Mario Lanza

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Kara DioGuardi

Kara DioGuardi is an award-winning hitmaker, a savvy record executive, and a successful music publisher whose songs have been recorded by such superstars as Pink, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani, Santana, Steven Tyler, and many others. She was also the feisty fourth judge on American Idol. But success wouldn't have happened for this songwriter, artist, and producer without the dark times of defeat. Kara not only writes about what it was like to collaborate with some of our favorite performing artists, she also opens up about everything from her struggles with debilitating stage fright and an equally paralyzing eating disorder, to caring for her mother during her final battle with cancer. And, of course, she shares behind-the-scenes stories from her years on American Idol and the real truth about her departure from the show.--From publisher description.

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Rosanne Cash

For thirty years as a musician, Rosanne Cash has enjoyed both critical and commercial success, releasing a series of albums that are as notable for their lyrical intelligence as for their musical excellence. In this memoir, Cash writes compellingly about her upbringing in Southern California as the child of country legend Johnny Cash, and of her relationships with her mother and her famous stepmother, June Carter Cash. In her account of her development as an artist she shares memories of recording her own first album on a German label; working her way to success; her Nashville marriage to Rodney Crowell; her relationship with the country music establishment; taking a new direction in her music and moving to New York; motherhood; dealing with the deaths of her parents, in part through music; the process of songwriting; and her fulfillment with her current husband and musical collaborator, John Leventhal.--From publisher description.

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Kirk Lake

"From the Tin Pan Alley roots of his debut through to the rococo arrangements of Want and the brassy Broadway standards of Judy Garland, Rufus Wainwright's work mixes innovation and tradition like no other contemporary pop performer. His private life, which, by choice or otherwise, he has lived in public, is equally incredible - and in its own, sometimes peculiar, often exaggerated way, has encompassed all three of the clichéd tenets of the popular recording artist (sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll) ... follows Wainwright's journey from child actor to profligate Hollywood pop star ... from playing to a handful of friends in a tiny Canadian café to triumphant sell-out shows at Carnegie Hall"--Jacket.

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Rubén Martínez

"The U.S.-Mexican border is one of the most permeable boundaries in the world. Even as the United States deploys billions of dollars and a vast arsenal to "hold the line," the border is breached daily by Mexicans in search of work. Yet the migrant gambit is perilous. Thousands die crossing the border, and those who reach "the other side" are branded illegals, undocumented and unprotected.". "In Crossing Over, the Ruben Martinez puts a human face on the phenomenon, following the exodus of the Chavez clan, an extended Mexican family with the grim distinction of having lost three sons in a tragic border incident. He charts the migrants' progress from their small south-Mexican town of Cheran through the harrowing underground railroad to the tomato farms of Missouri, the strawberry fields of California, and the slaughterhouses of Wisconsin. He reveals the effects of emigration on the family members left behind and offers a powerful portrait of migrant culture, an exchange that deposits hip-hop in Indian villages while bringing Mexican pop to the northern plains. Far from joining the melting pot, Martinez argues, the migrants - as many as seven million in the United States - are spawning a new culture that will alter both countries, as Latin America and the United States come increasingly to resemble each other."--BOOK JACKET.