Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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Selected adn Translated from the Works of Guy De Maupassant, Pedro Antonio De Alarcon, Alexander L. Kielland, Leopold Kompert, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer,a nd Giovanni Macherini-Graziani. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Indiana Business Magazine, published by Curtis Magazine Group, Inc. on December 1, 1993. The length of the article is 1215 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: City spotlight: Wabash. (Wabash River, Indiana)
Author: Joe Slacian
Publication: Indiana Business Magazine (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 1, 1993
Publisher: Curtis Magazine Group, Inc.
Volume: v37Issue: n12Page: p55(4)

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Avant-garde plays by a gifted and unconventional German Jewish writer, one of the few women among the Expressionists of the Berlin Moderns

Famous for her poetry and infamous for her bohemian lifestyle, as well as her association with political radicals, Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945) is only now returning to just renown as one of the few women writers within the Expressionist movement of the early twentieth century. These plays-Dark River, Arthur Aronymus and His Ancestors, and I and I-in Jane Curtis's fluid translation, allow readers of English to experience the radically avant-garde style that put Lasker-Schüler on a par with Brecht in her day, as well as the passionate treatment of questions of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality that placed her well ahead of her time. Lasker-Schüler's plays reflect her unusual life among the Berlin Moderns of the 1910s and 20s. The daughter of a well-to-do Jewish banker and builder, Else Schüler gave up her bourgeois existence as a doctor's wife for the artistic, social, and political uncertainties that would characterize the rest of her life. Many of her finest poems and plays were written amidst the cafe society of Berlin, where she knew some of the great expressionist artists of the period. The death of her beloved son in 1927, which led her to intense introspection and reflection on the Jewish tradition, especially mysticism and the Kabbalah, also marked the beginning of Lasker-Schüler's years of tragedy, loss, and dislocation, culminating in her flight from Nazi Germany to Switzerland and then Jerusalem, where she ended her days as an eccentric pauper.
The plays in this volume mark Lasker-Schüler's movement away from the traditional aesthetic canon, revealing a unique formal development from naturalistic expressionist episodes in the lyrical Dark River to a historicizing politicization of the theater in Arthur Aronymous to the forms of montage and "epic" presentations in I and I. A short preface by Inca Molina Rumold places each play in its historical, biographical, and artistic context.
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This digital document is an article from Journal of Leisure Research, published by National Recreation and Park Association on June 22, 1993. The length of the article is 2843 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the author: Linear parks, frequently developed on abandoned railroad lines, have become a common type of recreation site. Adjacent landowners often express strong concerns about proposed linear parks. However, it has been suggested that these concerns are usually misplaced and once the park is actually developed they disappear. Survey data from a sample of landowners along the Missouri River State Trail in central Missouri are analyzed and the results suggest that landowners along potential sites probably have exaggerated fears which diminish once the park is established.

Citation Details
Title: Rural landowners' attitudes towards the Missouri River State Trail.
Author: Michael S. Kaylen
Publication: Journal of Leisure Research (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 1993
Publisher: National Recreation and Park Association
Volume: v25Issue: n3Page: p281(9)

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In Higher Ground, one of our most insightful music writers brilliantly reinterprets the lives of three pop geniuses and the soul revolution they launched.

Soul music is one of America's greatest cultural achievements, and Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and Curtis Mayfield are three of its most inspired practitioners. In midcentury America it was soul music--particularly the dazzling stream of recordings made by these three stars--that helped bring the gospel vision of the black church into the mainstream, energizing the era’s social movements and defining a new American gospel where the sacred and the secular met. What made this gospel all the more amazing was that its most influential articulators were the sons and daughters of sharecroppers, storefront preachers, and single parents in the projects, whose genius gave voice to a new vision of American possibility.

Higher Ground seamlessly weaves the specific and intensely personal narratives of Stevie, Aretha, and Curtis’s lives into the historical fabric of their times. The three shared many similarities: They were all children of the great migration and of the black church. But the gospel impulse manifested itself in different ways within the dramas of their individual lives and musical creations. In Stevie Wonder’s case, it was a literally color-blind universal sense of spirituality that expressed itself in his life and music as an urge toward transcendence, particularly in the mid-seventies when albums like Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life radically revised what a pop album could be. For Aretha Franklin, the traditional gospel vision of a beloved community anchored in the strength of women comforted her through a life littered with tragedy and found expression in propulsive pop songs like "Respect" as well as in her legendary gospel albums. And for Curtis Mayfield, the gospel notion of conscious living inspired him to create songs that served the purposes of the Civil Rights movement and the radical Black Power movement alike, from the gritty street drama of Superfly to the transcendent call of "People Get Ready."

Werner doesn't just provide a narrative of three fascinating lives; he ties them together with a provocative thesis about American history and culture that compels us to reconsider both the music and the times. And aside from the personalities and the history, he writes beautifully about music itself, the nuts and bolts of its creation and performance, in a way that brings a new awareness and understanding to the most familiar music, forcing readers to listen to songs they've heard a thousand times with fresh ears. In Higher Ground, Werner illuminates the lives of three unparalleled American artists, reminding us why their music mattered then and still resonates with us today.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Not a classic, but necessary exposure to the message
This book doesn't fit neatly into any genre boxes. It's not a dedicated biography. It's not a musical history. It's not really cultural theory. It's a fusion between a joint biography of Wonder, Franklin, and Mayfield with a connection to the cultural history that fuels their work. I learned some things along the way, but I found this book to fall short of other recent reads in popular music such as "I Never Loved a Man" focusing on Aretha Franklin's first album and "Shout: The Beatles and Their Generation".

This book is very ambitious. It covers the lives of three subjects and 40 years of social history in about 290 pages. Consequently, it's more a series of events that support the author's central ideal: black music is most vital when it speaks in a gospel voice to community themes.

The work on Mayfield is very helpful and was most beneficial to me. Mayfield has traditionally been underrated. This book skillfully connects Mayfield to Cabrini-Green and traditions of black entrepreneurship. Mayfield sacrificed some of the chart success of Motown to remain independent and this book provides some quality interview excerpts from Mayfield and gives key highlights from his career. Let's hope there's a Black Studies student out there who will read this and be led to give Mayfield the full scale critical biography he deserves.

It's hard to do justice to Stevie in the space allowed. Werner is a big believer that Songs in the Key of Life is the peak of Stevie's powers. I'd like more support for this viewpoint with closer reading of Stevie's lyrics. Werner's a big fan of Conversation Peace for recent Stevie and dismisses Jungle Fever. I gained some key episodes on Stevie's life, though, and having just read about the Beatles, I gained a great deal from Werner's discussion about how Stevie gained artistic strength from rock music and artists like Jeff Beck.

Aretha resists analysis because she has not been as an open an interview subject as Stevie and Mayfield. Still, this book does communicate how powerful a symbol of womanist advocacy Aretha has become and how she has struggled to be true to her gospel roots while succeeding in a pop environment that often opposes those roots.

This book is not as thorough a history as other things that I've read, but it does offer one man's interpretation of some key figures and, especially in the case of Curtis Mayfield, bring attention to some underrated work. I recommend this for those deeply interested in these artists and those exploring a range of options for revitalizing soul music.

4 stars

---SD

Ken Burns, This Should Be Your Next Documentary
I bought this book because LA Times writer Ann Powers referenced it in her article on Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin and the movie Dreamgirls.I can see why Ann thought so highly of this work.Craig Werner has written the most insightful and the deepest book we are ever likely to get concerning the simultaneous influence of soul greats Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Curtis Mayfield.This book is the bomb!

As a lifelong Aretha-file, I was astonished by the author's multi-dimensional portrait of Aretha and her musical journey.There is more information here about Aretha than I have ever found anywhere---including in Aretha's very disappointing autobiography.

The portraits of musical genuises Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield are as deep and as indelible as the one of Aretha.These three artists very simply changed the face of American music.Not just soul music, but American music.

We can see---sometimes in frightening ways---the influence of these great musical sensations on American Idol every year.Not that any singer/songwriters of the last 20 years can touch these geniuses.

God Bless Aretha, Steve and Curtis!And God speed Craig Werner on to his next great book!

this book sings like Aretha
Werner, whose masterpiece, A CHANGE IS GONNA COME: RACE, MUSIC AND THE SOUL OF AMERICA, is widely considered a classic, strikes again with an equally profound book that is an even better read.The narrative speedskates on three fascinating and nicely braided portraits of artists who reshaped American music in the image of the best black dreams of freedom.Not onlydo we get three great life stories; we also get a complex cultural history of how the black freedom movement transformed American culture, infusing the "gospel vision" into all manner of music.And on top of that, Werner has written a fine short history of the movement "up South" in Detroit and Chicago, two urban crucibles that reveal, in distinct ways, the tragedy of America's failure to respond to the African American call for R-e-s-p-e-c-t and to the call of its own best inner visions.This book sings like Aretha. ... Read more