Never look an American in the eye

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Professor Peter Schickele

Real-life music professor Peter Schickele claims to have discovered the works of a "justly" neglected member of the famous Bach musical family. Along with the live and studio music performances of these "P.D.Q. Bach" works on the market since the days of the Long Playing Record, Schickele provides this additional documentation should there be any doubt as to the accuracy of his claims. There is at least no doubt as to the material's oddness, as the performance of one piece requires the creation of an instrument which combines the reed neck of a bassoon with a pipe connection adaptor that attaches to a trombone. What results is a reed-fed brass instrument called the tromboon...

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Jeffrey B. Ferguson

This is a focus on the life and early career of George Schuyler one of the important intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. The text presents an understanding of Schuyler as public intellectual while offering insights into the relations between race and satire during a formative period in African-American cultural history.

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Carolyn See

In this bittersweet and beautifully written memoir Carolyn See embarks on nothing less than a reevaluation of the American Dream. "This is a history," she writes, "of how drugs and drink have worked in our family for the last fifty - actually it turned out to be closer to a hundred - years. In varying degrees, it's history seen through a purple haze. It's full of secrets and chaos and distortions, and secretly remembered joys. I'm beginning to think it may be the unwritten history of America.". Although it features a clan in which dysfunction was something of a family tradition, Dreaming is no "victim's story" or temperance tract. With a wry humor and not a trace of self-pity, See writes of fights and breakups and hard times, but also of celebration and optimism in the face of adversity. The story of See's own family speaks for the countless people who reached for the shining American vision, found it eluded their grasp, and then tried to make what they had glitter as best they could. Dreaming is about yearning, imagining, and reinventing oneself, about rolling with the punches and continuing on. In this fiercely funny and deeply empathetic book, See shows us that the wild life, for better and worse, has made us what we are.

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Linda Greenlaw

In his number one bestseller, The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger describes Linda Greenlaw as "one of the best sea captains, period, on the East Coast." Now Greenlaw tells her own riveting story of a thirty-day swordfishing voyage aboard one of the best-outfitted boats on the East Coast, complete with danger, humor, and characters so colorful they seem to have been ripped from the pages of Moby Dick