Great Art

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.

Without a broad view of interconnectedness, our problem-solving skills are limited and short-sighted, and our abilities to make long-term, beneficial decisions are hampered. If we don’t acknowledge our interdependence's complexity, then we are doomed to replicate a system that will ultimately fail. Just as every node on a network contributes to the final result, every action of a member of a particular organizational system contributes to the outcome.

Are you a pub trivia enthusiast looking for some new challenges? The Great Book of Pub Trivia is the perfect companion for game nights, fun family times, fun evenings with friends, or just brushing up on your pub trivia knowledge. These trivia questions will get your brain working, and these random facts will give you bragging rights with all your friends (if you get them right).

Ear training is one of the most rewarding skills you can develop, and it’s one that you can work on every day. Which makes total sense: music is an aural experience, after all. Ear training helps you turn the music you hear into music you make on your piano. This works for your own musical ideas, too: when you dream up a great riff or chord progression, you naturally want to sit down and play it right away. Ear training helps you do just that.

The Great Gate of Kiev resounds to the tumultuous bell rings that end Pictures an an Exhibition, one of the most magnificent and virtuosic of all piano pieces. However, to some of his contemporaries, Modest Mussorgsky was ‘insane’ and ‘a perfect idiot’. Born into a wealthy land-owning family, what drove this tormented man and why did he suffer psychological breakdowns and alcoholism? How did he achieve his command of the realist idiom in his stage works? d, of course, Pictures at an Exhibition.

At the height of the McCarthy era, an experimental theater troupe set up shop in a bar near the University of Chicago. Via word-of-mouth, astonished crowds packed the ad-hoc venue to see its unscripted, interactive, consciousness-raising style. From this unlikely seed grew the Second City, the massively influential comedy theater troupe, and its offshoots - the Groundlings, Upright Citizens Brigade, SNL, and a slew of others. Sam Wasson charts the meteoric rise of improv in this richly reported, scene-driven narrative.

It’s tough being an author these days, and it’s getting harder. But, as Jason Boog shows in a rich mix of history and politics, this is not the first period when writers have struggled to scratch a living. Between accounts of contemporary layoffs and shrinking paychecks for authors and publishing professionals are stories from the 1930s when writers, hard hit by the Great Depression, fought to create unions and New Deal projects like the Federal Writers Project.

You’ve probably wanted to be like one of these people, but thought that you just “weren’t made for it”. However, leadership is not a gift that you’re born with. It’s a set of skills, strategies, and tactics than everyone has to learn before they become a good leader, it will help you on how to lead smart people. The successful leaders that you know also had to learn their skills - and you can do this too! But how to you become a leader?

In the public imagination, Ernest Hemingway looms larger than life. But the actual person behind the legend has long remained elusive. Now, his son Patrick shares the letters they exchanged over two decades, offering a glimpse into how one of America’s most iconic writers interacted with his children. These letters reveal a father who wished for his children to share his interests—hunting, fishing, travel—and a son who was receptive to the experiences his father offered.

Take a peek inside the heads of some of the world's greatest living graphic designers. How do they think, how do they connect to others, what special skills do they have? In honest and revealing interviews, 19 designers, including Stefan Sagmeister, Michael Beirut, David Carson, and Milton Glaser, share their approaches, processes, opinions, and thoughts about their work with noted brand designer Debbie Millman. The internet radio talk host of Design Matters, Millman persuades the greatest graphic designers of our time to speak frankly and openly about their work.

The Great Commanders is a masterly portrait of six men - Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Horatio Nelson, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ulysses S. Grant and Georgi Zhukov - whose military genius changed the course of world history.

Hans Holbein the Younger is chiefly celebrated for his beautiful and precisely realized portraiture, which includes representations of Henry VIII, his advisors Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, his wives Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves, and an array of the Tudor lords and ladies encountered during the course of two sojourns in England. But beyond these familiar images, which have come to define our perception of the age, Holbein was a multifaceted genius: a humanist, satirist, and political propagandist, and a deft man whose work was rich in layers of symbolism and allusion.

Ear training is one of the most rewarding skills you can develop, and it’s one that you can work on every day. Which makes total sense: Music is an aural experience, after all. Ear training helps you turn the music you hear into music you make on your guitar. This works for your own musical ideas, too: When you dream up a great riff or chord progression, you naturally want to sit down and play it right away. Ear training helps you do just that.

John Milton (1608-1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defenses of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Tracing Milton’s literary, intellectual, and political development with unprecedented depth and understanding, Poet of Revolution is an unmatched biographical account of the formation of the mind that would go on to create Paradise Lost - but would first justify the killing of a king.

On a summer's day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London. Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image - as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation - as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature.

The Art of Writing is Yang's highly practical treatise on the four key principles of dazzling, effective writing - economy, transparency, variety, and harmony. Far from your garden-variety style guide, the principles in this audiobook apply to everyone, whether you're writing an inauguration speech or a letter home to Mom.

This audiobook about Stoicism can also give you wisdom and help you overcome negative things and situations as well as adversity, find serenity, and live perfectly well. This audiobook contains timeless truths about Stoicism, and this also includes wisdom for any generation or era.

From the acclaimed biographer - the fascinating, little-known story of a Victorian-era murder that rocked literary London, leading Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and Queen Victoria herself to wonder: Can a novel kill?

Yes, this book is designed entirely to share those secrets that will inspire you to write that great song that you know you can! And once the creativity really starts flowing, we'll create great habits and write even more, each and every day. Get down to writing the music and the lyrics you know that you can because writer's block is a fantasy. You just need inspiration.

Essential lessons for comeback players, midlevel players, and all beginners. Covers tone production, breathing, tongue use, written music, how to practice, and more essentials to get you started right.