Download or read book Victory Is Assured written by Stanley Crouch and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The grievous loss of Stanley Crouch, one of America’s most renowned intellectuals, is underscored by the posthumous appearance of these remarkable essays. With Stanley Crouch’s untimely death in 2020, American literature lost “a critic without peer” (Ta-Nehisi Coates). Born in Los Angeles in 1945, Crouch—a towering stylist, fearless columnist, and without question, one of the finest jazz critics of all time—was Rabelaisian both in stature and in intellectual appetite. Beloved yet cantankerous, Crouch delighted and enflamed the passions of his readers in equal measure, whether writing about race, politics, literature, or music. In these essays—some discovered on his computer, unpublished until now—Crouch tackles subjects ranging from Malcolm X (“a thorned bud standing in the shadow of sequoias”) to the films of Quentin Tarantino (“With Django, Tarantino has slipped down . . . into a shallow and bloodstained hip-hop turn that his own best work has well-refuted”). Introduced by Jelani Cobb, with an afterword by Wynton Marsalis, and collected by his longtime editor Glenn Mott, Victory Is Assured canonizes the legacy of an inimitable, indispensable American critic.

Download or read book Victory Is Assured Uncollected Writings of Stanley Crouch written by Stanley Crouch and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The grievous loss of Stanley Crouch, one of America’s most renowned intellectuals, is underscored by the posthumous appearance of these remarkable essays. With Stanley Crouch’s untimely death in 2020, American literature lost “a critic without peer” (Ta-Nehisi Coates). Born in Los Angeles in 1945, Crouch—a towering stylist, fearless columnist, and without question, one of the finest jazz critics of all time—was Rabelaisian both in stature and in intellectual appetite. Beloved yet cantankerous, Crouch delighted and enflamed the passions of his readers in equal measure, whether writing about race, politics, literature, or music. In these essays—some discovered on his computer, unpublished until now—Crouch tackles subjects ranging from Malcolm X (“a thorned bud standing in the shadow of sequoias”) to the films of Quentin Tarantino (“With Django, Tarantino has slipped down . . . into a shallow and bloodstained hip-hop turn that his own best work has well-refuted”). Introduced by Jelani Cobb, with an afterword by Wynton Marsalis, and collected by his longtime editor Glenn Mott, Victory Is Assured canonizes the legacy of an inimitable, indispensable American critic.

Download or read book Considering Genius written by Stanley Crouch and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2007-04-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a preeminent--and always controversial--jazz critic and intellectual firebrand comes the long-awaited collections of essential essays on the great music and performers of the jazz world.

Download or read book The Artificial White Man written by Stanley Crouch and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2009-03-25 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this penetrating collection of original essays, legendary gadfly and esteemed critic Stanley Crouch tackles the notion on authenticity-what it is, what it isn't, and what we make of it, for good or for bad. While the question of who's the real deal and who isn't has now seeped into nearly every corner of American culture, nowhere does the idea of authenticity hold greater sway than in the realm of ethnicity. In this bracing collection of original essays, Crouch brings all his rhetorical skills to bear on this animating-and polarizing-idea, and investigates the motives behind those who present themselves as authentic, those who claim to expose the inauthentic, and what this all tells us about the state of the arts-from the vaulted halls of literary fiction to the arena of soft drink-shilling pop stars-in America today. For Crouch, this is not simply an academic exercise, but a summation of our peculiar historical moment. Living in a time in which much of the conventions that defined and limited people's futures-whether it be race, class, or sex-have been obliterated, we're both liberated from bigotries and yet-still-facing profound disillusionment. As influences come and go at breakneck speed, as traditions are remade and re-imagined, it has become hard to tell which metaphorical end is up. The result, Crouch argues, is not only a national paranoia that someone may have put something over on us-i.e. that we have too often been duped into believing that the counterfeit is authentic-but also a deep retrenchment of imagination and artistic expression, from white and black alike. As he promises in his introduction: "This book is an argument with all of that, however sympathetic it might be to the search for alternatives to our disappointments. It hopes to present, through affirmation, a new form of rebellion in our time of cosmetic dissent."

Download or read book Notes of a Hanging Judge written by Stanley Crouch and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stanley Crouch, the rarely acknowledged but epic nature of the Afro-American experience offers one of the most revealing paths through the spiritual and intellectual thickets of our time, exposing us to ourselves as often through art as through politics. In Notes of a Hanging Judge, Crouch portrays this century as an "Age of Redefinition" for the United States and identifies the Civil Rights Movement as one of its richest metaphors. Crouch explores the movement from all sides--its epochal triumphs and the forces that have nearly destroyed it, its great political and artistic success stories and the crime culture it has been powerless to prevent or to control--and traces its complex and ambivalent interactions with the feminist and gay dissent that followed its example. Balancing the passionate involvement of an insider with a reporter's open-minded rigor, and using a virtuosic prose style, Crouch offers uniquely insightful accounts of familiar public issues--black middle-class life, the Bernhard Goetz case, black homosexuals, the career of Louis Farrakhan--that throw fresh light on the position of Afro-Americans in the contemporary world. Even more revealing are Crouch's accounts of his travels, focusing on his perceptions as a black man, that put places as diverse as Atlanta and Africa, or Mississippi and Italy, in unique new perspectives. Perhaps most powerful of all are Crouch's profiles of black leaders ranging from Maynard, to Michael, to Jesse Jackson. Crouch's stern evaluations are sure to be controversial, especially his vision of the Civil Rights Movement as a noble cause "gone loco," mired in self-defeating ethnic nationalism and condescending self-regard, and conspicuously lacking in the spiritual majesty that ensured its great political victories. His discussions of artistic figures, including extended critiques of Toni Morrison and Spike Lee, will also incite much debate. Taken together, these essays represent a major reinterpretation of black, and therefore American, culture in our time, and should be read by anyone who is serious about either.

Download or read book Duran Duran s Rio written by Annie Zaleski and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the '80s, the Birmingham, England, band Duran Duran became closely associated with new wave, an idiosyncratic genre that dominated the decade's music and culture. No album represented this rip-it-up-and-start-again movement better than the act's breakthrough 1982 LP, Rio. A cohesive album with a retro-futuristic sound-influences include danceable disco, tangy funk, swaggering glam, and Roxy Music's art-rock-the full-length sold millions and spawned smashes such as "Hungry Like the Wolf" and the title track. However, Rio wasn't a success everywhere at first; in fact, the LP had to be buffed-up with remixes and reissued before it found an audience in America. The album was further buoyed by colorful music videos, which established Duran Duran as leaders of an MTV-driven second British Invasion, and the group's cutting-edge visual aesthetic. Via extensive new interviews with band members and other figures who helped Rio succeed, this book explores how and why Rio became a landmark pop-rock album, and examines how the LP was both a musical inspiration-and a reflection of a musical, cultural, and technology zeitgeist.

Download or read book From Babylon to Timbuktu written by Rudolph Windsor and published by Windsor Golden Series Publication. This book was released on 2023-11-02 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Don t the Moon Look Lonesome written by Stanley Crouch and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stanley Crouch's gloriously bold first novel provides an intimate and epic portrait of America that breaks all the rules in crossing the boundaries of race, sex, and class. Blonde Carla from South Dakota is a jazz singer who has been around the block. Almost suddenly, she finds herself fighting to hold on to Maxwell, a black tenor saxophonist from Texas. Their red-hot and sublimely tender five-year union is under siege. Those black people who oppose such relatonships in the interest of romantic entitlement or group solidarity are pressuring Maxwell, and he is wavering. As Carla battles to save the deepest love of her life, her past plays out against the present, vividly bringing forth a startlingly fresh range of characters in scenes that are as accurately drawn as they are unpredictable and innovatively conceived.

Download or read book Out of the House of Bondage written by Thavolia Glymph and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source of slavery's redeeming qualities, where 'gentle' mistresses ministered to 'loyal' slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely the exposure to public view of the unbridgeable social distance between the women on whose labor the plantation household relied and the women who employed them. This is a story of race and gender, nation and citizenship, freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century South; a big abstract story that is composed of equally big personal stories.

Download or read book London Street written by Jane E. Griffioen and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-05-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within a Dutch enclave already removed from the larger world, Janie’s family is further isolated and odd. Janie struggles within the tight-knit community to understand the secrets and events involving her family. She knows the line her father draws between the holy and the sinful. His boundaries and rigid belief system nearly destroy the very family they were meant to protect. Persistent rumors and shunning by church members add to Janie’s heartache and confusion. Her endurance to preserve a loving relationship with her family is an intimate story of triumph over community bigotry and religious zeal gone too far.

Download or read book Kansas City Lightning written by Stanley Crouch and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A tour de force. . . . Crouch has given us a bone-deep understanding of Parker’s music and the world that produced it. In his pages, Bird still lives.” — Washington Post A stunning portrait of Charlie Parker, one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America. Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four. Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Stanley Crouch recreates Parker’s Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between music and drugs, between his domineering mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie lies at the bittersweet heart of this story. With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of an acclaimed social critic, and the narrative skill of a literary novelist, Stanley Crouch illuminates this American master as never before.

Download or read book Wild Women and the Blues written by Denny S. Bryce and published by Kensington Publishing Corporation. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes author's note, a reading group guide with discussion questions, and an excerpt from Blackbirds.

Download or read book Maria Montessori written by Rita Kramer and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2017-05-21 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive biography of a physician, feminist, social reformer, educator, and one of the most influential, and controversial women of the 20th century. Maria Montessori effected a worldwide revolution in the classroom. She developed a new method of educating the young and inspired a movement that carried it into every corner of the world. This is the story of the woman behind the public figure—her accomplishments, her ideas, and her passions. Montessori broke the mold imposed on women in the nineteenth century and forged a new one, first for herself and eventually for those who came after her. Against formidable odds she became the first woman to graduate from the medical school of the University of Rome and then devoted herself to the condition of children considered uneducable at the time. She developed a teaching method that enabled them to do as well as normal children, a method which then led her to found a new kind of school—the Casa dei Bambini, or House of Children—which gained her worldwide fame and still pervades classrooms wherever young children learn. This biography is not only the story of a groundbreaking feminist but a vital chapter in the history of education. “Highly recommended for educators, parents, and moderate feminists who seek inspiration from one of the most accomplished women of this or any other age.”—Publishers Weekly

Download or read book The Original Wild Ones written by Bill Hayes and published by Motorbooks. This book was released on 2010-11-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get an inside look at the real beginning of outlaw biker culture with this “raucous and heartfelt recounting of the early days of biker clubs” (Roadbike). The story starts one weekend in 1947, at a motorcycle race in Hollister, California. A few members of one club, the no-holds-barred “Boozefighters,” got a little juiced up and took their racing to the street. Word of the fracas spread, and soon enough Life magazine was on hand to tell the world, with sensational (albeit posed) pictures of the outlaws. And then the “Hollister riot” made its way into the movies, immortalized in Marlon Brando’s “The Wild One.” What was the reality behind the myth? Through interviews with the surviving members of the Boozefighters, current member Bill Hayes and club historian Jim “JQ” Quattlebaum take readers right into the fray for a firsthand account of what happened in Hollister, and the formation of the Boozefighters, where the outlaw biker culture truly began. The book, “with its great stories and entertaining real-life characters” (MotorcycleUSA.com), is “mandatory reading for anyone interested in American motorcycling history “(Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly).

Download or read book The Organ Thieves written by Chip Jones and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks meets Get Out in this “startling…powerful” (Kirkus Reviews) investigation of racial inequality at the core of the heart transplant race. In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a white businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge. The circumstances surrounding his death reflect the long legacy of mistreating African Americans that began more than a century before with cadaver harvesting and worse. It culminated in efforts to win the heart transplant race in the late 1960s. Featuring years of research and fresh reporting, along with a foreword from social justice activist Ben Jealous, “this powerful book weaves together a medical mystery, a legal drama, and a sweeping history, its characters confronting unprecedented issues of life and death under the shadows of centuries of racial injustice” (Edward L. Ayers, author of The Promise of the New South).

Download or read book The Goddess Blackwoman written by Akil and published by Nia Communications. This book was released on 1995 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "12 lessons to restore the image, the character, & the responsibility of the goddess blackwoman"--Cover.

Download or read book Blood Brothers written by Randy Roberts and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “engrossing and important book" (Wall Street Journal) that brings to life the fateful friendship between Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali In 1962, boxing writers and fans considered Cassius Clay an obnoxious self-promoter, and few believed that he would become the heavyweight champion of the world. But Malcolm X, the most famous minister in the Nation of Islam, saw the potential in Clay, not just for boxing greatness, but as a means of spreading the Nation’s message. The two became fast friends, keeping their interactions secret from the press for fear of jeopardizing Clay’s career. Clay began living a double life—a patriotic “good negro” in public, and a radical reformer behind the scenes. Soon, however, their friendship would sour, with disastrous and far-reaching consequences. Based on previously untapped sources, from Malcolm’s personal papers to FBI records, Blood Brothers is the first book to offer an in-depth portrait of this complex bond. An extraordinary narrative of love and deep affection, as well as deceit, betrayal, and violence, this story is a window into the public and private lives of two of our greatest national icons, and the tumultuous period in American history that they helped to shape.