Apple TV Plus Review: Is It Worth the $5 Per Month?
Should Netflix or Disney worry about Apple?
(Image: © Future)
Apple TV Plus is an interesting first foot forward from Apple in the streaming wars, but the company's not quite there yet.
Big-budget shows
Wide availability
Web-browser streaming is buggy
No must-watch show (yet)
Short launch list
Apple TV Plus, the company's fourth premium subscription service (joining Apple Music, Apple News Plus and Apple Arcade) is here, and it's … interesting. Priced too low to write off immediately, Apple TV Plus aims to worm its way into your streaming habits with big names, important premises and a surprising amount of supported devices (at least for Apple). It's even on the Fire TV Stick (which Disney Plus can't claim yet).
Having spent a weekend poking around the service's initial offerings, I've found that Apple TV Plus' Day 1 package isn't exactly ready to compete with Netflix, even though some of the Apple service's shows can be pretty entertaining. The big early flaws include a web-browser streaming option that needs more time in the oven and a selection that feels limited at best.
TV is a medium where commercial (Big Bang Theory) and critical (The Wire) success can be mutually exclusive, so my lukewarm thoughts about some of Apple's shows may prove irrelevant over time. The success of Apple TV Plus, however, depends on how soon Apple can smooth out its streaming issues and if one or more of its shows can find a strong audience that makes the service a must-have. Most folks aren't getting the free year I did.
Apple TV Plus pricing, availability and deals
Priced lower than any major streaming service, Apple TV Plus costs $4.99 per month (with a one-week free trial). That includes 4K streaming (which costs $15.99 on Netflix) and family sharing, with a total of six shared accounts permitted. Apple TV Plus is available in more than 100 countries, including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom and Australia.
You can get a free year of Apple TV Plus by buying a device to watch it on; that could be the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, iPod touch or any Mac. Students paying for the $4.99 Apple Music account get Apple TV Plus for free.
Apple TV Plus app and device support: Flawed
Apple could not hope for its streaming service to succeed if it were limited to just Apple's hardware; neither the Apple TV HD ($149) nor the Apple TV 4K ($179) is affordable. So, the good news is that the service isn't limited to the TV app (available on tvOS, iOS, iPadOS and macOS).
There's an Apple TV app for both Roku and Amazon Fire sticks (the Fire TV Cube is a glaring omission — though Amazon tells the press it's coming soon), and that app is also on Samsung Smart TVs. Oh, and there's a web-browser-based player, available at https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-plus/ (click Watch Now).
How well those apps run, though, is a different question. Apple TV Plus operates smoothly on Apple's own devices, but things didn't run as smoothly elsewhere. Users (including my colleague Andrew E. Freedman at Tom's Hardware) have reported random crashing in the web browser mode, and I saw the Amazon Fire TV app stop mid-episode in Dickinson, which kicked me to the Apple TV app's home screen.
I couldn't watch in a web browser for long enough to see a crash, however, as I saw bumpy video quality, especially when people were moving in both See and Dickinson. Frustratingly, any progress made in a web browser doesn't carry over to other apps. That stack of browser-based problems might seem small for those with a streaming stick or box, but those who use their laptop for their TV would say otherwise.
A less annoying, but still noticeable issue happened as I streamed Apple TV Plus shows on the Fire TV Stick 4K; the load time after fast-forwarding or rewinding a show was about 8 seconds on average, while Netflix (5 seconds) and Prime Video (4 seconds) loaded footage faster.
My Roku Ultra had the least-annoying issue of all outside platforms, as I noticed a slight lag between clicking a button on the remote and the on-screen graphics responding.
Apple TV Plus library: Not aiming for quantity
Apple TV Plus' $4.99-per-month price makes sense given that you can fit the nine entries in the Apple TV Plus launch list — The Morning Show, See, For All Mankind, Dickinson, Ghostwriter, Helpsters, Snoopy in Space, Oprah's Book Club, The Elephant Queen — in a single smallish paragraph.
You can't say the same about Netflix's originals lineup, which earns its higher price (HD streaming costs $11.99 per month) with quantity, offering hundreds of shows and movies. Disney Plus will also launch with nine originals, and those shows will debut one episode per week, but the company's immense back catalogue practically makes it a value pick at $6.99 per month.
More original programming is coming soon, including M. Night Shyamalan's Servant (Nov. 28); Truth Be Told (Dec. 6), starring Octavia Spencer; and The Banker (January 2020), a film starring Samuel L. Jackson and Anthony Mackie.
See: It's a C for me
A long-running target for jokes in the Tom's Guide office, See revolves around warring tribes in a post-apocalyptic world. Both groups are unable to see, with a blindness that's likely tied to the near-extinction-level event that created the post-apocalyptic setting. The show's big early twist, however, is that two newborn children can see. How do the adults know the babies can see, if they're blind?
And the show itself? The first episode (three are out right now) feels like an attempt to be the next Game of Thrones, down to lead actor Jason Momoa. The magic, though, is missing. Dialogue is stiff, and all characters outside of Momoa's Baba Voss are barely there, feeling two-dimensional at best.
Maybe See will find a home with fantasy fans, but it didn't convert me. Sure, it's giant wide-shots of the rivers and valleys look beautiful, and it feels immense, but it doesn't do anything to make me care about any of the involved characters.
The Morning Show: Good, but a bit hollow
(Image credit: Apple TV+)
This series, co-produced by co-stars Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, bit off a lot with its subject matter, and I'm not sure how it plans to digest its topic. The broad strokes of the series are simple and ripped straight from the headlines: Talk show co-host Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) is kicked out of his job following multiple accusations of sexually inappropriate relationships with colleagues.
Meanwhile, The Morning Show (yes, that's also the name of the show in the show) co-anchor Alex Levy (Aniston) is struggling to deal with the ramifications of this news. This series proves most engaging when focused on Levy's quest to stay at the top of the a.m. TV pecking order — Aniston clashes well with co-stars Mark Duplass and Billy Crudup — and handling Bradley Jackson (Witherspoon), a potential new rival.
Having seen three episodes of The Morning Show, I'm beginning to feel that it may not have as much to say about the #MeToo era and workplace harassment as I wanted or thought it should. This came into focus for me during a small-ish monologue by Carell's character, who came across as a farce as he said to one of his last remaining allies:
"Let's, just for a second, let's look at the larger context of hashtag-me-too. It's been, what, two years? We're two years in? I feel like people are screaming for an honest conversation, and what do I do? What do I do best? I am a journalist. I can feel when the world needs me to articulate something for them, to help them understand, and believe me, I know this is going to require a high degree of sensitivity, but I fucking love a tightrope. I love it. Makes me feel alive. Maybe all this happened for a reason. I think if I can get in there and show my face, and look and address the darkness that exists —"
That entire monologue pokes at the idea that this show is going to take its subject matter seriously, by turning him into an aloof joke. A later scene in that episode, however, did more damage to the show's credibility on the topic. As Kessler continues to talk about making a documentary about the #MeToo era, he learns that, shockingly, an accused man he knew was a serious threat, which helps Kessler see himself as innocent. All the while, it seems intentional that we've still yet to get a tally of his transgressions. It all comes across as "sympathy for the accused," which is the last thing this moment needs. If The Morning Show turns out to be an anti-cancel culture project, it'll curdle even more over time.
Read my full The Morning Show review for more details.
Dickinson: A surprise standout
The last Apple TV Plus show I expected to love managed to be my favorite so far. Hailee Steinfeld, as a young Emily Dickinson, is the centerpiece of a wonderfully weird comedy series.
Imbued with a modern, youthful energy, Dickinson eschews dry period-piece dialogue for lively banter as Jane Krakowski (her mother, Mrs. Dickinson) and Toby Huss (Edward Dickinson) try to raise a daughter who is spiritually not of their era. Not only does Emily not sit like a lady of her time, with a slouch that feels utterly relatable, but the way she says "bullshit"? I felt it.
Later in the first and second episode, you'll happen upon the show's sexual energy, which adds urgency. Also, its depiction of "death" borders on fantasy and will leave you scratching your head — in a good way.
For All Mankind: Houston, this is a problem
Maybe I'm just unpatriotic, but this cloying What If? series, which imagines a world where Russia beat the United States to the moon, just grated against my brain. The best thing I can say is that the series isn't entirely torturous.
When Chris Bauer (The Wire's Frank Sobotka) shows up, he adds a bit of energy, as a member of NASA's middle management who's trying to deal with the press and wrangle a bunch of depressed astronauts. His performance helps pull the camera away from Joel Kinnaman, who gets a lot of work for how wooden his acting chops are.
The worst part of the first episode (Red Moon) is the cloying soundtrack, as it blasts nostalgic tunes over montage scene after montage scene. It's like if someone took all the earnesty and underdog tropes of Friday Night Lights and sprayed it at a CNN documentary about the moon landing.
Outlook: Waiting on a hit
Is Apple TV Plus worth it? Well, the shows certainly look like they cost a lot to make, but based on my early experience, I have to say the service's value is on a case-by-case basis. If you're intrigued by one of the shows, give Apple's service a spin. Unless, that is, you're expecting to watch Apple TV Plus on a PC laptop. In that case, wait.
I'll be updating this review as Apple TV Plus evolves, as it's a living, breathing thing. Apple's released only three episodes of See, The Morning Show and For All Mankind, so the word is out on how they're going to land these stories. Right now, I don't know if I'm going to renew in 2020 when my free year expires or if I'd buy a second month after this one is over.
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The Case for Pandora
by James Essig; Steve McCarter
Compendium on Light Speed Travel
James Essig
The Relativistic Rocketeer
Compendium on Light-Speed Travel
James M. Essig
Call of the Cosmic Wild. Relativistic Rockets for the New Millennium
COSMIC SHIPS
Publication Date : 1/12/2017
This book is about building craft for space travel—space travel not in the far distant future, but in the immediate future. There is no question that we have the technology to build and power a large craft capable of traversing the galaxy, and for now, this book will focus on achieving the goal of intragalactic travel. We will describe various methods of power generation and propulsion, delineate the materials and technology for construction, discuss the building of the spacecraft from the outside-in, and show what is required to sustain life on the craft for extended periods of time. While we will go into some detail on each of these, pointing out advantages and disadvantages to components and methods, this is not, nor is it intended to be, a highly technical book to be used by specialists. Rather, it is intended to inform the general readership about what is possible, and perhaps what is not, in building and operating spacecraft for long-distance and long-duration travel with current and available means.
Steve McCarter Steve McCarter was raised and educated in Denver, Colorado, graduating from high school in 1967 and the University of Colorado (Boulder) in 1971 with a degree in environmental biology. He has spent more than thirty-five years working in the field of environmental consulting but has never abandoned an abiding and passionate interest in space sciences that had its inception during the years of the US-Soviet space race. John F. Kennedy’s inaugural words, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone . . .” inspired a firm belief that space travel is not only possible but also one that offers mankind its best hope for survival and expansion. Mr. McCarter has been writing professionally since 1973. James Essig Mr. Essig’s love of interstellar travel had its genesis in his childhood. Through most of his elementary school-age years, he was a shy kid, but one who was far from the stereotypical, reserved nerdy geek. His grade school report cards where generally good but were far from the straight A cards that the academically brilliant students would receive. He had a very personal dream, however, that motivated him to get through the often boring school days. This dream is that for an unbounded future of human interstellar space-flight. His infatuation with manned space exploration began early in grade school, fueled by the Apollo Space program and lunar landings and the promise of manned missions to distant planets in the not-so-distant future. It seemed as though, by the 1980s, we would definitely be sending humans on Martian exploratory missions. His interest in manned space travel waned a bit during the late 1970s through the mid-1990s but picked up again after he had read a book on real-world potential interstellar travel methods based mainly on known and well-established physics. Mr. Essig holds a degree in physics from George Mason University.
The Case for Pandora explores the capabilities of modern extraterrestrial travel technology with enthralling vision.
James Essig and Steve McCarter’s The Case For Pandora is a technical manual with instructions for building a spaceship capable of extraterrestrial travel. Designs for generation, colony, and century ships, collectively referred to as space arks, are offered as a solution to an extinction-level event (ELE) such as an asteroid or climate change.
The text is devoted to a single solution to human extinction: leaving Earth behind. It includes extensive information about building a colony ship, maintaining an artificial human-friendly environment on board, and supporting life in space, but this work is backed by only a cursory assessment of the motives for evacuating the planet. The introduction glosses over such motives, dismissing causes from politics and overcrowding without nuance. It is more thorough in covering the scientific aspects of space travel.
The book includes ship designs that focus on technical details and physical capability. These are covered in seven sections that go over information about materials, manufacturing considerations, and power and propulsion. The book’s thirty-six chapters include over 200 images and diagrams, most taken from NASA, the Department of Energy, and other legitimate sources. These cover liquid fuel rocket engines and their components. A chapter on the ark’s passengers addresses “both physical and psychological health, systems for shipboard governance, and reproduction and population control methods that are necessary to maintain a viable population capable of completing a mission that may take generations to accomplish.”
The work is organized in an easy-to-use way, and its tables and images help impart understanding. The text assumes a basic understanding of manufacturing, design, and physics, but explanations of the discussed principles make it accessible to laypeople, too. Conversational in tone, it uses accessible language to describe complex concepts from aerospace design and astronautics.
The book has in mind massive flying ships of the sort that would make Apollo 11 look like a tiny skiff. From an engineering perspective, its analysis of different interstellar crafts and technology is solid. It does not extend to including blueprints, but emphasizes what is possible in building and operating colony-sized spacecrafts. To existent conversations of space travel, it adds suggestions for building bigger, more powerful crafts with technology that is already available.
The Case for Pandora explores the capabilities of modern extraterrestrial travel technology with enthralling vision, talking in a realistic way about how to fulfill the timeless dream of a new Earth, self-sustaining and suspended in space.


Vatican cleric Scarano charged with money-laundering
January 22 2014, category: Misc, by: thomas
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25831234
A senior Italian cleric has been charged with laundering millions through the Vatican bank, police say.
Monsignor Nunzio Scarano is already on trial and under house arrest on separate charges of plotting to smuggle 20m euros ($26m; £17m) into Italy.
The former Vatican accountant and two other people were served with arrest warrants on Tuesday, police said.
Last year, Pope Francis set up a commission to review the bank's activities after a series of scandals.
Traditionally the Vatican has opposed the right of the Italian judiciary to investigate alleged crimes committed by its officials on the grounds of diplomatic immunity and privilege, reports the BBC's David Willey in Rome.
But under Pope Francis, increased cooperation between the Vatican and Italian authorities led to the arrest of Monsignor Scarano last summer, our correspondent says.
'False donations'
On Tuesday, police seized some 6.5m euros in bank accounts and real estate, including Monsignor Scarano's luxury apartment in the southern city of Salerno.
Authorities said the latest charges against the cleric related to "false donations", which he allegedly recycled from offshore accounts through the Vatican bank.
Prosecutors allege that Monsignor Scarano got dozens of people to make contributions to a home for the terminally ill in Salerno, and used the money to pay off a mortgage on one of his properties.
Another Catholic priest has also been arrested on charges of laundering and making false statements, officials say.
Monsignor Scarano worked for two decades as a senior accountant in a Vatican department known as Apsa (the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See).
The division manages the Vatican's real estate holdings and stock portfolios.
The cleric was suspended from his position last year, after he was accused of conspiring to smuggle millions from Switzerland into Italy with the help of a secret service agent and a financial broker.
The trio's high-profile trial began in early December in Rome.
Officially known as the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), the Vatican bank is one of the world's most secretive. It has 114 employees and 5.4bn euros of assets.
The bank is undergoing a major restructuring on the orders of Pope Francis.
He has hired an American financial services company to examine all 19,000 accounts to ensure that international rules against money laundering are being correctly observed.
Religious Abuse?
Apostatize!
The Catholic Church today is mired in scandal, including shady financial dealings, pedophilia, and nuns who have been raped or have had abortions.
Clergymen who commit pedophilia are often merely transferred or reprimanded by their superiors, who often cover up the crimes to spare the Church public humiliation and the need to pay large financial damages to the victims.
40% of Catholic Nuns Have Been Sexually Abused
Do Religious Restrictions Force Doctors to Commit Malpractice?
UK's top cardinal accused of 'inappropriate acts' by priests
*Etymology of the word "Apostasy":
(gr. "apostasia", abandon, defect) Public and voluntary abandonment of a religion )
Copyright © 2012, Apostasynow.org. All Rights Reserved.


My Super Science Stories
I just finished Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, and I can say that it deserves all of the attention and awards that it has garnered. Nice piece of work, and I say that as someone who doesn't often get into the kind of fairy tales and folk tales that the book is rooted in. But although the fairy tale world isn't a place that I'd want to live in long term, Novik has certainly made it a nice place to visit.
Novik has studied fairy/folk tales enough to have mastered their cadence of thought and speech. Folk tales were tales told by and to peasants. Peasants live a lot closer to the survival line than middle-class Americans, and they don't take having food and shelter and clothing and safety for granted. Therefore, when they told stories they focused on mundane details of food and shelter and clothing much more than modern writers because they're listeners needed and wanted to know about these things. This focus on the concrete produces a sort of plodding (and I don't mean that as a putdown) style of writing which is actually one of the book's achievements. This style of writing feels immediately familiar as a fairy tale, even to me a person who doesn't read fairy tales, and successfully removes me from normal reality to a fairy tale place even before any magic has happened.
The second thing that impressed me was how Novik makes the village usurer into sympathetic character who we root for even as she sticks it to the rest of the village and demands her pound of flesh. This is where Novik begins to build on the traditional fairy/folk tale world by introducing and focusing on a character that most fairy/folk tales avoided. We think of usury as the charging of an unconscionable rate of interest, like a loan shark, but fairy/folk tales come from a time where Christians considered the loaning of money for interest to be a sin in and of itself, no matter what the rate of interest. It was the sin of usury. Which didn't mean that good Christians didn't agree to take loans in return for interest; they did. But they left the sin of making those loans to Jews, since the Jews were damned anyway so what difference did it make if they added usury to their sins?
Because Jews and usury were such a distasteful topic, the Christian fairy tale tradition left them out, much like the standard American myth of the cowboy ignores the fact that many of the cowboys were black. But Novik has brought Miryem and her usury back and put them front and center. And all she had to do to make Miryem sympathetic was to show the world from Miryem's point of view. We sympathize with hardship and people being treated unjustly. Novik turns the usual trope of the usurer on its head by showing Miryem and her family suffering hardship and being treated unjustly, and before you know it you're rooting for the usurer. Again, nice work.
Novik uses multiple points of view in Spinning Silver. I know that this is a very familiar technique but I've never used it, not yet anyway, so I paid attention here. I'm marking myself as a noob writer here, I know, but Novik helped me understand how multiple pov lets you write in first person while also communicating information that a single pov, first-person narrator wouldn't know. The great advantage of an omniscient, third person narrator is that they know everything and can therefore tell everything. First-person narrators often don't know everything that's going on. But someone knows it and the multiple pov approach lets those someones tell what they know. I'll have to try it at some point.
Where I think Novik does stumble is over the problem of magic. Magic abounds in the latter part of the book and is a critical component of the plot. The hard part of writing about magic (or scifi technology) is to keep the rules controlling the magic straight. To my reading, Novik fails to do this, somewhat spectacularly. It didn't ruin the book for me because by that time I was so invested in the characters that I just want my damned, fairy tale ending and I didn't care that much about how Novik got me there. But, unfortunately, she got me there by having magic work in ways at the end of the book that violate the rules of magic that she established earlier in the book. Oh well. It's a flaw in the book but if I work hard and am very lucky then someday maybe I can write a story as flawed, but as good, as Spinning Silver.
Lick Observatory
Mendlesohn on Heinlein
John-Robert
John-Robert Fay lives in Santa Cruz, California. He was educated at the University of Washington, the University of California, and San Jose State University. He has worked as a janitor, apartment house manager, library assistant, mental hospital orderly, cooperative grocery clerk, professional strike picketer, advertising salesman, newspaper production manager, publishing project manager, and university economics lecturer. But now he just sits around cafes and makes stuff up.


Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency Fulfilling Our Nation's Promise
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Soldier Missing From Korean War Accounted For (Buckley)
Release No: 16-019 April 7, 2016
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced today that the remains of a U.S. serviceman, missing from the Korean War, have been identified and will be returned to his family for burial with full military honors.
Army Cpl. Dennis D. Buckley, 24, of Detroit, will be buried April 14 in Rittman, Ohio. On Feb. 5, 1951, Buckley was assigned to A Battery, 15th Field Artillery Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division, which was supporting the South Korean Army attacks against units of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Forces (CPVF) in the area known as the Central Corridor in South Korea. The CPVF launched a counterattack, overwhelming neighboring units and leaving the 15th Field Artillery Battalion behind enemy lines. As the unit conducted a fighting withdrawal south toward Wonju, Buckley went missing near Hoengsong and was reported missing on February 13.
Buckley’s remains were not located after the CPVF units withdrew north in March 1951, nor by the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service during organized searches in 1953. Additionally, his name never appeared on any list of Americans who were in custody of the North Koreans or the CPVF.
However, a repatriated American prisoner of war provided information that Buckley was captured by the CPVF and died in their custody at the Suan POW camp. Based on this information, the U.S. Army declared Buckley dead on June 30, 1951.
Between 1990 and 1994, North Korea returned to the United States 208 boxes of commingled human remains, which when combined with remains recovered during joint recovery operations in North Korea, account for the remains of at least 600 U.S. servicemen who fought during the war. North Korean documents included in the repatriation indicated that some of the remains were recovered from the area where Buckley was believed to have died.
To identify Buckley’s remains, scientists from DPAA and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory used dental comparison analysis, which matched his records; mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome Short Tandem Repeat DNA analysis, which matched a brother and a sister; anthropological analysis; as well as circumstantial evidence.
Today, 7,819 Americans remain unaccounted for from the Korean War. Using advances in technology, identifications continue to be made from remains that were previously turned over by North Korean officials or recovered by American teams.
For additional information on the Defense Department’s mission to account for Americans who went missing while serving our country, visit the DPAA website at www.dpaa.mil or call (703) 699-1420.
Military/DoD Websites
DoD Inspector General


River Views - - Published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser April 9, 2014
Last week, in the McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission case, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the narrow (5-4) majority that "Money in politics may at times seem repugnant to some, but so, too, does much of what the First Amendment vigorously protects." Roberts went on to say, "The government may no more restrict how many candidates or causes a donor may support than it may tell a newspaper how many candidates it may endorse."
This type of manipulative thinking has become the prevailing standard among arch conservatives (We are not talking the basic Reagan conservatives of thirty-five to forty years ago who merely wanted to strip away all social services, we're talking about diabolically arch conservatives who want to crush all of the civil rights of Americans below the level of the super rich and powerful.). Roberts and fellow evil ones Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and the minutely less arch Anthony Kennedy (no relation whatsoever to Joe, Jack, Bobby or Teddy) would have us, the masses, believe that Sheldon Adelson spending $92 million on the 2012 election had no more corrupt impact on the process of campaigning than the waitress in Pahrump, Nevada who scraped together ten dollars in tip money to donate to her third cousin's campaign for state senate.
As for the argument about newspapers endorsing multiple measures and candidates. Yes, that is protected under the freedom of the press clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but Chief Justice Roberts words are specious at best. He ignores the fact that gigantic corporations and the filthy rich have in the past decade or two brought undo influence on Congress and regulatory institutions in order to allow those very same mega corporations and filthy rich to gobble up newspapers as well as radio and television stations so that today's "mainstream" media outlets are controlled by only a handful of corporate giants and mega-rich individuals.
It is odd that the same big money media that loves to celebrate the most mundane of Kardashian and Kanye anniversaries, granted very little air time or news space last year to the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The 17th Amendment provides for the direct election, by the voters, of U.S. Senators. Prior to 1913, U.S. Senators were selected by members of each state's legislature. In the decades following the Civil War, particularly in the Gilded Age from 1880 on, when the incredibly wealthy often bought their way into the U.S. Senate through undue influence (think: Senator Leland Stanford of California), calls for reform grew until direct election of U.S. Senators became a basic plank in the campaigns of every Populist and Progressive candidate of the 1890s and early 1900s.
The poster child for turn of the twetieth century big money influence in state legislature selection of U.S. Senators was William A. Clark of Montana. W.A. Clark started out as a self-made hardworking man who drove mule trains loaded with goods as simple as eggs between Salt Lake City and the mining boomtowns of Montana. With his profits he moved on to banking, where he repossessed several indebted mining properties. Employing innovations like electric power he turned many of his mines into hugely profitable enterprises. In turn he bought up more mines, railroads, and newspaers. By the time Montana gained statehood he was known as one of the "Copper Kings" of Montana. Even in 1890s or early 20th Century value, Clark's wealth was measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps approaching a billion dollars, a figure that would be equal to hundreds of billions today.
In 1899 Clark handed out so much cash to Montana legislators in an effort to be named U.S. Senator that even the U.S. Senate took notice and voted to deny him a seat. Clark is reported to have said of this, "I never bought a man who wasn't for sale." Still apt words to describe many of our state and national politicians in the 21st Century.
William Andrews Clark's daughter, Huguette Clark is the major subject of a new book entitled, Empty Mansions. Huguette was born in 1906 and died in New York in 2011. Empty Mansions refers to the fact that Ms. Clark possessed a number of "homes" worth tens of millions of dollars apiece, most of these remained completely vacant for decades. A Connecticut palace remained unused except for a caretaker's labors from 1951 on into the 21st Century (expensive automobiles parked in the garage still had their 1949 license stickers in place).
Huguette Clark's possessions included a vacant house overlooking Santa Barbara, valued at $85 million, the New York home her father had built (more than one hundred rooms, unused for the last twenty years), and at least two Renoir paintings (value: tens of millions of dollars each) that have not been seen since Clark bought the art works in 1930.
The Santa Barbara mansion is supposedly going to be turned into some kind of art gallery or museum. I'm all for art, but how about kicking a few million of the Clark bazillions back to the general populace, if not directly to homeless shelters or food banks for the ever growing numbers of American poor.
The McCutcheon ruling, like the Citizens United case before, further protects the political influence of super rich individuals like the Clarks while the same Supreme Court majority of evil has also chipped away at the Voting Rights Act, which seeks to protect the rights of the elderly, the poor, and persons of color.
The super rich generally put the power of their purses behind repressive candidates and legislation, which usually equals heavy donations to Republican candidates. However, one of the wealthiest people in the world, Alice Walton, a major shareholder in Walmart, has been a long time Hillary Clinton supporter. Alice Walton's most recent mega-giveaway: Raising the minimum wage of Walmart workers?
No way, Jose! She spent over a billion dollars to build an oversized art gallery in Bentonville, Arkansas, presumably instantly turning it into the Paris of the Ozarks.
Somewhere names are being taken down by the ghosts of Ida Tarbell, Studs Terkel, and the Dust Bowl dispossessed. Names are being taken down and woe be unto Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, the Koch brothers and their ilk when those who have been duped by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News race bait and switch finally wake up and turn a bright light on the super rich and powerful. Let's hope it is sooner than later that we can tell the greedy, real-life Walton family, "Good night."


ARTS IN ACTION: Washington Concert Opera reviving Richard Strauss rarity GUNTRAM
Junge Genius: Richard Strauss at the time of the 1894 première of his first opera Guntram, scheduled for performance by Washington Concert Opera on 1 March 2015
Those who attended the 1894 Weimar première of Richard Strauss’s first opera, Guntram, likely surmised that they were hearing the work of a talented disciple of Richard Wagner but might never have suspected that they were witnessing the artistic birth of, as he introduced himself to the American liberators of his beloved Garmisch in 1945, der Komponist von Rosenkavalier—the composer of Der Rosenkavalier. With his first great tone poem, Tod und Verklärung, behind him, the young Strauss’s development as a composer was at a crossroads at the time of his work on Guntram. Having discarded the ethics of Schopenhauer in favor of the philosophical grandiloquence of Nietzsche, the not-yet-thirty-year-old Strauss infused his score for Guntram with thematic ideas that would recur four years later in the monumental tone poem Ein Heldenleben. Despite the near-disastrous reception that the opera received in 1894, the composer’s lingering affection for his freshman effort for the stage was confirmed by his return to Guntram in 1940, when he substantially revised and shortened the score. The lingering suspicion of the score among Twenty-First-Century musicians and audiences was revealed by its inexplicable absence from celebrations of the sesquicentennial of Strauss’s birth in 2014: among countless productions of the familiar operas, the seldom-performed Feuersnot and Intermezzo received performances and recordings, but Guntram continued to hide in the shadows cast by his Straussian siblings, represented by only three concert performances at Dresden’s Semperoper. That omission will be rectified in part on 1 March 2015, when Washington Concert Opera will present a concert performance of Guntram in Lisner Auditorium on the campus of The George Washington University. Fielding a superb cast of singers lauded for combining vocal power with tonal beauty under the experienced baton of the company’s Artistic Director Antony Walker, Washington Concert Opera again offers District-area audiences an opportunity to make the acquaintance of a neglected score and, in this case, gives attentive ears the chance to listen for the seeds that ultimately flowered in Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, and Die Frau ohne Schatten.
The Man with the Plan: Sydney-born conductor Antony Walker, Artistic Director of Washington Concert Opera, will lead the company's performance of Richard Strauss's Guntram on 1 March 2015 [Photo by Bridget Elliot, © by Pinchgut Opera]
Washington Concert Opera’s performance will utilize Strauss’s 1940 edition of the score, which also served as the basis for the opera’s only other known performance in the United States, a 1983 concert performance in Carnegie Hall by the Opera Orchestra of New York featuring German tenor Reiner Goldberg in the title rôle and Hungarian soprano Ilona Tokody, with whom OONY’s Music Director Eve Queler also made a studio recording of Guntram for Sony/CBS Masterworks. While preferring Strauss’s later, tightened version of the score, Maestro Walker is sensitive to the demands that Guntram makes on conductor, cast, orchestra, and audience. ‘One of the biggest challenges in conducting Guntram is that although it is very Wagnerian in language in many passages, Strauss’s use of the orchestra to accompany the singers is less transparent and heavier than Wagner's writing,’ he says. ‘I will have to be very careful with balancing the orchestra with the singers. Fortunately, in concert the singers are in front of the orchestra, and in Lisner the orchestra is seated behind the proscenium. The combination of both these facts makes the balance between singers and orchestra a little easier!’
Likewise, Maestro Walker is attentive not only to the significance of Guntram in Strauss’s artistic evolution but to the opera’s place in the transition of large-scaled musical forms from the lush tonalism of the Nineteenth Century to the more sinewy idioms of the Twentieth Century. ‘Guntram is an intensely lyrical work, with sweeping vocal lines and beautiful orchestral textures,’ the conductor muses. ‘I hope our audience falls in love Strauss's luscious and luxurious vocal and orchestral lines: a language that is the fullest expression of late 19th Century Romanticism and on the cusp of the modernism of the early 20th Century. As one experiences Guntram,’ he suggests, ‘one can listen for Wagnerian influences, echoes of Strauss's early tone poems Macbeth, Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration, as well as [reminding] oneself that this work was [introduced] in 1894, the same year as Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faun, Massenet's Thaïs, Mahler's 2nd Symphony, and a year after Verdi's Falstaff, Humperdinck's Hänsel and Gretel, and Puccini's Manon Lescaut—a fascinating period of transition in Classical Music!’
As is typical of Washington Concert Opera performances, the company’s Guntram will benefit from the participation of a cast of singers ideally-chosen for their parts: Kansas-born tenor Robert Dean Smith in the title rôle, soprano Marjorie Owens—a recent Metropolitan Opera débutante—as Freihild, acclaimed Wagnerian baritone Tom Fox as Der alte Herzog, Annapolis native baritone Zachary Nelson as Herzog Robert, and Chinese bass Wei Wu as Friedhold.
Heil, Minnesinger: Tenor Robert Dean Smith, who will sing the title rôle in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Richard Strauss’s Guntram on 1 March 2015 [Photo by Todd Smith, © by Robert Dean Smith]
One of America’s most celebrated singers of the punishing Wagner and Strauss repertories for tenor, Robert Dean Smith recently garnered praise for his singing of another of opera’s most daunting tenor parts, the title rôle in Verdi’s Otello, in a performance recorded by NAXOS [reviewed here]. In contemplating his preparations to sing Guntram, Mr. Smith is quick to dismiss the notion suggested by tenors of the past that singing Verdi’s Otello is, in vocal terms, a game-changer. ‘In no way does singing Otello alter my "approach" to Guntram—or any other rôle, for that matter,’ he says. ‘It does give me another unique experience that affects ALL of the rôles I sing. Every rôle has specific vocal demands necessitating the application of a correct singing technique so that Verdi will sound like Verdi, Wagner like Wagner, and so on. With each new rôle, with each performance, and also with each rehearsal, I have a mindset for wanting to develop artistically and vocally, improving the ability for expression and communication of the music.’ This mindset is especially crucial in approaching Strauss’s Guntram, he feels, owing to the character’s innate musicality, a quality that surely inspired the composer, perhaps even in a covertly autobiographical sense. ‘Guntram is a singer, like Tannhäuser and, to some extent, Walther in Meistersinger,’ Mr. Smith states. ‘I always find it a pleasant challenge to "sing" as a character on stage. Guntram is one of the good guys, although he does kill, albeit in self-defense. His love of nature, his generosity, and sense of duty are the positive qualities I would like to bring out as much as possible.’
Der kluge Staatsmann: Baritone Tom Fox, Der alte Herzog in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Richard Strauss’s Guntram on 1 March 2015 [Photo by Alex John Beck, © by CAMI]
Like Mr. Smith, Tom Fox chooses to focus primarily not on the musical pedigree of his rôle in Guntram, Der alte Herzog, but on the character’s dramatic specificity. ‘Well, certainly [he] is not patterned after Alberich [a rôle in which Mr. Fox has excelled at the Metropolitan Opera, both in Siegfried and in Götterdämmerung] or Klingsor, [but there] could be a tad of Telramund in there,’ he confides, ‘but those are all Wagner Böse rôles. I feel [that] Strauss was nearing King Marke in Tristan with the alte Herzog. The rôle of Robert seems more along the same type as Alberich, but Strauss was too young when he composed this piece to grasp the psychology of Wagner’s tremendous vocal writing for those rôles. Certainly—for me, at least—Strauss later followed his own path in his vocal writing, acknowledging the influence of Wagner along the way.’ Mr. Fox, whose Vodník in North Carolina Opera’s semi-staged performance of Dvořák’s Rusalka [reviewed here] was a marvel of intelligent, understated characterization, is keenly aware of the inconsistencies in Strauss’s depiction of the alte Herzog and the resulting difficulties in making the character one with whom an audience can sympathize. ‘Actually finding and settling on an interpretation [means] not giving too much weight to the lack of dramaturgy in Strauss’s libretto,’ he remarks. ‘I don’t find any sympathy for Robert in the story, so why is the alte Herzog so embittered at the death of an abusive son-in-law?’ Thinking further about his insightful understanding of the rôle, Mr. Fox adds, ‘That being said, I let Strauss’s composition guide me. His orchestration in the Funeral Aria exhibits tremendous pathos for the old man and his falling-apart empire—hence “become the old man suffering loss and equating everything with his supposed glorious past.” This helps motivate the rage that I feel the part demands at the end. The beginning of the rôle shows the Herzog’s love for his daughter and his acceptance of the Minnesinger Guntram.’
Rôle fit for a bride: Soprano Marjorie Owens, Freihild in Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Richard Strauss’s Guntram on 1 March 2015 [Photo by Devon Cass, © by CAMI]
The rôle of Freihild was originated by soprano Pauline de Ahna, who four months after the first performance of Guntram became Frau Strauss. Washington Concert Opera’s performance will feature one of the very few sopranos in the world with experience in Strauss’s first opera. Having sung Freihild in the three Dresden performances in 2014, Marjorie Owens comes to Washington after having rung in 2015 with her Metropolitan Opera début as Verdi’s Aida [in which role she alternated, incidentally, with another Washington Concert Opera alumna, Tamara Wilson]. She was, in fact, the Strauss soprano par excellence at the Semperoper in 2014, her celebration of the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth having encompassed, in addition to Freihild in Guntram, performances of the title rôles in Ariadne auf Naxos, which she also sang with great distinction in Fort Worth in 2013, and Daphne. Another great Straussian, Dame Gwyneth Jones, paid homage to Pauline de Ahna in a performance piece entitled Die Frau im Schatten (The Woman in the Shadow), noting that the soprano’s influence over her husband was more heard than seen by the public. Her influence was extraordinary, however, and the quality of Strauss’s music for Freihild is indicative of the power that the soprano exerted over the composer. Mr. Smith likened Strauss’s characterization of Guntram to Wagner’s portrayal of the title character in Wagner’s Tannhäuser, and comparisons between Elisabeth in the same opera and Elsa in Lohengrin with Strauss’s Freihild are similarly apt. Elisabeth is another part in which Ms. Owens has excelled in Dresden, solidifying her qualification to sing Freihild with unimpeachable musical and dramatic authority.
It seems that virtually every important German-speaking composer of opera has to his credit at least one score that languishes in obscurity. Even amidst the increased scrutiny of the Baroque revival of recent decades, infrequently-performed Händel operas are numerous. Beyond Salzburg, how many audiences have heard Mozart’s Apollo et Hyacinthus, Ascanio in Alba, or La finta semplice? Having only one player in the game spares Beethoven from neglect in the world’s opera houses, but Wagner’s legacy seldom extends to modern performances of Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot, and Rienzi. Perhaps even more than any of these scores, Richard Strauss’s Guntram has much to offer the Twenty-First-Century listener. Maestro Antony Walker and Washington Concert Opera have repeatedly proved wonderfully adept at conveying the singular passion and pageantry of opera on the concert stage. Their Guntram is poised to establish our nation’s capital anew as one of the world’s foremost operatic capitals.
To learn more about Washington Concert Opera’s performance of Guntram, please visit the company’s website. Click here or phone 202.364.5826 to purchase tickets.
Sincerest thanks to the artists for their time and frankness in responding to questions for this article. Special thanks, too, to Kendra Rubinfeld of Kendra Rubinfeld PR for her assistance in facilitating the artists’ responses.
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Shareholders’ Annual General Meeting
“A policy for improving competitiveness – by strengthening productivity, improving the business environment and enhancing investments – is a sine qua non condition for ensuring a high growth rate for the future with the view to achieving real economic convergence, reducing unemployment and raising citizens’ standard of living” said Eurobank EFG CEO, Nicholas Nanopoulos, in his address to the Shareholders’ Annual General Meeting on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007. Mr. Nanopoulos added that: “Improving the competitiveness of the Greek economy is a one-way street both for ensuring the necessary high growth rates in the future and reducing at a sustainable level our country’s dependence on a steady inflow of foreign capital. This necessity makes it a strategic priority to introduce broad structural changes in the economy focusing on a new operational model. This model relies on private entrepreneurship and corresponding rationalization of the state’s role. The private sector has already proven its ability to bring to the economy the necessary flexibility, openness, innovation and competitive profile. Another essential condition is modernizing the state’s functions by increasing transparency and reducing bureaucracy. In addition, the state can also assume a new role in support of private entrepreneurship that is expanding dynamically beyond national borders with a vision. The benefits for Greece are obvious: our country is becoming an economic pole with a strong presence and influence in a large geographical area and this represents a strategic priority and a historic challenge.”
Eurobank EFG CEO then went on to say that: “At the same time, structural changes will have to expand and intensify, including the use of new investment tools, such as PPPs, as well as the deregulation of closed markets and professions and liberalization of the labour market. Reforms are also needed in Education, with the view to building a modern, productive and high added value economy”. Mr. Nanopoulos described expectations for the current year as positive, given the fact that significant progress has been made in budgetary adjustment as reflected in the deficit’s drop below 3%, which means that the economy can be expected to exit the regime of fiscal supervision. He added that in the local market, prospects remain positive as there are is still ample room for the increase of banking operations in all sectors. At the end of 2006, household lending as a percentage of GDP was 41%, well below the eurozone average of 54%. On the other hand, the ratio of NPLs in Greece was 6% in September2006, significantly higher than the corresponding eurozone average of about 3%. This issue should be tackled through concerted action by both the banking sector and supervising authorities because NPLs raise the cost of money for borrowers”.
The Bank’s Chairman, Xenophon Nikitas, referring to the progress of the economy stressed that “further efforts are needed to shorten the competitiveness gap from our other European partners and drastically reduce the current account deficit that has been plaguing us for a long time and will unfortunately continue to do so in the coming years”. Speaking about Eurobank EFG progress in recent years he stressed inter alia that “since the beginning of the last decade, Eurobank EFG after a series of successful mergers and acquisitions associated with fast operational growth was able to create the terms and conditions for a strong position in the domestic market. We laid the difficult wager of consolidating six banks based on a new vision and the most up to date organization and operation standards. We have thus created a large banking group, with a strong and healthy capital base, a modern profile and innovative services and products. Eurobank EFG has not only brought a revolution in the retail banking sector but also a people-centered approach to its customer relations. Of course all this did not happen automatically or by chance. It is the result of a totally successful and carefully planned policy that is growing pace by pace, year by year, a strategy that has ensured for the Eurobank EFG Group a very strong presence in Greece at the end of 2006 and a significant presence in New Europe. At the end of 2006, the Group had 1,300 branches and points of sale in Greece and abroad and around 19,000 employees. Our strategy, combined with our comprehensive product range, high quality of service, qualified and dedicated staff has allowed the Bank to achieve financial results in 2006 which exceeded the Management Targets” In his concluding remarks, Mr. Nikitas emphasized the staff’s contribution to the attainment of goals that are “neither unrealistic nor overoptimistic, which is why we overshoot them despite the fact that we set the bar higher each time”.
Referring to the Bank’s progress in the last decade, CEO N. Nanopoulos said that: “Despite the relatively large number of acquisitions, our growth in the last ten years is mostly organic and is the result of the faster increase of ourvolumes compared to market rates. Our loans, in the last decade, expanded per annum on average by 48%, without including acquisitions. During that same period, client funds under management have risen by an annual average growth rate of 28%. This data testifies, in the best possible way, to the dynamism of our Organization which is, however, also linked to a high level of quality and return for our shareholders”.
Summarizing the performance of the last five years Mr. Nanopoulos stressed:
· The significant improvement in the Bank’s efficiency with the cost to income ratio dropping from 58.1 to 49.7% in Greece, one of the best in Europe.
· The improvement of loan portfolio quality with the NPLs ratio falling to 2.9 from 3.8% and
· An increase of net profit CAGR by 37% and ROE in excess of 25% in 2006 for Greece.
The expansion of Eurobank EFG activity in New Europe started at the end of the last decade from Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia. In these first wave countries, where the Group’s presence was already quite strong, the goal is to become, on a long-term basis, among the 3-4 leading banks in the financial sector. More recently, the Group extended its activities to Poland, Turkey and the Ukraine where prospects are highly promising.
In these large markets the Group can achieve satisfactory profitability rates even if it remains among the 10-12 largest banks.
At the end of 2006, the Group had about 800 branches, points of sale and business centers outside Greece. The objective is for these to exceed 1,400 at the end of 2009.
Moreover, in Greece and abroad, the Eurobank EFG Group employs about 19,000 people.
The business expansion outside Greece was particularly strong in 2006, with loan balances more than doubling. Net loan additions outside Greece reached 2 billion euros, with net loan additions in the last quarter of 2006 being almost five times higher compared to the average quarter of 2005.
According to Mr. Nanopoulos, “we have now reached a critical turning point that marks our Group’s transition to a new era, since following our development in Greece, we have created a new growth and profitability platform in New Europe countries. Thus we have built the best possible prospects for the future with the view to achieving steadily rising profitability levels and value creation for our shareholders. We estimate that until 2009, our operations in New Europe will be contributing at least 30% to the Group’s total revenues and 20% to net profit.”
Concluding, Mr. Nanopoulos presented Management’s new goals for the 3-year period 2007-2009, which clearly reflect the Group’s dynamic growth and strong market position. Specifically, the Bank will be aiming at:
Profit CAGR of at least 22%[1] in 2007-2009.
ROE of more than 25% until 2009.
Cost to Income ratio below 45% by 2009.
In the same context, the Group has set its objectives for New Europe. These objectives that were recently presented in London and Athens are as follows:
Net profits in excess of € 60 million in 2007 and above € 260 million in 2009,
Efficiency ratio (cost to income ratio) below 58% by 2009, and
ROE above 15% by 2009 (return on required capital including goodwill ).
The General Meeting approved the distribution of a total dividend of € 0.92 per share (including an interim dividend of € 0.36%) 23% higher than last year’s. The total dividend corresponds to a dividend yield of 3.7% on average share price in 2006. The Bank’s Management objective is a dividend policy that responds to shareholders expectations and trust. It is worth noting that in the five-year period 2002-2006, dividend CAGR was 24%.
As from Thursday 5 April 2007 the share will trade ex-dividend on the Athens Stock Exchange, while payment of dividends will start on April 16th, 2007. The General Meeting also approved the distribution of 2 new shares for 10 old shares. It is expected that new shares will start trading on the ASE around mid-May.
The General Meeting was attended by the Governor of the Bank of Greece, Nikolaos Garganas, the President of the Hellenic Bank Association and Chairman of the National Bank, Takis Arapoglou, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of Greece Nikolaos Paleokrassas and members of the economic, business and social community.
[1] On 2006 net profits of € 644.5 billion.


Fernando Bujones Biography, Life, Interesting Facts
Miami, Florida, United States Of America
Fernando Bujones was an American dancer credited as one of the best in the 20th century as well as his generation.
Personal Relations
Fernando Bujones married two women in the course of his life. His first marriage was to MárciaKubitschek in 1980. Kubitschek was the daughter of the former Brazilian president, JuscelinoKubitschek de Oliveira. Their union brought forth a daughter named Alejandra. He married for a second time to Maria Arnillas, also a dancer who was a native of Peru.
Personal Background and Origins
Born Miami, Florida on March 9, 1955, as Fernando Bujones Jr., he was the son of Mary Calleriro and Fernando Bujones Sr. Both of his parents were Cuban, and at the time of his birth, his mother happens to visit Florida. Shortly after he was born, they went back to Cuba, where he grew up. His parents separated when he was 5, and his mother enrolled him at a local dance school a year later when he was six years old.
He started receiving formal ballet classes under the tutelage of Alicia Alonso for a year and a half at the Cuban National Ballet. In 1964, Bujones, along with his mother, finally settled in Miami after moving back and forth between Havana and Miami.
A Principal Dancer in the Making
After settling in on Miami, Fernando Bujones managed to win a scholarship in 1967 to the official and prestigious New York City Ballet’s School of American Ballet. At the company, he learned from renowned ballet instructors such as André Eglevsky and Stanley Williams, while also being assisted by his cousin and personal coach, Zeida Cecilia Mendez.
Fernando Bujones made his debut performance in 1970 with the Eglevsky Ballet, and during 1972, he was also admitted at the American Ballet Theatre. A year later in 1973 he became a soloist successfully followed by being named as a principal dancer at the age of 19. This feat made him the youngest principal dancer in the history of the American Ballet Theatre.
His hard work and passion paid off when not only was he chosen as a representative but also bagged the Gold Medal at the International Ballet Competition held in Varna, Bulgaria in 1974. Aside from that, he was also awarded a special medal for attaining the highest technical achievement due to his performance.
A Clash of Power: Bujones and Baryshnikov
With achievement coming in one after the other in his life, Fernando Bujones was soon met with discourse. At the height of his activities, another renowned dance from the Soviet Union defected which shifted the world’s attention towards him. To make matters worse, Baryshnikov also joined the American Ballet Theatre, which heightened the tension between the two and overshadowing Bujones.
Bujones stayed at the ABT until 1985 then left the company after refusing to stand in as a substitute for Baryshnikov. As a result, he had more time on his hands and collaborated with other countries’ dance troupes as a guest artist for 33 countries amounting to 60 ballet troupes.
He only returned at ABT when Baryshnikov resigned in 1989, and worked for them as a permanent guest artist until 1995.
Miscellaneous Activities and Death
Besides being a renowned dancer, Fernando Bujones also served as an artistic director to several dance companies such as the Ballet Mississippi in 1993 until it folded and the Orlando Ballet. He also collaborated on an international level with other ballet troupes located in Spain, Mexico, and Brazil.
He was diagnosed with lung cancer before his death, but Bujones died on November 10, 2005, at the age of 50 from suffering complications of metastatic melanoma. Before his death, he managed to finish his autobiography entitled Fernando Bujones: An Autobiography which was published four years later in 2009 after his death by his cousin and private coach Zeida Mendez.
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Photos of Activities
Department of Chemistry is one of the prestigious departments of Assumption College Autonomous, affiliated to Mahatma Gandhi University. The glorious journey of this department began in the year 1957. The department celebrated its Diamond Jubilee in 2017.
So far 22 dedicated teachers served the department. Presently the department has six permanent faculty and three guest faculty. The faculty of the department has so far more than 25 international publications which has high impact factor and citation index. They have presented papers in the international and national conferences which supplement their research knowledge. The faculty of the department has been the Principal investigator for more than 10 SPYTiS (Scheme for Promoting Young Talents in Science) student projects of KSCSTE.
The department cherish a history of good academic performance consistently. The students of the department bagged four of the first ten ranks including the first rank in the MG University CBCSS Degree Examination March 2018. In order to nurture the research aptitude and global competency of the students, the department consider it as a responsibility to ensure that her students get enrolled in prestigious summer research fellowships in, National institutes like IISc, IISER, JNCASR etc. Besides, interested students are motivated, encouraged and assisted to clear National level tests to get themselves placed in National institutes for higher studies.
The alumnae of the department have excelled in various walks of life. They include IAS officer, College principals, Scientists, University and College Professors and Govt. Employees. More than 100 alumnae participated in the alumni meet ‘ormacheppu’ organised by the department on 20th January 2018 in connection with the Diamond Jubilee Celebrations. They contributed generously towards the institution of Diamond Jubilee memorial All Kerala Intercollegiate Quiz Competition. With support from alumni and teachers, Rs. 1, 00,000 was raised to conduct the event.
In addition to inter departmental and intra departmental competitions, the department conducts SPARK-All Kerala Intercollegiate Paper Presentation competition every year. Diamond Jubilee Memorial All Kerala Intercollegiate Quiz Competition will be conducted from next academic year onwards. The department also conducts value added programmes like alumni lecture, expert lecture etc.
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The Prophet (#04 in Sons Of Encouragement Series)
by Francine Rivers
Paperback|Aug 2006
Product Rating: 5(1)
Sons Of Encouragement
Behind the men who shaped history are the heroes who forever changed it. In THE PROPHET, the fourth book in the Sons of Encouragement series, beloved author Francine Rivers illuminates the life of Amos. Francine examines the life of Amos...
Hardback - $24.99
eBook - $7.63
Unavailable. Out of Print. Only available while stock lasts.
The Priest (#01 in Sons Of Encouragement Series)
The Scribe (#05 in Sons Of Encouragement Series)
The Warrior (#02 in Sons Of Encouragement Series)
The Prince (#03 in Sons Of Encouragement Series)
A Lineage of Grace (Special Edition)
Unspoken (Bathsheba) (#04 in Lineage Of Grace Series)
Behind the men who shaped history are the heroes who forever changed it. In THE PROPHET, the fourth book in the Sons of Encouragement series, beloved author Francine Rivers illuminates the life of Amos. Francine examines the life of Amos and his relationship to Israel during its prosperous years. Amos's message - and his relationship with God - made him unpopular. But his challenge to those who were enjoying the blessings of prosperity was crucial then and is strikingly timely today as well.
Product Code 1414309856
Publisher Tyndale House
Publication Date Aug 2006
New York Times best-selling author Francine Rivers (born 1947) began her literary career at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and journalism. From 1976 to 1985, she had a successful writing career in the general market, and her books were highly acclaimed by readers and reviewers. Although raised in a religious home, Francine did not truly encounter Christ until later in life, when she was already a wife, a mother of three, and an established romance novelist.
Five years after becoming a born-again Christian in 1986, Francine released Redeeming Love as her statement of faith. This retelling of the biblical story of Gomer and Hosea, set during the time of the California Gold Rush, is now considered by many to be a classic work of Christian fiction. The popularity of Redeeming Love continues unabated over a quarter of a century after its publication.
Since Redeeming Love, Francine has published numerous novels with Christian themes - all best sellers. The Last Sin Eater, earned her the CBA Gold Medal award and has since been made into a feature film - She has continued to win both industry acclaim and reader loyalty around the globe. Her Christian novels have been awarded or nominated for numerous honours, including the RITA Award, the Christy Award, the ECPA Gold Medallion, and the Holt Medallion in Honour of Outstanding Literary Talent. In 1997, after winning her third RITA Award for inspirational fiction, Francine was inducted into the Romance Writers of America's Hall of Fame. Francine's books have been translated into over thirty languages, and she enjoys best-seller status in many countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, and South Africa.
Francine and her husband, Rick, live in northern California and enjoy time spent with their three grown children and taking every opportunity to spoil their grandchildren. Francine uses her writing to draw closer to the Lord, and she desires that through her work she might worship and praise Jesus for all He has done and is doing in her life.
Boxed Set (Includes Sensible Shoes, Two Steps Forward, Barefoot, and An Extra Mile) (Sensible Shoes Series)
Barefoot: A Story of Surrendering to God (#03 in Sensible Shoes Series)
5in1: A Lineage of Grace


Anna Renee
Indie folk/electro pop artist and songwriter of many genres, based in Nashville. Anna Renee’s musical aesthetic demands attention, playfully exploring aspects often forgotten in the mainstream pop industry.
Anna Renee began her musical journey in 2014 with the release of her first EP, The Places You’ll Go, working alongside Stevie Mackey(The Voice) and Aaron Dudley of Rock Mafia(Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus). She is currently working with numerous artists in Nashville, while exploring herself as an artist in the sync world.
“I’m always uncovering new aspects of myself in music, and hopefully creating a space for others to delve deeper into themselves.”


Spring Warming And Carbon Dioxide Exchange Over Low Arctic Tundra In Central Canada
Sites: CA-DL1
Authors: Lafleur, P.M.; Humphreys, E.R.
Tundra-atmosphere exchanges of carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapour were measured near Daring Lake, Northwest Territories in the Canadian Low Arctic for 3 years, 2004–2006. The measurement period spanned late-winter until the end of the growing period. Mean temperatures during the measurement period varied from about 2 °C less than historical average in 2004 and 2005 to 2 °C greater in 2006. Much of the added warmth in 2006 occurred at the beginning of the study, when snow melt occurred 3 weeks earlier than in the other years. Total precipitation in 2006 (163 mm) was more than double that of the driest year, 2004 (71 mm). The tundra was a net sink for CO2 carbon in all years. Mid-summer net ecosystem exchange of CO2(NEE) achieved maximum values of −1.3 g C m−2 day−1 (2004) to −1.8 g C m−2 day−1 (2006). Accumulated NEE values over the 109-day period were −32,−51 and −61 g C m−2 in 2004, 2005 and 2006, respectively. The larger CO2 uptake in 2006 was attributed to the early spring coupled with warmer air and soil conditions. In 2004, CO2 uptake was limited by the shorter growing season and mid-summer dryness, which likely reduced ecosystem productivity. Seasonal total evapotranspiration (ET) ranged from 130 mm (2004) to 181 mm (2006) and varied in accordance with the precipitation received and with the timing of snow melt. Maximum daily ET rates ranged from 2.3 to 2.7 mm day−1, occurring in mid July. Ecosystem water use efficiency (WUEeco) varied slightly between years, ranging from 2.2 in the driest year to 2.5 in the year with intermediate rainfall amounts. In the wettest year, increased soil evaporation may have contributed to a lower WUEeco (2.3). We speculate that most, if not all, of the modest growing season CO2 sink measured at this site could be lost due to fall and winter respiration leading to the tundra being a net CO2source or CO2 neutral on an annual basis. However, this hypothesis is untested as yet.
Journal: Global Change Biology


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2016 Gift Guide, Books, Celebrity Chatter, Holiday Gift Guide
Holiday Gift Guide 2016: The Year’s Best Celebrity (Auto)Biographies (Part Two)
December 15, 2016 alanwp	Leave a comment
In Such Good Company (Crown Archetype, $28), Carol Burnett pulls back the curtain on the 25-time Emmy-Award winning show that made television history, and she reminisces about the outrageously funny and tender moments that made working on the series as much fun as watching it. Carol delves into little-known stories of the guests, sketches and improvisations that made The Carol Burnett Show legendary, as well as some favorite tales too good not to relive again. While writing this book, Carol rewatched all 276 episodes and screen-grabbed her favorite video stills from the archives to illustrate the chemistry of the actors and the improvisational magic that made the show so successful. This book is Carol’s love letter to a golden era in television history through the lens of her brilliant show. Get the best seat in the house for “eleven years of laughter, mayhem, and fun in the sandbox.”
Grammy and Academy Award–winning songwriter Carole Bayer Sager shares the remarkably frank and darkly funny story of her life in and out of the recording studio, from her fascinating (and sometimes calamitous) relationships to her collaborations with some of the greatest composers and musical artists of our time. While her professional life was filled with success and fascinating people, her personal life was far more difficult and dramatic.
In They’re Playing Our Song (Simon & Schuster, $28), Sager tells the surprisingly frank and darkly humorous story of a woman whose sometimes crippling fears and devastating relationships inspired many of the songs she would ultimately write. The book will fascinate anyone interested in the craft of songwriting and the joy of collaboration, but Sager’s memoir is also a deeply personal account of how love and heartbreak made her the woman, and the writer, she is.
Seventeen-time all-star; scorer of 81 points in a game; MVP and a shooting guard second only to Jordan in league history: Kobe Bryant is one of basketball’s absolute greatest players, a fascinating and complicated character who knew when he was a mere boy that he would be better than Jordan on the court. The debate about whether he achieved that is a furious one–but Kobe has surpassed Jordan on the all-time scoring list and has only one less championship than Jordan (5 to Jordan’s 6). He is set to retire after the 2015/16 season, just in time for Roland Lazenby’s Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant (Little, Brown and Company, $32) Provocative stories mixed with good old-fashioned basketball reporting make for a riveting and essential read for any hoops fan.
She inspired songs—Leon Russell wrote “A Song for You” and “Delta Lady” for her, Stephen Stills wrote “Cherokee.” She co-wrote songs—“Superstar” and the piano coda to “Layla,” uncredited. She sang backup for Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, and Stills, before finding fame as a solo artist with such hits as “We’re All Alone” and “(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher.” Following her story from Lafayette, Tennessee to becoming one of the most sought after rock vocalists in LA in the ’70s, Delta Lady (Harper, $25.99) chronicles Rita Coolidge’s fascinating journey throughout the ’60s-’70s pop/rock universe. A muse to some of the twentieth century’s most influential rock musicians, she broke hearts, Delta Lady is a rich, deeply personal memoir that offers a front row seat to an iconic era, and illuminates the life of an artist whose career has helped shape modern American culture.
Call her a woman of letters. Mary Astor detailed her marital affairs as well as the many, many, many dalliances of some of Hollywood’s biggest names. The studio heads, longtime controllers of public perception, were desperate to keep such juicy details from leaking. With the complete support of the Astor family and unlimited access to the Mary Astor estate, Joseph Egan has painted a portrait of a great film actress in her most challenging role; an unwilling but determined mother battling for her daughter regardless of the harm that her affairs and her most intimate secrets would do to her career, the careers of her friends, or even Hollywood. The Purple Diaries: Mary Astor and the Most Sensational Hollywood Scandal of the 1930s ( Diversion Publishing, $16.99) is a look at Hollywood’s Golden Age as it has never been seen before, as Egan spins a wildly absorbing yarn about a scandal that threatened to tarnish forever the dream factory known as Hollywood.
“Casanova” is a synonym for “great lover,” Over the course of his lifetime, he claimed to have seduced more than 100 women, among them married women, young women in convents, girls just barely in their teens, and in one notorious instance, his own illegitimate daughter. Yet the real story of this remarkable figure is little known. He was intellectually curious and read forbidden books, for which he was jailed. He staged a dramatic escape from Venice’s notorious prison, the only person known to have done so. He then fled to France, where he invented the national lottery that still exists to this day. He crisscrossed Europe, landing for a while in St. Petersburg, where he was admitted to the court of Catherine the Great. He corresponded with Voltaire and met Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, assisting them as they composed the timeless opera Don Giovanni. A figure straight out of a Henry Fielding novel: Erotic, brilliant, impulsive, and desperate for recognition, Casanova was a self-destructive genius. Casanova: The World of a Seductive Genius (Simon & Schuster, $32.50) is a witty, roisterous biography exposes his astonishing life in rich, intimate detail.
The curtain has gone up on the complete memoirs of playwright Neil Simon, now with a new introduction and afterword. Neil Simon’s Memoirs (Simon & Schuster, $35) combines Simon’s two memoirs, Rewrites and The Play Goes On, into one volume that spans his extraordinary five-decade career in theater, television and film. Rewrites takes Simon through his first love, his first play, and his first brush with failure. One touching section is as he describes his marriage to his beloved wife Joan, and writes lucidly about the pain of losing her to cancer. The Play Goes On adds to his life’s story, as he wins the Pulitzer Prize and reflects with humor and insight on his tumultuous life and meteoric career.
Now, with the whole story in one place, Neil Simon’s collected memoirs trace the history of modern entertainment over the last fifty years through the eyes of a man who started life the son of a garment salesman and became the greatest—and most successful—American playwright of all time.
Claude Monet is perhaps the world’s most beloved artist, and among all his creations, the paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny are most famous. Monet intended them to provide an asylum of peaceful meditation. Yet, as Ross King reveals in Mad Enchantment (Bloomsbury, $30), his magisterial chronicle of both artist and masterpiece, these beautiful canvases belie the intense frustration Monet experienced at the difficulties of capturing the fugitive effects of light, water and color. They also reflect the terrible personal torments Monet suffered in the last dozen years of his life. The book tells the full story behind the creation of the “Water Lilies,” as the horrors of World War I came ever closer to Paris and Giverny, and a new generation of younger artists, led by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, were challenging the achievements of Impressionism.
It’s widely known that Oscar Wilde was precociously intellectual, flamboyant and hedonistic—but lesser so that he owed these characteristics to his parents. Oscar’s mother, Lady Jane Wilde, rose to prominence as a political journalist, advocating a rebellion against colonialism in 1848. She opened a salon and was known as the most scintillating hostess of her day. She passed on her infectious delight in the art of living to Oscar, who drank it in greedily. His father, Sir William Wilde, was acutely conscious of injustices of the social order. But Sir William was also a philanderer, and when he stood accused of sexually assaulting a young female patient, the scandal and trial sent shockwaves through Dublin society. As for Oscar, the one role that didn’t suit him was that of Victorian husband, as his wife, Constance, was to discover. In a major repositioning of our first modern celebrity, The Fall of the House of Wilde (Bloomsbury, $35) identifies Oscar Wilde as a member of one of the most dazzling Irish American families of Victorian times, and places him in the broader social, political, and religious context.
He’s best known for his wistful movie scores, with “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” from the Toy Story soundtrack leading the pack. He’s been nominated for 20 Academy Awards, and has twice won Oscars for Best Original Song. But Randy Newman was also a quintessentially American pop powerhouse before he turned his formidable talents to scoring films. A songwriter since the age of 17, his earliest compositions were recorded by ’60s luminaries like The Fleetwoods, Gene Pitney, Jackie DeShannon and the O’Jays. Yet very little has been written about his personal life, including his marriages and his diagnosis with Epstein-Barr virus. Maybe I’m Doing It Wrong: The Life of Randy Newman (Overlook, $28.95) is a primer for newcomers to his work and a rewarding handbook for the aficionado.
Yes, it’s her, again. Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep (Harper, $26.99) explores her beginnings as a young woman of the ’70s grappling with love, feminism and her astonishing talent. Michael Schulman brings into focus Meryl’s heady rise to stardom on the New York stage; her passionate, tragically short-lived love affair with actor John Cazale; her marriage to sculptor Don Gummer; and her evolution as a young woman of the 1970s wrestling with changing ideas of feminism, marriage, love, and sacrifice.Featuring eight pages of black-and-white photos, this captivating story of the making of one of the most revered artistic careers of our time reveals a gifted young woman coming into her extraordinary talents at a time of immense transformation, offering a rare glimpse into the life of the actress long before she became an icon.
Mary Martin was one of the greatest stars of her day. Growing up in Texas, she was married early to Benjamin Hagman and gave birth to her first child, Larry Hagman. She didn’t make a dent in the movie industry and was lured to New York where she found herself auditioning for Cole Porter and his new show “Leave It to Me!”. After she sang the bawdy “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, she ended up on the cover of Life magazine. Six years later, she became the Toast of Broadway. Her personal life was just as interesting: In NYC, she met and married Richard Halliday, a closeted upper-class homosexual who adored her and interior decorating. There were rumors about Martin, too, being in a lesbian relationship with both Janet Gaynor and Jean Arthur. Savor the stuff in David Kaufman’s Some Enchanted Evenings (St. Martin’s Press, $29.99)
Still known to millions primarily as the author of The Lottery, Shirley Jackson has been curiously absent from the mainstream American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense and psychological horror, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America more deeply than anyone. Now, biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author in Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright, $35). Placing Jackson within an American Gothic tradition that stretches back to Hawthorne and Poe, Franklin demonstrates how her unique contribution to this genre came from her focus on “domestic horror.” Based on a wealth of previously undiscovered correspondence and dozens of new interviews, the tome―an exploration of astonishing talent shaped by a damaging childhood and turbulent marriage―becomes the definitive biography of a generational avatar and an American literary giant.
On May 25, 1977, a problem-plagued, budget-straining, independent science-fiction film opened in a mere thirty-two American movie theatres. Conceived, written and directed by a little-known filmmaker named George Lucas, Star Wars reinvented the cinematic landscape, ushering in a new way for movies to be made, marketed, and merchandised. And if that wasn’t game-changing enough, Lucas went on to create another blockbuster series with “Indiana Jones,” and completely revolutionized the world of special effects, not to mention sound systems. His work and legacy have led to a rash of innovation and democratization in film and television. Brian Jay Jones does a splendid job detailing Lucas’ fame and fortune in George Lucas: A Life (Little, Brown and Company, $32).
Why were Americans so attracted to John F. Kennedy in the late ‘50s and early ’60s . . . was it is glamorous image, good looks, cool style, tough-minded rhetoric and sex appeal? As Steve Watts argues in JFK and the Masculine Mystique: Sex and Power on the New Frontier (Thomas Dunne Books, $29.99), JFK was tailor made for the cultural atmosphere of his time. He benefited from a crisis of manhood that had welled up in postwar America when men had become ensnared by bureaucracy, softened by suburban comfort, and emasculated by a generation of newly aggressive women. By examining Kennedy in the context of certain books, movies, social critiques, music, and cultural discussions that framed his ascendancy, Watts shows us the excitement and sense of possibility, the optimism and aspirations that accompanied the dawn of a new age in America.
For too long Tippi Hedren’s story has been told by others through whispered gossip and tabloid headlines. In Tippi: A Memoir (William Morrow, $28.99), she sets the record straight, recalling how a young and virtuous Lutheran girl from small-town Minnesota became a worldwide legend as one of the most famous Hitchcock girls, as an unwavering animal activist, and as the matriarch of a powerful Hollywood dynasty that includes her movie star daughter Melanie Griffith, and rising star Dakota Johnson, her granddaughter. Hedren digs deep into her complicated relationship with the man who discovered her talent, director Alfred Hitchcock, the benefactor who would become a repulsive and controlling director who contractually controlled her every move. She speaks openly about the dark pain she endured working with him on their most famous collaborations, The Birds and Marnie. Filled with 16 pages of beautiful photos, Tippi is a rare and fascinating look at a private woman s remarkable life no celebrity aficionado can miss.
In a career that has spanned more than 60 years, Robert Wagner has witnessed the twilight of the Golden Age of Hollywood and the rise of television, becoming a beloved star in both media. During that time he became acquainted, both professionally and socially, with the remarkable women who were the greatest screen personalities of their day. I Loved Her in the Movies (Viking, $tk) is his intimate and revealing account of the charisma of these women on film, why they became stars, and how their specific emotional and dramatic chemistries affected the choices they made as actresses as well as the choices they made as women. Among Wagner’s subjects are Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe, Gloria Swanson, Norma Shearer, Loretta Young, Joan Blondell, Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell, Dorothy Lamour, Debra Paget, Jean Peters, Linda Darnell, Betty Hutton, Raquel Welch, Glenn Close, and the two actresses whom he ultimately married, Natalie Wood and Jill St. John. As fun and entertaining as RJ himself.
Was it magic? In Presto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales (Simon & Schuster, $26), Penn Jillette tells how he lost 100 pounds with his trademark outrageous sense of humor and biting social commentary that makes this success story anything but ordinary. Topping 330 pounds and saddled with a systolic blood pressure reading over 200, he knew he was at a dangerous crossroads: If he wanted to see his small children grow up, he needed to change. And then came a former NASA scientist and an unconventional innovator, Ray Cronise, who saved Penn Jillette’s life with his wild “potato diet.” Penn describes the process in hilarious detail, as he performs his Las Vegas show, takes meetings with Hollywood executives, hangs out with his celebrity friends and fellow eccentric performers, all while remaining a dedicated husband and father. Presto is an incisive, rollicking read.
We have never forgiven Maggie Smith for stealing Liza Minnelli’s Oscar (look it up), but Michael Coveney’s biography shines a light on the life and career of a truly remarkable performer, one whose stage and screen career spans six decades. From her days as a West End star of comedy and revue, Dame Maggie’s path would cross with those of the greatest actors, playwrights, and directors of the era. Whether stealing scenes from Richard Burton, answering back to Laurence Olivier, or playing opposite Judi Dench in Breath of Life, her career can be seen as a “Who’s Who” of British theater. The book, written with the actress’ blessing and drawing on personal archives as well as interviews with immediate family and close friends, is a portrait of one of the greatest actors of our time.
Born a Crime: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (Spiegel & Grau, $28) is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life. His name is Trevor Noah. The stories collected here are by turns hilarious, dramatic, and deeply affecting. Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Trevor illuminates his curious world with an incisive wit and unflinching honesty.
Felix and Oscar? No way. The oddest couple was Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor. Donald Bogle skillfully recreates the moving narrative of Taylor and Jackson’s experiences together and their intense emotional connection, without shying away from the controversies that swirled around them. Through interviews with friends and acquaintances of the two stars, as well as anonymous but credible sources, Elizabeth and Michael: The Queen of Hollywood and the King of Pop―A Love Story (Atria, $26) emerges as a tender, intimate look at this famous odd couple and a treasure to their millions of fans.
The first book from Ruth Bader Ginsburg since becoming a Supreme Court Justice in 1993—a witty, engaging, serious, and playful collection of writings and speeches from the woman who has had a powerful and enduring influence on law, women’s rights, and popular culture. My Own Words (Simon & Schuster, $30) offers Justice Ginsburg on wide-ranging topics, including gender equality, the workways of the Supreme Court, being Jewish, law and lawyers in opera, and the value of looking beyond US shores when interpreting the US Constitution. Throughout her life Justice Ginsburg has been (and continues to be) a prolific writer and public speaker.
In 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl’s halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That’s how this extraordinary autobiography began. Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to these pages the same honesty, humor and originality found in his songs. Born to Run (Simon & Schuster, $32.50) will be revelatory for anyone who has ever enjoyed Bruce Springsteen, but this book is much more than a legendary rock star’s memoir. This is a book for workers and dreamers, parents and children, lovers and loners, artists, freaks, or anyone who has ever wanted to be baptized in the holy river of rock and roll.
Unlike The Boss, Stephen Foster still has no (real, true) fame. The subtitle of a new bio, The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster: A Revealing Portrait of the Forgotten Man Behind “Swanee River,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” and “My Old Kentucky Home” (9Rowman & Littlefield, $45) says it all. He died in poverty, in New York’s Bellevue Hospital, three days after falling in his Bowery bathroom and severely cutting his throat on the broken basin. His last words? “I’m done for.” A friend found his alcohol-ravaged body at the local morgue, a body whose purse contained 38 cents and a scrap of paper on which the words “dear friends and gentle hearts” were written . . . possibly the opening line to a new song.
Cerphe’s Up: A Musical Life with Bruce Springsteen, Little Feat, Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, CSNY, and Many More (Carrel Books, $34.99) is an incisive musical memoir by Cerphe Colwell, a renowned rock radio broadcaster for more than forty-five years in Washington, DC. Cerphe shares his life as a rock radio insider in rich detail and previously unpublished photographs. His story includes promotion and friendship with a young unknown Bruce Springsteen; his years at radio station WHFS 102.3 as it blossomed in a new free-form format; hanging out with George Harrison, the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, John Entwistle, Jackson Browne, and many more; testifying on Capitol Hill with friend Frank Zappa during the “Porn Rock” hearings; and managing the radio syndication of both G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Stern.
In 2015, the U.S. women’s national soccer team won its first FIFA championship in 16 years, culminating in an epic final game that electified soccer fans around the world. It also featured a gutsy, brilliant performance by team captain and midfielder Carli Lloyd, who made history that day, scoring a hat trick—three goals in one game—during the first 16 minutes. But there was a time when Carli almost quit the sport. In 2003 she was struggling, her soccer career at a crossroads. What Carli lacked were fitness, mental toughness and character. Despite all the naysayers, the times she was benched, moments when her self-confidence took a nosedive, she succeeded in becoming one of the best in the world. The candid When Nobody Was Watching: My Hard-Fought Journey to the Top of the Soccer World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26) candid reflection on a remarkable turnaround will take readers inside the women’s national team and inside the head of an athlete who willed herself to perform at the highest levels of competition.
To have been alive during the last 60 years is to have lived with the music of Paul Simon. The boy from Queens scored his first hit record in 1957, just months after Elvis Presley ignited the rock era. As the songwriting half of Simon & Garfunkel, his work helped define the youth movement of the ’60s. On his own in the ’70s, Simon made radio-dominating hits. He kicked off the ’80s by reuniting with Garfunkel to perform for half a million New Yorkers in Central Park. Five years later, Simon’s album “Graceland” sold millions and spurred an international political controversy. And it doesn’t stop there. Peter Ames Carlin’s Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon (Henry Holt, $32) is a revelatory account of the life of beloved American music icon, a story replete with tales of Carrie Fisher, Leonard Bernstein, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Shelley Duvall, Nelson Mandela, drugs, depression, marriage, divorce and more.
Alfred HitchcockBenjamin HagmanBette DavisBetty HuttonBorn a Crime: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African ChildhoodBorn to RunBrian Jay JonesBruce SpringsteenCarli LloydCarol BurnettCarrel BooksCasanovaCerphe ColwellClaude MonetCrown ArchetypeDavid KaufmanDebra PagetDon GiovanniDon GummerDonald BogleDorothy LamourEdgar Allan PoeG. Gordon LiddyGeorge HarrisonGeorge LucasGivernyGlenn CloseGloria Swansonhen Nobody Was Watching: My Hard-Fought Journey to the Top of the Soccer WorldHenri MatisseHoward SternIrene DunneJackson BrowneJanet GaynorJean ArthurJean PetersJFKJill St. JohnJoan BlondellJoan CrawfordJohn CazaleJohn EntwistleJohn F. KennedyJudi DenchLady Jane WildeLarry HagmanLaurence OlivierLinda DarnellLiz TaylorLiza MinnelliLorenzo da PonteLoretta YoungMad EnchantmentMaggie SmithMarilyn MonroeMarnieMary MartinMeryl StreepMichael CoveneyMichael JacksonMozartNatalie WoodNathaniel HawthorneNeil SimonNorma ShearerOscar WildePablo PicassoPaul SimonPenn JillettePeter Ames CarlinPresto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical TalesRaquel WelchRay CroniseRichard BurtonRichard HallidayRobert WagnerRosalind RussellRoss KingRuth Bader GinsburgRuth FranklinShirley JacksonSir William WildeSpiegel & GrauStar WarsStephen FosterSteve WattsThe Daily Showthe Rolling StonesTippe HedrenTrevor NoahVan MorrisonWHFS 102.3William Morrow
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