdrawn, unconfident child to eloquent champion of the oppressed, ever unafraid to trouble the waters. Frady explores King's conflicts, contradictions, and triumphs, as well as the great personal cost he bore in urging nonviolent change in a singularly violent time.
Part of the excellent Penguin Lives series, this slender volume sheds much light on a prophet now honored, but still too little understood. --Gregory McNamee [via]
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Meridianby Alice Walker, Julie RubensteinISBN 067172701X (0-671-72701-X)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Meridian'Book summary:A Black woman who grew up amid prejudice and poverty in the South finds comfort and strength in the civil-rights movement. [via]
The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammadby Karl EvanzzISBN 0679774068 (0-679-77406-8)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad'Book summary:This well-documented biography by Karl Evanzz of The Washington Post shows how a poor, Georgia-born mulatto preacher and laborman named Elijah Poole, who moved to Detroit in the 1930s to escape the brutality of the South, reinvented himself as the leader of the controversial Nation of Islam. Evanzz sifts through years of rumors and myths to uncover a proud and politically shrewd demagogue whose frail, asthma-prone body contrasted his fiery antiwhite rhetoric and proclamations of black self-reliance. "To millions of African Americans," Evanzz writes, "Elijah Muhammad was not so much a prophet as a self-schooled psychoanalyst who, like the highly celebrated Sigmund Freud, advanced theories about the nature and role of religion and race in mental dysfunction."
Painstaking research reveals how Muhammad synthesized the philosophies of Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington, as well as updating tenets of Freemasonry and the Moorish Science Temple to create the Nation's dogma. Evanzz also recounts Muhammad's imprisonment for draft dodging, one of many run-ins with law enforcement, and his efforts to build schools for the children of his followers. Among the biographical details uncovered with the help of recently declassified FBI files is the identity of Muhammad's greatest teacher, the mysterious W.D. Fard, as well as confirmation of the many children Muhammad fathered out of wedlock. The FBI files also add insight into the treachery, distrust, and violence that gripped the Nation after the 1965 assassination of Muhammad's former second-in-command, Malcolm X. By and large, Evanzz presents a fair, scholarly account of one of the 20th century's most infamous and influential Afro-American figures. --Eugene Holley Jr. [via]
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Mr. Love and Justiceby Colin MacInnesISBN 0749001860 (0-7490-0186-0)
Softcover, Intl Pub Marketing
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No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylanby Robert SheltonISBN 068805045X (0-688-05045-X)
Hardcover, Smithmark Pub
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No One Was Killed; Documentation and Meditation:Convention Week, Chicago, August 1968: Convention Week, Chicago, August 1968by John SchultzISBN 0695801023 (0-695-80102-3)
Hardcover, Big Table Pub Co
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Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Sonby James BaldwinISBN 0679744738 (0-679-74473-8)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Not of the World: A History of the Commune in Americaby Daniel CohenISBN 0695804057 (0-695-80405-7)
Hardcover, Follett
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One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nestby Ken KeseyISBN 0774033444 (0-7740-3344-4)
Softcover, Coles Pub Group Ltd
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› Find signed collectible books: 'One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest'Book summary:An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. Marking the fortieth anniversary of Viking's publication of this American classic, this deluxe hardcover edition includes a new introduction by Robert Faggen and drawings Kesey made when he worked at the psychiatric hospital that was the inspiration for the novel.
A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results.
With One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey created a work without precedent in American literature, a novel at once comic and tragic that probes the nature of madness and sanity, authority and vitality. Greeted by unanimous acclaim when it was first published, the book has become an enduring favorite of readers. This new edition-modeled on the popular fortieth-anniversary edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road-will bring Kesey's genius to a new generation while delighting his loyal fans. [via]More editions of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest:
- One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: ISBN 0670526053 (0-670-52605-3)
Softcover, Viking Press - One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: ISBN 0670030589 (0-670-03058-9)
Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated - One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: ISBN 0786201118 (0-7862-0111-8)
Hardcover, Thorndike Pr - One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: ISBN 0774033444 (0-7740-3344-4)
Softcover, Coles Pub Group Ltd
- One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: ISBN 0670526053 (0-670-52605-3)
The Paper Revolutionaries: The Rise of the Underground Pressby Laurence LeamerISBN 0671211447 (0-671-21144-7)
Softcover, Simon and Schuster
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Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dungby Lester Bangs, Greil MarcusISBN 0679720456 (0-679-72045-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung'Book summary:Vintage presents the paperback edition of the wild and brilliant writings of Lester Bangs--the most outrageous and popular rock critic of the 1970s--edited and with an introduction by the reigning dean of rack critics, Greil Marcus. Advertising in Rolling Stone and other major publications. [via]
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The Real Frank Zappa Bookby Frank ZappaISBN 0671705725 (0-671-70572-5)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Real Frank Zappa Book'Book summary:This is the second-best way to expose yourself to the particular genius of Frank Zappa (music is the best, after all)--through his own words. In addition to being an idiosyncratic American composer of some degree of controversy, Zappa was an orator of no small ability or scope. He was known for his ability to expound at great length (and to hilarious effect) on any number of topics. The Real Frank Zappa Book faithfully captures this side of its author, composed of essays on everything from his background and upbringing, to politics, capitalism, and raising children. Zappa takes the opportunity to dispel some of the most pervasive rumors that surrounded him right up to (and even persist after) his death in 1993 (no he didn't do drugs, or sleep with all those groupies). If you're familiar with the man, you will be able to hear his distinctive enunciations (aided by the bold-facing of certain words and Zappaisms) as you read the assorted road stories, his views on making music for a living, and scenes from two--count them, two--organized hearings on obscenity in music. Of course, the chapter titles speak for themselves and include such Zappa winners as "All About Schmucks," "Marriage (As a Dada Concept)," and "America Drinks and Goes Marching." [via]
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The Real Frank Zappa Bookby Peter Occhiogrosso, Frank ZappaISBN 067163870X (0-671-63870-X)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Real Frank Zappa Book'Book summary:This is the second-best way to expose yourself to the particular genius of Frank Zappa (music is the best, after all)--through his own words. In addition to being an idiosyncratic American composer of some degree of controversy, Zappa was an orator of no small ability or scope. He was known for his ability to expound at great length (and to hilarious effect) on any number of topics. The Real Frank Zappa Book faithfully captures this side of its author, composed of essays on everything from his background and upbringing, to politics, capitalism, and raising children. Zappa takes the opportunity to dispel some of the most pervasive rumors that surrounded him right up to (and even persist after) his death in 1993 (no he didn't do drugs, or sleep with all those groupies). If you're familiar with the man, you will be able to hear his distinctive enunciations (aided by the bold-facing of certain words and Zappaisms) as you read the assorted road stories, his views on making music for a living, and scenes from two--count them, two--organized hearings on obscenity in music. Of course, the chapter titles speak for themselves and include such Zappa winners as "All About Schmucks," "Marriage (As a Dada Concept)," and "America Drinks and Goes Marching." [via]
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The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll: The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Musicby Holly George-Warren, Anthony Decurtis, James Henke, Jim MillerISBN 0679737286 (0-679-73728-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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SDSby Alan AdelsonISBN 0684123932 (0-684-12393-2)
Hardcover, Scribner
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Selected Poems, 1956-1968by Leonard CohenISBN 0670002348 (0-670-00234-8)
Softcover, Penguin USA
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She's Come Undoneby Wally LambISBN 0671003755 (0-671-00375-5)
Softcover, Washington Square Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'She's Come Undone'Book summary:Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 1997: "Mine is a story of craving; an unreliable account of lusts and troubles that began, somehow, in 1956 on the day our free television was delivered." So begins the story of Dolores Price, the unconventional heroine of Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone. Dolores is a class-A emotional basket case, and why shouldn't she be? She's suffered almost every abuse and familial travesty that exists: Her father is a violent, philandering liar; her mother has the mental and emotional consistency of Jell-O; and the men in her life are probably the gender's most loathsome creatures. But Dolores is no quitter; she battles her woes with a sense of self-indulgence and gluttony rivaled only by Henry VIII. Hers is a dysfunctional Wonder Years, where growing up in the golden era was anything but ideal. While most kids her age were dealing with the monumental importance of the latest Beatles single and how college turned an older sibling into a long-haired hippie, Dolores was grappling with such issues as divorce, rape, and mental illness. Whether you're disgusted by her antics or moved by her pathetic ploys, you'll be drawn into Dolores's warped, hilarious, Mallomar-munching world. [via]
More editions of She's Come Undone:
- She's Come Undone: ISBN 0671021001 (0-671-02100-1)
Softcover, Pocket Books - She's Come Undone: ISBN 0671014730 (0-671-01473-0)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster - She's Come Undone: ISBN 0671759213 (0-671-75921-3)
Softcover, Pocket Books - She's Come Undone: ISBN 0613033205 (0-613-03320-5)
Hardcover, Bt Bound - She's Come Undone: ISBN 0671759205 (0-671-75920-5)
Hardcover, Pocket Books - She's Come Undone: ISBN 0671003755 (0-671-00375-5)
Softcover, Washington Square Pr
- She's Come Undone: ISBN 0671021001 (0-671-02100-1)
Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generationby Philip NormanISBN 0743235657 (0-7432-3565-7)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation'Book summary:The intimate chronicle of the history we thought we knew. Over a hundred photographs never before seen. [via]
More editions of Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation:
- Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation: ISBN 0671432532 (0-671-43253-2)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster - Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation: ISBN 0684830671 (0-684-83067-1)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster - Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation: ISBN 0743235657 (0-7432-3565-7)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
- Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation: ISBN 0671432532 (0-671-43253-2)
Steppenwolfby Hermann HesseISBN 071390917X (0-7139-0917-X)
Hardcover, Allen Lane
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Tell Me Why : The Beatles: Album by Album, Song by Song, the Sixties and Afterby Tim RileyISBN 0679721983 (0-679-72198-3)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Things They Carriedby Tim O'BrienISBN 0767902890 (0-7679-0289-0)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Things They Carried'Book summary:"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."
A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Times Were a Changinby Irwin Unge, Debi Unger, Irwin UngerISBN 0609803379 (0-609-80337-9)
Softcover, Three Rivers Pr
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Turning Point: 1968by Irwin Unger, Debi UngerISBN 0684186969 (0-684-18696-9)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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Underworldby Don DelilloISBN 0684842696 (0-684-84269-6)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Underworld'Book summary:While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the cold war and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.
"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.
Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled. [via]
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The Unlawful Concert: An Account of the Presidio Mutiny Caseby Fred GardnerISBN 0670741086 (0-670-74108-6)
Hardcover, Viking Press
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Walking on the Wind: A Memoir of the Movementby John Lewis, Michael D'OrsoISBN 0684810654 (0-684-81065-4)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movementby John LewisISBN 0613225805 (0-613-22580-5)
Hardcover, Bt Bound
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement'Book summary:John Lewis is an authentic American hero, a modest man from the most humble of beginnings who left a rural Alabama cotton farm 40 years ago and strode into the forefront of the civil rights movement. One of the young people who brought the teachings of Ghandi and King to the lunch counters of Nashville in 1960, Lewis suffered taunts and threats, beatings and arrests. He spoke at the historic 1963 March on Washington and became chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The nation, tuned to the nightly news, watched in horror as state troopers clubbed him viciously, fracturing his skull as he led a march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Today, he's the only member of Congress who can be proud of having been carried off to jail more than 40 times. With the help of a collaborator, journalist Michael D'Orso, this remarkable man has written a truly remarkable book. Walking with the Wind is a deeply moving personal memoir that skillfully balances the intimate and touching recollections of the deeply thoughtful Lewis with the intense national drama that was the civil rights movement. [via]
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Wonderland Avenue: Tales of Glamour and Excessby Danny SugermanISBN 0688046568 (0-688-04656-8)
Hardcover, Daedalus Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wonderland Avenue: Tales of Glamour and Excess'Book summary:Danny Sugerman had it all: a gorgeous house in Laurel Canyon, all the money, drugs, fast cars, and pretty girls a young man could want. He was a success in the record business--until Jim Morrison died of an overdose. Here is how Sugarman lost everything and ended up in an insane asylum with a $400-a-day heroin habit. [via]
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Year of the Heroic Guerrilla: World Revolution and Counterrevolution in 1968by Robert Vincent DanielsISBN 0674964519 (0-674-96451-9)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Year of the Heroic Guerrilla: World Revolution and Counterrevolution in 1968'Book summary:From Paris to Peking, from Saigon to Washington, the pillars of the postwar world tottered on the brink of collapse in 1968. Year of the Heroic Guerrilla is the first global analysis of that universal upheaval.
Daniels vividly depicts the great crises of that era: the Tet offensive and the abdication of Lyndon Johnson; the denouncement of the counterculture; the fissuring of the civil rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; the student revolt at Columbia University; the May uprising in France that nearly overthrew the Fifth Republic; the "cultural revolution" in China; the chilling of the Prague Spring by the Soviet army; and, finally, the convention and riots in Mayor Daley's Chicago, signaling the downturn of the revolutionary spirit in America.
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