Download or read book Steve Wright s Book of Factoids written by Steve Wright and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now fully revised and updated with new content. Steve Wright selects the weirdest, most fascinating and entertaining trivia from around the world, as read out on his hit Radio 2 show, Steve Wright in the Afternoon.
Download or read book Academia Obscura written by Glen Wright and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-19 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you think the groves of academe are all stuffiness, elbow patches and greying old men... think again. Academia Obscura is an irreverent glimpse inside the ivory tower, exposing the eccentric and slightly unhinged world of university life. Take a trip through the spectrum of academic oddities and unearth the Easter eggs buried in peer reviewed papers, the weird and wonderful world of scholarly social media, and rats in underpants. Procrastinating PhD student Glen Wright invites you to peruse his cabinet of curiosities and discover what academics get up to when no one's looking. Welcome to the hidden silly side of higher education.
Download or read book Can t Take That Away written by Steven Salvatore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A charming, inspired story about being true to who you are." - Phil Stamper, bestselling author of The Gravity of Us An empowering and emotional debut about a genderqueer teen who finds the courage to stand up and speak out for equality when they are discriminated against by their high school administration. Carey Parker dreams of being a diva, and bringing the house down with song. They can hit every note of all the top pop and Broadway hits. But despite their talent, emotional scars from an incident with a homophobic classmate and their grandmother's spiraling dementia make it harder and harder for Carey to find their voice. Then Carey meets Cris, a singer/guitarist who makes Carey feel seen for the first time in their life. With the rush of a promising new romantic relationship, Carey finds the confidence to audition for the role of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, in the school musical, setting off a chain reaction of prejudice by Carey's tormentor and others in the school. It's up to Carey, Cris, and their friends to defend their rights--and they refuse to be silenced. Told in alternating chapters with identifying pronouns, debut author Steven Salvatore's Can't Take That Away conducts a powerful, uplifting anthem, a swoony romance, and an affirmation of self-identity that will ignite the activist in all of us.
Download or read book The Second Book of General Ignorance written by John Lloyd and published by Crown. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the brains behind the New York Times' bestseller, The Book of General Ignorance comes another wonderful collection of the most outrageous, fascinating, and mind-bending facts, taking on the hugely popular form of the first book in the internationally bestselling series. Just when you thought that it was safe to start showing off again, John Lloyd and John Mitchinson are back with another busload of mistakes and misunderstandings. Here is a new collection of simple, perfectly obvious questions you'll be quite certain you know the answers to. Whether it's history, science, sports, geography, literature, language, medicine, the classics, or common wisdom, you'll be astonished to discover that everything you thought you knew is still hopelessly wrong. For example, do you know who made the first airplane flight? How many legs does an octopus have? How much water should you drink every day? What is the chance of tossing a coin and it landing on heads? What happens if you leave a tooth in a glass of Coke overnight? What is house dust mostly made from? What was the first dishwasher built to do? What color are oranges? Who in the world is most likely to kill you? Whatever your answers to the questions above, you can be sure that everything you think you know is wrong. The Second Book of General Ignorance is the essential text for everyone who knows they don't know everything, and an ideal stick with which to beat people who think they do.
Download or read book The Smithsonian Book of Air Space Trivia written by Smithsonian Institution and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who was the first person to dine in space? How long was the Wright brothers's first successful flight? What famous aircraft was named after a grape-flavored soft drink? What toy based on an animated film accompanied astronauts on a shuttle mission in 2000? These questions and many more are answered in The Smithsonian Book of Air & Space Trivia. In addition to the canon of space and aviation information, the pages are illustrated with more than 125 objects from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's collections.
Download or read book Class written by Paul Fussell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1992 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.
Download or read book A Book for Her written by Bridget Christie and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-07-02 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bridget Christie is a stand-up comedian, idiot and feminist. On the 30th of April 2012, a man farted in the Women’s Studies Section of a bookshop and it changed her life forever. A Book For Her details Christie’s twelve years of anonymous toil in the bowels of stand-up comedy and the sudden epiphany that made her, unbelievably, one of the most critically acclaimed British stand-up comedians this decade, drawing together the threads that link a smelly smell in the women’s studies section to the global feminist struggle. Find out how nice Peter Stringfellow’s fish tastes, how yoghurt advertising perpetuates rape myths, and how Emily Bronte used a special ladies’ pen to write Wuthering Heights. If you’re interested in comedy and feminism, then this is definitely the book for you. If you hate both then I’d probably give it a miss. “Christie is adept at turning on a sixpence between being comical, or serious, or both at once, and at pricking her own earnestness.” Telegraph ‘Christie piles derision and tomfoolery upon everyday sexism, while never pretending that jokes alone will solve the problem.’ Guardian
Download or read book The Story of Music written by Howard Goodall and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did prehistoric people start making music? What does every postwar pop song have in common? A “masterful” tour of music through the ages (Booklist, starred review). Music is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and yet the history of its development from single notes to multi-layered orchestration can seem bewilderingly specialized and complex. In his dynamic tour through 40,000 years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall does away with stuffy biographies, unhelpful labels, and tired terminology. Instead, he leads us through the story of music as it happened, idea by idea, so that each musical innovation—harmony, notation, sung theater, the orchestra, dance music, recording, broadcasting—strikes us with its original force. He focuses on what changed when and why, picking out the discoveries that revolutionized man-made sound and bringing to life musical visionaries from the little-known Pérotin to the colossus of Wagner. Along the way, he also gives refreshingly clear descriptions of what music is and how it works: what scales are all about, why some chords sound discordant, and what all post-war pop songs have in common. The story of music is the story of our urge to invent, connect, rebel—and entertain. Howard Goodall's beautifully clear and compelling account is both a hymn to human endeavor and a groundbreaking map of our musical journey.
Download or read book Faster written by James Gleick and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2000-09-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of Genius and Chaos, a bracing new work about the accelerating pace of change in today's world. Most of us suffer some degree of "hurry sickness." a malady that has launched us into the "epoch of the nanosecond," a need-everything-yesterday sphere dominated by cell phones, computers, faxes, and remote controls. Yet for all the hours, minutes, and even seconds being saved, we're still filling our days to the point that we have no time for such basic human activities as eating, sex, and relating to our families. Written with fresh insight and thorough research, Faster is a wise and witty look at a harried world not likely to slow down anytime soon.
Download or read book The Show That Never Ends The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock written by David Weigel and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The wildly entertaining story of progressive rock, the music that ruled the 1970s charts—and has divided listeners ever since. The Show That Never Ends is the definitive story of the extraordinary rise and fall of progressive (“prog”) rock. Epitomized by such classic, chart-topping bands as Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Emerson Lake & Palmer, along with such successors as Rush, Marillion, Asia, Styx, and Porcupine Tree, prog sold hundreds of millions of records. It brought into the mainstream concept albums, spaced-out cover art, crazy time signatures, multitrack recording, and stagecraft so bombastic it was spoofed in the classic movie This Is Spinal Tap. With a vast knowledge of what Rolling Stone has called “the deliciously decadent genre that the punks failed to kill,” access to key people who made the music, and the passion of a true enthusiast, Washington Post national reporter David Weigel tells the story of prog in all its pomp, creativity, and excess. Weigel explains exactly what was “progressive” about prog rock and how its complexity and experimentalism arose from such precursors as the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. He traces prog’s popularity from the massive success of Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” and the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” in 1967. He reveals how prog’s best-selling, epochal albums were made, including The Dark Side of the Moon, Thick as a Brick, and Tubular Bells. And he explores the rise of new instruments into the prog mix, such as the synthesizer, flute, mellotron, and—famously—the double-neck guitar. The Show That Never Ends is filled with the candid reminiscences of prog’s celebrated musicians. It also features memorable portraits of the vital contributions of producers, empresarios, and technicians such as Richard Branson, Brian Eno, Ahmet Ertegun, and Bob Moog. Ultimately, Weigel defends prog from the enormous derision it has received for a generation, and he reveals the new critical respect and popularity it has achieved in its contemporary resurgence.
Download or read book Move Along Please written by Mark Mason and published by ISIS Large Print Books. This book was released on 2014 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At 10.41a.m. on a Tuesday morning in September, Mark Mason boards the number 1A bus at Land's End. Forty-six buses and eleven days later he disembarks at John O'Groats. Along the way he visits everywhere from the village where the internet enters Britain to the urban sprawl of Birmingham (inspiration for The Two Towers in The Lord Of The Rings). He samples staples of the British diet from curry to the deep-fried Mars Bar, and uncovers countless fascinating facts about his native land - did you know, for example, that Crewe Alexandra football club is named after the wife of Edward VII or that Loch Ness could hold the water from all the lakes in England and Wales?
Download or read book The Age of Decadence written by Simon Heffer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly detailed history of Britain at its imperial zenith, revealing the simmering tensions and explosive rivalries beneath the opulent surface of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. The popular memory of Britain in the years before the Great War is of a powerful, contented, orderly, and thriving country. Britain commanded a vast empire: she bestrode international commerce. Her citizens were living longer, profiting from civil liberties their grandparents only dreamed of and enjoying an expanding range of comforts and pastimes. The mood of pride and self-confidence can be seen in Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches, newsreels of George V’s coronation, and London’s great Edwardian palaces. Yet beneath the surface things were very different In The Age of Decadence, Simon Heffer exposes the contradictions of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He explains how, despite the nation’s massive power, a mismanaged war against the Boers in South Africa created profound doubts about her imperial destiny. He shows how attempts to secure vital social reforms prompted the twentieth century’s gravest constitutional crisis—and coincided with the worst industrial unrest in British history. He describes how politicians who conceded the vote to millions more men disregarded women so utterly that female suffragists’ public protest bordered on terrorism. He depicts a ruling class that fell prey to degeneracy and scandal. He analyses a national psyche that embraced the motor-car, the sensationalist press, and the science fiction of H. G. Wells, but also the nostalgia of A. E. Housman.
Download or read book Scrappy Little Nobody written by Anna Kendrick and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling collection of humorous autobiographical essays by the Academy Award nominated actress and star of Up in the Air and Pitch Perfect. Even before she made a name for herself on the silver screen starring in films like Pitch Perfect, Up in the Air, Twilight, and Into the Woods, Anna Kendrick was unusually small, weird, and “10 percent defiant.” At the ripe age of thirteen, she had already resolved to “keep the crazy inside my head where it belonged. Forever. But here’s the thing about crazy: It. Wants. Out.” In Scrappy Little Nobody, she invites readers inside her brain, sharing extraordinary and charmingly ordinary stories with candor and winningly wry observations. With her razor-sharp wit, Anna recounts the absurdities she’s experienced on her way to and from the heart of pop culture as only she can—from her unusual path to the performing arts (Vanilla Ice and baggy neon pants may have played a role) to her double life as a middle-school student who also starred on Broadway to her initial “dating experiments” (including only liking boys who didn’t like her back) to reviewing a binder full of butt doubles to her struggle to live like an adult woman instead of a perpetual “man-child.” Enter Anna’s world and follow her rise from “scrappy little nobody” to somebody who dazzles on the stage, the screen, and now the page—with an electric, singular voice, at once familiar and surprising, sharp and sweet, funny and serious (well, not that serious).
Download or read book Land of Promise written by Michael Lind and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[An] ambitious economic history of the united States...rich with details." ?—David Leonhardt, New York Times Book Review How did a weak collection of former British colonies become an industrial, financial, and military colossus? From the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the American economy has been transformed by wave after wave of emerging technology: the steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine, computer technology. Yet technology-driven change leads to growing misalignment between an innovative economy and anachronistic legal and political structures until the gap is closed by the modernization of America's institutions—often amid upheavals such as the Civil War and Reconstruction and the Great Depression and World War II. When the U.S. economy has flourished, government and business, labor and universities, have worked together in a never-ending project of economic nation building. As the United States struggles to emerge from the Great Recession, Michael Lind clearly demonstrates that Americans, since the earliest days of the republic, have reinvented the American economy - and have the power to do so again.
Download or read book JFK and the Unspeakable written by James W. Douglass and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE ACCLAIMED BOOK, NOW IN PAPERBACK, with a reading group guide and a new afterword by the author. At the height of the Cold War, JFK risked committing the greatest crime in human history: starting a nuclear war. Horrified by the specter of nuclear annihilation, Kennedy gradually turned away from his long-held Cold Warrior beliefs and toward a policy of lasting peace. But to the military and intelligence agencies in the United States, who were committed to winning the Cold War at any cost, Kennedy’s change of heart was a direct threat to their power and influence. Once these dark "Unspeakable" forces recognized that Kennedy’s interests were in direct opposition to their own, they tagged him as a dangerous traitor, plotted his assassination, and orchestrated the subsequent cover-up. Douglass takes readers into the Oval Office during the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, along on the strange journey of Lee Harvey Oswald and his shadowy handlers, and to the winding road in Dallas where an ambush awaited the President’s motorcade. As Douglass convincingly documents, at every step along the way these forces of the Unspeakable were present, moving people like pawns on a chessboard to promote a dangerous and deadly agenda.
Download or read book Alfred Hitchcock s America written by Murray Pomerance and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a sharp eye for social detail and the pressures of class inequality, Alfred Hitchcock brought to the American scene a perspicacity and analytical shrewdness unparalleled in American cinema. Murray Pomerance works from a basis in cultural analysis and a detailed knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock's films and production techniques to explore how America of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s is revealed and critically commented upon in Hitchcock's work. Alfred Hitchcock's America is full of stunning details that bring new light to Hitchcock's method and works. The American "spirit of place," is seen here in light of the titanic American personality, American values in a consumer age, social class and American social form, and the characteristic American marriage. The book’s analysis ranges across a wide array of films from Rebecca to Family Plot, and examines in depth the location sequences, characterological types, and complex social expectations that riddled American society while Hitchcock thrived there.
Download or read book Blankety Blank written by D. Harlan Wilson and published by . This book was released on 2009-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rutger Van Trout has worse problems than his mundane existence in the all-consuming, all-suppressing Vulgaria of Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's not that his son might be turning into a werewolf, or that his daughter might be a nymphomaniac. The problem does not lie in his obsession with transforming his middle-class estate into a three-ring barnyard. He doesn't even mind his wife's (possibly) haunted skeleton or the freak-of-the-week superheroes and window-jumpers populating his neighborhood. The complication has invaded his community in the form of a new breed of serial killer named Mr. Blankety Blank, who stalks from house to house throughout the Vulgaria leaving a bloodbath that would make Jack the Ripper himself blush.
