Download or read book Billie Holiday Biography The Unforgettable Lady Day Feminism Strange Fruit Controversies Relationships Rumors and More written by Chris Dicker and published by Chris Dicker. This book was released on with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Billie Holiday, also known as the Lady Day was a very talented jazz and blues singer during the Great Depression and beyond in the United States. She lived and coped during the most difficult times in the United States, especially when it comes to gender inequality, racism and discrimination. In fact, some of her songs were considered "protest songs" against racism. The most controversial song of Billie Holiday was "Strange Fruit," which both fascinated and embraced black feminism. Billie Holiday was the singer of the resistance for blacks during that time. It was very difficult for a woman to succeed during the Great Depression in 1930s. Often she sang for pennies to make the ends meet. Billie Holiday was very honest and open to her audience. She was mostly singing and producing albums for minorities, rather than the mainstream. Billie Holiday was "Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr." combined in the music industry. She embraced the pain and channeled it through her songs. It created deep and strong bond with her listeners. Billie Holiday (Lady Day) was one of the most significant jazz singers ever recorded. Again, her struggles and her pain can be heard in her music. She evolved from a typical torch singer into being a real innovator, singing songs about racism and injustice. Her life was reflected in her music. This what helped her to stand out from the rest of the musicians. There were times where Billie Holiday was more famous for her wrong doings than her true talent. She was arrested multiple times for possession of drugs. Her addictions to drug and alcohol often went out of control, making her professional and personal life a disaster. You'll learn more about this here. In this biography, you'll also learn into some depth who Billie Holiday really was as a person. What happened to her family? Who were her idols and influences for her music and much more. There were instances where the Lady Day was actually raped while a kid, and how all those difficulties shaped her as a person many people admire to this day. If you want to learn more about Billie Holiday, her legacy and true talent. Grab this biography now!
Download or read book Billie Holiday written by Stuart Nicholson and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[A sensitive, perceptive biography. . . [Nicholson successfully portrays both the genius and the tragedy of the legendary Lady Day." -- Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Billie Holiday Biography written by and published by . This book was released on 19?? with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book If You Can t Be Free Be a Mystery written by Farah Jasmine Griffin and published by One World. This book was released on 2002-04-30 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than four decades after her death, Billie Holiday remains one of the most gifted artists of our time–and also one of the most elusive. Because of who she was and how she chose to live her life, Lady Day has been the subject of both intense adoration and wildly distorted legends. Now at last, Farah Jasmine Griffin, a writer of intellectual authority and superb literary gifts, liberates Billie Holiday from the mythology that has obscured both her life and her art. An intimate meditation on Holiday’s place in American culture and history, If You Can’t Be Free, Be A Mystery reveals Lady Day in all her complexity, humor and pain–a true jazz virtuoso whose passion and originality made every song she sang hers forever. Celebrated by poets, revered by recording artists from Frank Sinatra to Macy Gray, Billie Holiday is more popular and influential today than ever before. Now, thanks to this marvelous book, Holiday’s many fans can finally understand the singer and the woman they love.
Download or read book Strange Fruit written by David Margolick and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the story of a song that foretold a movement, and the lady who dared to sing it. The powerful, evocative lyrics of Strange Fruit - written by a Jewish communist schoolteacher - portray the lynching of a black man in the South. In 1939, its performance sparked controversy (and sometimes violence) wherever Billie Holiday went. Not until 16 years later did Rosa Parks refuse to yield her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Yet Strange Fruit lived on, and in this work David Margolick chronicles its effect on those who experienced it first-hand: musicians, artists, journalists, intellectuals, students, budding activists, and even the waitresses and bartenders who worked the clubs.
Download or read book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism written by Angela Y. Davis and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith−published here in their entirety for the first time−Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.
Download or read book Lady Sings the Blues written by Billie Holiday and published by Crown. This book was released on 2006-07-25 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perfect for fans of The United States vs. Billie Holiday, this is the fiercely honest, no-holds-barred memoir of the legendary jazz, swing, and standards singing sensation—a fiftieth-anniversary edition updated with stunning new photos, a revised discography, and an insightful foreword by music writer David Ritz Taking the reader on a fast-moving journey from Billie Holiday’s rough-and-tumble Baltimore childhood (where she ran errands at a whorehouse in exchange for the chance to listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith albums), to her emergence on Harlem’s club scene, to sold-out performances with the Count Basie Orchestra and with Artie Shaw and his band, this revelatory memoir is notable for its trenchant observations on the racism that darkened Billie’s life and the heroin addiction that ended it too soon. We are with her during the mesmerizing debut of “Strange Fruit”; with her as she rubs shoulders with the biggest movie stars and musicians of the day (Bob Hope, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and more); and with her through the scrapes with Jim Crow, spats with Sarah Vaughan, ignominious jailings, and tragic decline. All of this is told in Holiday’s tart, streetwise style and hip patois that makes it read as if it were written yesterday.
Download or read book Mother Mother written by Annie Macmanus and published by Wildfire. This book was released on 2021-05-27 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER, JUNE 2021 'Annie Macmanus is writer whose understanding and capturing of human nature comes as easily to her as breathing' CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS 'A work of gilded melancholy that is going to take everyone by surprise' UNA MULLALLY 'Macmanus writes with flair and confidence rarely seen in a debut' SINÉAD GLEESON One Saturday morning, TJ McConnell wakes up to find his mother, Mary, gone. He doesn't know where - or why - but he's the only one who can help find her. Mary grew up longing for information about the mother she never knew. Her brother could barely remember her, and their father numbed his pain with drink. Now aged thirty-seven, Mary has lived in the same house her whole life. She's never left Belfast. TJ, who's about to turn eighteen, is itching to see more of the world. But when his mother disappears, TJ begins to realise what he's been taking for granted. MOTHER MOTHER takes us down the challenging road of Mary's life while following TJ's increasingly desperate search for her, as he begins to discover what has led her to this point. This is a story about family, grief, addiction and motherhood, and it asks an important question - if you spend your life giving everything to the ones you love, do you risk losing yourself along the way? 'A brilliant book...that explores the brutal legacy of addiction and the consequences of a deep grief left to stagnate' Sara Cox 'A tender, surprising, occasionally bleak, moving and delicate book' Irish Times 'A study of grief, addiction and what it means to be a mother' Stylist 'Melancholy, beautifully unadorned prose' Mail on Sunday 'Unflinching and unsparing but also beautifully written' Daily Mail 'An incredible debut' Daily Mirror 'A page-turning exploration of grief, addiction, young motherhood and unbreakable family ties' British Vogue
Download or read book My Mrs Brown written by William Norwich and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Called upon to inventory the estate of a wealthy woman, Emilia Brown, a frugal and unnoticed woman in small-town Rhode Island, discovers an exquisitely tailored Oscar de la Renta dress in the woman's collection and changes her life to be able to purchase the dress.
Download or read book The Emperor of All Maladies written by Siddhartha Mukherjee and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.
Download or read book Love Life and Lemons written by Jane Hugen-Tobler and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1927The ancient lemon tree sits resplendent on a farm in Italy. It holds the secrets of former kings and saints and has been protected through time by the Hugen-Toblers'. The farming family's future is in the balance when tragic events unfold, and the tree is threatened.Corrado's passion is cooking. When he leaves Italy for London no one knows the unimaginable effect it will have on the tree and his family...In London, Margaret is trapped in a loveless marriage with an older man who has a dark secret. He constantly buys her shoes but cannot make love to her.Shifting between drab, grey England and vibrant, sunny Italy, Margaret and Corrado find themselves embarking on life changing journeys; little do they know how inconceivably important it will become when their lives collide and cultures clash.A story of family, food, love and lemons. Can new love find a way through adversity and ultimately save the tree?What people are saying about this book...'A book whose characters' lives become a part of yours. I couldn't put it down and read it in two days.'Rae Harlond'Love, Life & Lemons is a wonderful book. It is a vibrant feast for the senses from start to finish.'Sharon Beadman'This is a book I want on my bookshelf.'Nikki Wood
Download or read book Dancing Revelations written by Thomas DeFrantz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey's dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution."--Jacket.
Download or read book Imperial Leather written by Anne Mcclintock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.
Download or read book An Apartment on Uranus written by Paul B. Preciado and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “dissident of the gender-sex binary system” reflects on gender transitioning and political and cultural transitions in technoscientific capitalism. Uranus, the frozen giant, is the coldest planet in the solar system as well as a deity in Greek mythology. It is also the inspiration for uranism, a concept coined by the writer Karl Heinrich Ulrich in 1864 to define the “third sex” and the rights of those who “love differently.” Following Ulrich, Paul B. Preciado dreams of an apartment on Uranus where he might live beyond existing power, gender and racial strictures invented by modernity. “My trans condition is a new form of uranism,” he writes. “I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am not heterosexual. I am not homosexual. I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the gender-sex binary system. I am the multiplicity of the cosmos trapped in a binary political and epistemological system, shouting in front of you. I am a uranist confined inside the limits of technoscientific capitalism.” This book recounts Preciado's transformation from Beatriz into Paul B., but it is not only an account of gender transitioning. Preciado also considers political, cultural, and sexual transition, reflecting on issues that range from the rise of neo-fascism in Europe to the technological appropriation of the uterus, from the harassment of trans children to the role museums might play in the cultural revolution to come. An Apartment on Uranus is a bold, transgressive, and necessary book.
Download or read book Wright for America written by Robin Lamont and published by . This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pryor Wright's ultra-conservative radio show has millions of devout fans who are sure that the slurs and wild accusations fired at the liberal left prove him a true patriot. But when his venomous rantings catch Maren Garrity's twin brother in the crossfire, the struggling actress pursues her own style of justice and enlists a troupe of fellow unemployed actors to teach Wright just how powerful words can be.
Download or read book Assata Taught Me written by Donna Murch and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Panther and Cuban exile, Assata Shakur, has inspired multiple generations of radical protest, including our contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing its title from one of America's foremost revolutionaries, this collection of thought-provoking essays by award-winning Panther scholar Donna Murch explores how social protest is challenging our current system of state violence and mass incarceration. Murch exposes the devastating consequences of overlapping punishment campaigns against gangs, drugs, and crime on poor and working-class populations of color. Through largely hidden channels, it is these punishment campaigns, Murch says, that generate enormous revenues for the state. Under such difficult conditions, organized resistance to the advancing tide of state violence and incarceration has proved difficult. This timely and urgent book shows how a youth-led political movement has emerged since the killing of Trayvon Martin that challenges the bi-partisan consensus on punishment and looks to the future through a redistributive, queer, and feminist lens. Murch frames the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement in relation to earlier struggles for Black Liberation, while excavating the origins of mass incarceration and the political economy that drives it. Assata Taught Me offers a fresh and much-needed historical perspective on the fifty years since the founding of the Black Panther Party, in which the world's largest police state has emerged.
Download or read book Post Colonial and African American Women s Writing written by Gina Wisker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-04 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible and unusually wide-ranging book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonial and African American women's writing. It provides a valuable gender and culture inflected critical introduction to well established women writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Suniti Namjoshi, Bessie Head, and others from the U.S.A., India, Africa, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and introduces emergent writers from South East Asia, Cyprus and Oceania. Engaging with and clarifying contested critical areas of feminism and the postcolonial; exploring historical background and cultural context, economic, political, and psychoanalytic influences on gendered experience, it provides a cohesive discussion of key issues such as cultural and gendered identity, motherhood, mothertongue, language, relationships, women's economic constraints and sexual politics.
