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The authors of this book have done an incredible job gathering information from their fellow soldiers (and in some cases those soldiers families) in order to convey and portray what can only be described as an incredibly poignant account of their experiences.
I know that this will be a story I will one day recommend that my own children read in an effort to improve their understanding of the sacrafices such brave people have made for the sake of our continued freedom.
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- Teresa Twomey
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I bought this book for my under-two-year-old boys and my nearly five-year-old daughter never misses the nightly reading. It is a new Advent family tradition we all enjoy.
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Up till then, there was 'Commercial Art', and 'Art Departments', and whatever styling was applied to an industrial product was done as an afterthought, and usually by an amateur.
After The Eamses, a new recognition that the design of appearances was a craft and a profession, and not just an art, was born.
This book demonstrates in many ways, how Ray and Charles Eames applied this and many other insights to the various fields of endeavor that they entered and changed forever.
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Yes there is tablature. Does this make the music any less useful? I think not. If you can read music notation well enough to play the music presented, then do so. I can't do it well enough or fast enough to suite me. Some day I will. In the meantime I use tablature and progress in my guitar playing technique. Granted, my sight reading and music writing does not improve when I use tablature, but that is my choice.
I learn to love music, all kinds, using tablature, then as I progress music theory and music notation make more sense to me. Now I've decided that I want to learn to read standard music notation. No harm at all in that course.
Not all who play the guitar play in orchestras or bands that require notation. I play for personal enjoyment, not for the edification of people who judge music by the format it is published in.
A similar concept can be seen in the medieval catholic church, where latin (not even the original language the bible was written in!) was the only language that the bible was available in. Most people could not read, and those that could, could not read latin (for the most part). Does that make the bible appropriate for priests only (personally I think so, but my point meant to say NO)?
I liked the pieces presented in this book. They were easy to play (for the most part) and stimulated my interest in classical guitar playing (I think that was the point of the book no?).
One of the disadvantages of not reading music notation (well enough or not at all) is that I cannot accurately reproduce the music without having heard it before. I can approximate and I sometimes luck out and it sounds as it should. Here is my only suggestion for this book--Notation and a CD should be packaged together. This way you can learn to play the music properly. The alternative of course is to learn to read the music notation which would give you most of what you need to play it without the CD. The tablature would then only be used then for finger positioning suggestions from Mr Harris.
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Solomon Northup was an educated, free black man from upstate New York with a wife and children in the 1841 when through a chain of events ended up being kidnapped and sold into slavery. He eventually ended up deep in Louisiana and spent the next 12 years of his life there until he was rescued by a prominent citizen of his home state that knew him.
What stands out in this book to me are the descriptions of the various people he met and how they treated him from being very kind and gracious to vile and wicked. As a southerner I have often heard that slaves were basically happy and contented and this book will immediately put an end such a notion. Even the most illiterate and uneducated slave Solomon met yearned for freedom, as is human nature to do so. That being said there were several decent southern slave owners described in the book who treated their slaves well. One of them William Ford, almost certainly saved Solomon from being lynched by his new owner.
On the flip side there were many vile slave owners as well. Solomon was owned by a carpenter who mistreated him quite badly and Solomon had to fight him twice to prevent himself from being killed by his owner. After one of these fights he fled into the swamp being chased by his owner and several other slave owners with their bloodhounds. His description of the bloodhounds following him into the swamp and him seeing all of the snakes and alligators was quite interesting. Solomon, beside being literate was blessed with a great deal of "street" smarts and common sense. He knew how to evade the dogs when they chased him into the swamp. The aforementioned William Ford saved Solomon from the carpenter's wrath after this episode.
Solomon then went on to spend the rest of his time in captivity with another brutal slave owner. This owner was drunk half the time and continually mistreated all of his slaves. Solomon's rescue came when a Canadian drifter who worked as a laborer agreed to mail a rescue note to Solomon's home town. A few months later Solomon was rescued by a prominent gentlemen from his native New York and was reunited with his family.
This book was fascinating reading and moved at a rapid pace. Most of the books I read I never bother to write a review on unless I found them to be a good read and this is a good read!
If you want to read about slavery as it was and not in glossed over terms or political correct terms then this book is for you. The truth what a concept!
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A man is dying and from his bed he struggles to put his papers in order, to try to give shape to his last book. His mind races with all manner of thought mainly about society: the mechanization of the arts, society's dumbing down, player pianos, the Pulitzer Prize, school violence. All these thought threads come together in one overarching theme, and Gaddis's genius is not only in the ideas put forth but in his prose style: a style of fits and starts, sentences that run on incessantly, others that end abruptly to go on to the next thought. It is the perfect representation on paper of the thought processes of a dying intellectual man.
Admirers of both Gaddis's work as well as the work of Thomas Bernhard will gain much from this slim volume. Joseph Tabbi's afterword at the end puts this novella in context when viewed against Gaddis's entire ouevre.
Readers new to Gaddis might start with this one or "A Frolic of His Own."
Either way, treat yourself to this little book, one that deserves to be read more than once, one that deserves to be admired, one written by a largely overlooked American giant.
This prejudice of mine is coupled with a general dislike for posthumous works in general-the kind where a Major Author left a work unfinished at death, and which is years after released and edited with an introduction or forward by some noted Scholar: ("This really IS a great book, all of Fitzgerald's/Hemingway's/Duras'/McGowin's major Themes are here," etc., etc.). Well, they very seldom are great works, and just as the act of Revision seems contrived to some (your Kerouac wannabes, perhaps), I, conversely, find the act of posthumous publication to itself be contrived-again, in general. Glenn Gould, the great pianist, once expressed his intense dislike of "live" recordings being released on record labels with the surrounding hoopla, and said he planned to do a "fake" live album, recorded in the studio, complete with mistakes and overdubbed with audience coughing, etc. Sony of course wouldn't go for it, but I've often wanted to write a "fake" posthumous novel, the Final (unfinished) Work of a Great American Novelist-I'll make it about 100 de-contextualized pages, with 200 pages of forwards, introductions, afterwards, and footnotes. Now that Dave Eggars is a Publisher, he should get in touch.
But in the case of Agape Agape, the Afterward is totally superfluous. The book was finished when Gaddis died, and I don't need to have that explained to me, nor do I care what Joseph Tabbi et. al. Think of it in the overall context of Gaddis' other novels or what it started out as or what Gaddis wanted it to achieve. It's 125 pages, and all of a piece, without section or chapter breaks, the perfect length for what is the most cohesive and affecting book the man ever wrote-the free-associations of a dying narrator who's afraid his lifelong goal to write the definitive history of the player piano will never come to fruition. Into this frenetic and breathless narrative, then, is woven...everything. What begins with the narrator's opinions concerning several aspects of the History and Future of Technology becomes a fictional autobiography the likes of which has rarely been achieved, cemented by the character's grasp of mortality and humanity, and by Gaddis' seamless and masterful narrative drive. He is ON.
This is a one or two-sitting book, and the reader will come away from it reeling. It's too brief for me to go into specifics, for the specifics are the book, the book is the plot-but if you've never read Gaddis, START HERE. And if you need to picture a Literary Precedent, think of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, perhaps, or of the best shorter work by Camus or John Hawkes-but only think. Because this book suceeds where Gaddis' other novels drag in that it also makes you feel.