Download or read book The Kings of Swing written by Craig Urquhart and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kings of Swing is the intimate and extraordinary story of those South African golfers who have won numerous Major championships – more than any other nation outside of the United States. Their victories were achieved despite decades of sporting isolation and, during the post-apartheid era, in the shadow of possibly the greatest athlete of all time. This is a story of plane, train and car crashes, psychosurgery, a lightning strike, a broken beer bottle, a misplaced marker, a beautiful autistic boy and a scandal that ensnared the country’s most famous sportsman and led to the resignation of a prime minister. It is a story of the power of the mind and the power of the body in this, the most fickle of all sports. It is a story of dramatic highs and lows, of desperate poverty and fabulous wealth. It is a rare glimpse into the extraordinary lives of South Africa’s top golfers ...
Download or read book Swing Kings written by Jared Diamond and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The best baseball book I’ve read in years." — Sam Walker • "An exhilarating story of innovation." — Ben Reiter • "Swing Kings feels like a spiritual successor to Moneyball." — Baseball Prospectus From the Wall Street Journal’s national baseball writer, the captivating story of the home run boom, following a group of players who rose from obscurity to stardom and the rogue swing coaches who helped them usher the game into a new age. We are in a historic era for the home run. The 2019 season saw the most homers ever, obliterating a record set just two years before. It is a shift that has transformed the way the game is played, contributing to more strikeouts, longer games, and what feels like the logical conclusion of the analytics era. In Swing Kings, Wall Street Journal national baseball writer Jared Diamond reveals that the secret behind this unprecedented shift isn’t steroids or the stitching of the baseballs, it’s the most elemental explanation of all: the swing. In this lively narrative romp, he tracks a group of baseball’s biggest stars—including Aaron Judge, J.D. Martinez, and Justin Turner—who remade their swings under the tutelage of a band of renegade coaches, and remade the game in the process. These coaches, many of them baseball washouts who have reinvented themselves as swing gurus, for years were one of the game’s best-kept secrets. Among their ranks are a swimming pool contractor, the owner of a billiards hall, and an ex-hippie whose swing insights draw from surfing and the technique of Japanese samurai. Now, as Diamond artfully charts, this motley cast has moved from the baseball margins to its center of power. They are changing the way hitting is taught to players of all ages, and major league clubs are scrambling for their services, hiring them in record numbers as coaches and consultants. And Diamond himself, whose baseball career ended in high school, enlists the tutelage of each swing coach he profiles, with an aim toward starring in the annual Boston-New York media game at Yankee Stadium. Swing Kings is both a rollicking history of baseball’s recent past and a deeply reported, character-driven account of a battle between opponents as old as time: old and new, change and stasis, the establishment and those who break from it. Jared Diamond has written a masterful chronicle of America’s pastime at the crossroads.
Download or read book Paddy Cole written by Paddy Cole and published by The O'Brien Press Ltd. This book was released on 2020-11-02 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The colourful story of the 80-year-old saxophone player and singer affectionately know as The King of The Swingers. Paddy Cole has taken his style of Jazz, Dixieland and Swing band music all over the world – and back home too. Paddy Cole is the grand old man of Irish Showbiz who still is young at heart and has built a new radio career with his show on Dublin's Sunshine Radio every Sunday. His story is as heart-warming as it is hilarious!
Download or read book The Uncrowned King of Swing written by Jeffrey Magee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If Benny Goodman was the "King of Swing," then Fletcher Henderson was the power behind the throne. Not only did Henderson arrange the music that powered Goodman's meteoric rise, he also helped launch the careers of Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins, among others. Now Jeffrey Magee offers a fascinating account of this pivotal bandleader, throwing new light on the emergence of modern jazz and the world that created it.Drawing on an unprecedented combination of sources, including sound recordings, obscure stock arrangements, and hundreds of scores that have been available only since Goodman's death, Magee illuminates Henderson's musical output, from his early work as a New York bandleader, to his pivotal role in building the Kingdom of Swing. He shows how Henderson, standing at the forefront of the New York jazz scene during the 1920s and '30s, assembled the era's best musicians, simultaneously preserving jazz's distinctiveness and performing popular dance music that reached a wide audience. Magee reveals how, in Henderson's largely segregated musical world, black and white musicians worked together to establish jazz, how Henderson's style rose out of collaborations with many key players, how these players deftly combined improvised and written music, and how their work negotiated artistic and commercial impulses. And we see how, in the depths of the Depression, record producer John Hammond brought together Henderson and Goodman, a fortuitous collaboration that changed the face of American music.Whether placing Henderson's life in the context of the Great Migration or the Harlem Renaissance or describing how the savvy use of network radio made the Henderson-Goodman style a national standard, Jeffrey Magee brings to life a monumental musician who helped to shape an era.
Download or read book Swing written by Kwame Alexander and published by Clarion Books. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this YA novel in verse from bestselling authors Kwame Alexander and Mary Rand Hess (Solo), which Kirkus called “lively, moving, and heartfelt” in a starred review, Noah and Walt just want to leave their geek days behind and find “cool,” but in the process discover a lot about first loves, friendship, and embracing life . . . as well as why Black Lives Matter is so important for all. Best friends Noah and Walt are far from popular, but Walt is convinced junior year is their year, and he has a plan that includes wooing the girls of their dreams and becoming amazing athletes. Never mind he and Noah failed to make their baseball team yet again, and Noah’s crush since third grade, Sam, has him firmly in the friend zone. While Walt focuses on his program of jazz, podcasts, batting cages, and a “Hug Life” mentality, Noah feels stuck in status quo … until he stumbles on a stash of old love letters. Each one contains words Noah’s always wanted to say to Sam, and he begins secretly creating artwork using the lines that speak his heart. But when his art becomes public, Noah has a decision to make: continue his life in the dugout and possibly lose the girl forever, or take a swing and finally speak out. At the same time, American flags are being left around town. While some think it’s a harmless prank and others see it as a form of protest, Noah can’t shake the feeling something bigger is happening to his community. Especially after he witnesses events that hint divides and prejudices run deeper than he realized. As the personal and social tensions increase around them, Noah and Walt must decide what is really important when it comes to love, friendship, sacrifice, and fate. Swing: is written by New York Times bestselling author and Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Award-winner Kwame Alexander Features a diverse array of characters and perspectives tackles the biggest social issues of today, including racial prejudice and Black Lives Matter is perfect reading for the classroom or community-wide discussions is a 2020 YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers contains original artwork tied to the story If you enjoy Swing, check out Solo by Kwame Alexander and Mary Rand Hess.
Download or read book The Kings Mistresses written by Elizabeth C Goldsmith and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mancini Sisters, Marie and Hortense, were born in Rome, brought to the court of Louis XIV of France, and strategically married off by their uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, to secure his political power base. Such was the life of many young women of the age: they had no independent status under the law and were entirely a part of their husband's property once married. Marie and Hortense, however, had other ambitions in mind altogether. Miserable in their marriages and determined to live independently, they abandoned their husbands in secret and began lives of extraordinary daring on the run and in the public eye. The beguiling sisters quickly won the affections of noblemen and kings alike. Their flight became popular fodder for salon conversation and tabloids, and was closely followed by seventeenth-century European society. The Countess of Grignan remarked that they were traveling "like two heroines out of a novel." Others gossiped that they "were roaming the countryside in pursuit of wandering lovers. "Their scandalous behavior -- disguising themselves as men, gambling, and publicly disputing with their husbands -- served as more than just entertainment. It sparked discussions across Europe concerning the legal rights of husbands over their wives. Elizabeth Goldsmith's vibrant biography of the Mancini sisters -- drawn from personal papers of the players involved and the tabloids of the time -- illuminates the lives of two pioneering free spirits who were feminists long before the word existed.
Download or read book Hell of a Hat written by Kenneth Partridge and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late ’90s, third-wave ska broke across the American alternative music scene like a tsunami. In sweaty clubs across the nation, kids danced themselves dehydrated to the peppy rhythms and punchy horns of bands like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Reel Big Fish. As ska caught fire, a swing revival brought even more sharp-dressed, brass-packing bands to national attention. Hell of a Hat dives deep into this unique musical moment. Prior to invading the Billboard charts and MTV, ska thrived from Orange County, California, to NYC, where Moon Ska Records had eager rude girls and boys snapping up every release. On the swing tip, retro pioneers like Royal Crown Revue had fans doing the jump, jive, and wail long before The Brian Setzer Orchestra resurrected the Louis Prima joint. Drawing on interviews with heavyweights like the Bosstones, Sublime, Less Than Jake, and Cherry Poppin' Daddies—as well as underground heroes like Mustard Plug, The Slackers, Hepcat, and The New Morty Show—Kenneth Partridge argues that the relative economic prosperity and general optimism of the late ’90s created the perfect environment for fast, danceable music that—with some notable exceptions—tended to avoid political commentary. An homage to a time when plaids and skankin’ were king and doing the jitterbug in your best suit was so money, Hell of a Hat is an inside look at ’90s ska, swing, and the loud noises of an era when America was dreaming and didn’t even know it.
Download or read book Blue Rhythm Fantasy written by John Wriggle and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behind the iconic jazz orchestras, vocalists, and stage productions of the Swing Era lay the talents of popular music's unsung heroes: the arrangers. John Wriggle takes you behind the scenes of New York City's vibrant entertainment industry of the 1930s and 1940s to uncover the lives and work of jazz arrangers, both black and white, who left an indelible mark on American music and culture. Blue Rhythm Fantasy traces the extraordinary career of arranger Chappie Willet--a collaborator of Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and many others--to revisit legendary Swing Era venues and performers from Harlem to Times Square. Wriggle's insightful music analyses of big band arranging techniques explore representations of cultural modernism, discourses on art and commercialism, conceptions of race and cultural identity, music industry marketing strategies, and stage entertainment variety genres. Drawing on archives, obscure recordings, untapped sources in the African American press, and interviews with participants, Blue Rhythm Fantasy is a long-overdue study of the arranger during this dynamic era of American music history.
Download or read book Benny Goodman s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert written by Catherine Tackley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On January 16, 1938 Benny Goodman brought his swing orchestra to America's venerated home of European classical music, Carnegie Hall. The resulting concert - widely considered one of the most significant events in American music history - helped to usher jazz and swing music into the American cultural mainstream. This reputation has been perpetuated by Columbia Records' 1950 release of the concert on LP. Now, in Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert, jazz scholar and musician Catherine Tackley provides the first in depth, scholarly study of this seminal concert and recording. Combining rigorous documentary and archival research with close analysis of the recording, Tackley strips back the accumulated layers of interpretation and meaning to assess the performance in its original context, and explore what the material has come to represent in its recorded form. Taking a complete view of the concert, she examines the rich cultural setting in which it took place, and analyzes the compositions, arrangements and performances themselves, before discussing the immediate reception, and lasting legacy and impact of this storied event and album. As the definitive study of one of the most important recordings of the twentieth-century, Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert is a must-read for all serious jazz fans, musicians and scholars.
Download or read book LIFE written by and published by . This book was released on 1970-08-07 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.
Download or read book Crack of the Bat written by Bob Hill and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-08-03 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crack of the Bat is a comprehensive and entertaining look at the most famous icon in the history of baseball, the "Louisville Slugger" bat. It includes the evolution of bats from pioneer wagon tongues to the sleek aluminum models of today. It examines the amazing physics involved in hitting a baseball, where .003 seconds means the difference between a home run and a foul ball. It tells the fascinating history of the still family-owned Hillerich & Bradsby Company, which in just 80 years went from making butter churns to making seven million bats a year. Reinforcing this are dozens of stories about the bats themselves, and the personal idiosyncracies of the most famous hitters in baseball history, including Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Tony Gwynn, Cal Ripken Jr. and Derek Jeter. The book explains why the players picked the bats they did, the amazing lengths they would go to to protect them, and how valuable these bats have now become in the hands of collectors. Illustrated with hundreds of archival photographs, baseball decals, and icons, many in color, this book will become as much a cherished keepsake as some of the bats it describes.
Download or read book The Complete Idiot s Guide to Jazz written by Alan Axelrod and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1999 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the origins and history of jazz, its major artists, and its stylistic varieties, and offers suggestions for assembling a recording collection
Download or read book The Book of Kings written by Caleb Magyar and published by National Geographic Kids. This book was released on 2019 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "They're kings wielding scepters and sitting on thrones, they're presidents and prime ministers leading their nations, or they're CEOs, scientists, sports stars, artists, and others who are changing the world. Welcome to The Book of Kings, where being a regal royal doesn't just mean wearing a crown." -- back cover.
Download or read book The Kings of Strength written by Edmond Desbonnet and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than a century ago, the barrel-chested strongman clad in leopard skins, Roman sandals and carrying an oversized barbell was a common performer in fairs, circuses and vaudeville theaters. In 1911, before this phenomenon had disappeared, French gym owner, journalist and athlete Edmond Desbonnet published a colorful history of these mighty performers. Since he knew and interviewed many of these men (and women), Desbonnet was able to put a human face on the strongmen and strongwomen who made their livings by performing spectacular strength stunts for the entertainment of the public. Among these were super-strong athlete Louis Uni, known as Apollon; Eugen Sandow, the mighty Adonis of the stage; the great strongwoman Kati Sandwina Brumbach and many others who entertained audiences by lifting barbells, automobiles, horses and even elephants. Now translated to English and extensively annotated, The Kings of Strength records and preserves the biographies of more than 200 strength performers and bodybuilders from ancient times up to the early 1900s. The book provides a vital contribution to both theatrical and athletic history, while exploring the universal fascination with strength and muscular physiques.
Download or read book Catalog of Copyright Entries written by Library of Congress. Copyright Office and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 1188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ares Express written by Ian McDonald and published by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-01-31 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Mars of the imagination, like no other, in a colorful, witty SF novel, taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald's Desolation Road, Ares Express is set on a terraformed Mars where fusion-powered locomotives run along the network of rails that is the planet’s circulatory system and artificial intelligences reconfigure reality billions of times each second. One young woman, Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12th, becomes the person upon whom the future -- or futures -- of Mars depends. Big, picaresque, funny; taking the Mars of Ray Bradbury and the more recent, terraformed Marses of authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Greg Bear, Ares Express is a wild and woolly magic-realist SF novel, featuring lots of bizarre philosophies, strange, mind-stretching ideas, and trains as big as city blocks. REVIEWS “Ares Express is a long, adventure-filled, extravagantly colorful, often funny, quite moving, highly imaginative, excellently written story, set on a glorious Mars built partly of sharp-edged Kim Stanley Robinson-style extrapolation, but mostly of lush, loving, Ray Bradbury-style semi-SF, semi-Fantasy, Martian dreams.... I loved it wholeheartedly.” – SF Site “Hugo-winner McDonald’s virtues have long been underappreciated by major North American publishers... McDonald’s fantastic Mars is vividly detailed and owes much to Bradbury’s Martian stories. Despite a bit of hand waving around technology that is glibly indistinguishable from magic, this sequel is entirely worthy of its rightly lauded predecessor [Desolation Road].” – Publishers Weekly “One of the strangest, weirdest, fantastic reads of your life.” – SF Crowsnest “McDonald is clever, lyrical... snarky, and utterly wondrous. The characters would be completely unbelievable in our world, but in theirs they are inevitable...” – Night Owl Reviews
Download or read book Moving Kings written by Joshua Cohen and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A propulsive, incendiary novel about faith, race, class, and what it means to have a home, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Netanyahus “A Jewish Sopranos . . . utterly engrossing, full of passionate sympathy . . . Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today.”—The New Yorker ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Vulture, Bookforum One of the boldest voices of his generation, Joshua Cohen returns with Moving Kings, a powerful and provocative novel that interweaves, in profoundly intimate terms, the housing crisis in America’s poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods with the world's oldest conflict, in the Middle East. The year is 2015, and twenty-one-year-olds Yoav and Uri, veterans of the last Gaza War, have just completed their compulsory military service in the Israel Defense Forces. In keeping with national tradition, they take a year off for rest, recovery, and travel. They come to New York City and begin working for Yoav’s distant cousin David King—a proud American patriot, Republican, and Jew, and the recently divorced proprietor of King’s Moving Inc., a heavyweight in the tri-state area’s moving and storage industries. Yoav and Uri now must struggle to become reacquainted with civilian life, but it’s not easy to move beyond their traumatic pasts when their days are spent kicking down doors as eviction-movers in the ungentrified corners of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, throwing out delinquent tenants and seizing their possessions. And what starts off as a profitable if eerily familiar job—an “Occupation”—quickly turns violent when they encounter one homeowner seeking revenge.
