Great Art

James Boswell forever changed the genre of biography when he painstakingly transformed a scholarly profusion of detail into a perceptive, lifelike portrait of Dr. Samuel Johnson. James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson reveals a man of outsized appetites and private vulnerabilities and is the source of much of what we know about one of the towering figures of English literature.

T.D. Jakes doesn't just preach to his listeners, he gives them the psychological and practical tools that they need to realize their faith in their lives. Clear-sighted, realistic, and spiritually uplifting, Making Great Decisions is one of those rare books that can change lives. "Remember," writes T.D. Jakes, "your tomorrow is no better than the decisions you make today."

When he graduated from Columbia in 1958, John Giorno was handsome, charismatic, ambitious, and eager to soak up as much of Manhattan's art and culture as possible. Poetry didn't pay the bills, so he worked on Wall Street, spending his nights at the happenings, underground movie premiers, art shows, and poetry readings that brought the city to life. An intense romantic relationship with Andy Warhol - not yet the global superstar he would soon become - exposed Giorno to even more of the downtown scene, but after starring in Warhol's first movie, Sleep, they drifted apart.

Samuel Pepys kept a diary in which he wrote with astonishing candour about the life he saw around him in London in the 1660s, and about his private desires and ambitions. The diary was kept for fewer than 10 years of his long life: Claire Tomalin tells the whole story of the Fleet Street tailor's son who made himself rich and powerful, an MP and adviser to royalty.

However, a historical transformation of similar magnitude also took place in northern Europe at the same time. This "Other Renaissance" was initially centered on the city of Bruges in Flanders (modern Belgium), but its influence was soon being felt in France, the German states, London, and even in Italy itself.

The great secret of our time is that you can actually reach a very competent level at any skill just by harnessing the power of your most important asset - your brain. In Speak Like a Leader, self-growth pioneer and social chameleon Andrian focuses on fundamental principles that define our speaking ability and presents the most impactful but extremely attainable ways to improve dramatically this inherited but quite neglected skill.

In 1926, Henry Beston spent two weeks in a two-room cottage on the sand dunes of Cape Cod. He had not intended to stay longer, but, as he later wrote, "I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go."

Make Noise brings all the wisdom, advice, practical information, and big-picture thinking that any individual or business needs to make a successful podcast. He identifies core principles - such as create empathetically, i.e., think like the audience listens, and stay focused on what’s unique to you and what you have to say. He helps listeners come up with a “Ten Word Description” that will guide them throughout the creative process and then gets into how-tos - how to develop character, story, voice, and more.

Use this guide to storytelling as a sturdy foundation to change how you use stories. You can build solid stories to support your goals in business and life. The provided examples are from some of the world's greatest speakers, storytellers, with advice from leading experts. From best-selling authors to generation-changing motivational speakers, this audiobook covers all the fundamentals of outstanding storytelling. It will help you deliver stories to audiences that will leave them personally affected and motivated.

Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopedie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity - for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality.

Tolkien and the Great War tells for the first time the full story of how he embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe. This biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme and introduces the circle of friends who spurred his mythology to life.

Whether you're just starting out as a songwriter, you're an experienced songwriter or just looking for a new perspective on the beautiful craft of songwriting, Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics offers fresh insights to help you write your very best lyrics. In Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics, I deliver simple, logical, well-defined solutions to these issues and more: I give you seven well-developed professional templates for you to bring your lyrics to life.

Charlotte Gordon's new work is a fresh look at the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, who together comprise one of the most illustrious and inspiring mother-daughter pairs in history.

In this heartfelt memoir by the Masterpiece Theatre host, Pulitzer Prize winner, and groundbreaking New York Times columnist, Russell Baker traces his youth in the mountains of rural Virginia. When Baker was only five, his father died. His mother, strong-willed and matriarchal, never looked back. After all, she had three children to raise. These were Depression years, and Mrs. Baker moved her fledgling family to Baltimore. Baker's mother was determined her children would succeed, and we know her regimen worked for Russell.

Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause is one of the world's leading experts in natural sound, and he's spent his life discovering and recording nature's rich chorus. Searching far beyond our modern world's honking horns and buzzing machinery, he has sought out the truly wild places that remain, where natural soundscapes exist virtually unchanged from when the earliest humans first inhabited the earth.

America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, median wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess?

With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Leonardo Da Vinci to Caravaggio to Edward Hopper, Secret Lives of Great Artists recounts the seamy, steamy, and gritty history behind the great masters of international art. You'll learn that Michelangelo's body odor was so bad, his assistants couldn't stand working for him; that Vincent van Gogh sometimes ate paint directly from the tube; and Georgia O'Keeffe loved to paint in the nude. This is one art history lesson you'll never forget!

In this “by ear” lesson, you will learn an early-intermediate arrangement of “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” in three different styles. This allows you to not only learn the hymn for performance but to also learn different ways of arranging the accompaniment for use in other songs. This lesson is suitable for most adult students who have been practicing regularly for a little over a year.

The official celebration of All Creatures Great & Small and its incredible setting: the Yorkshire Dales. Featuring an in-depth look at the characters and real-life inspiration for the show, this book tells the fascinating story of the program’s main character: the Yorkshire Dales.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was born in Paris during a time of great social and political upheaval, a ferment that is dealt with extensively in his monumental work In Search of Lost Time. He was a sickly child and spent the earlier part of his short life pursuing a variety of sometimes frivolous activities, which led to his not being taken seriously as a writer. It was not until 1909, when he was 38 years old, that he began work on the groundbreaking novel for which he is known, a task that consumed the rest of his life.