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Giuseppe Verdi remains Italy's greatest operatic composer and a man of apparent contradictions--vividly brought to life through a nuanced examination of his life and monumental music. Giuseppe Verdi remains the greatest operatic composer that Italy, the home of opera, has ever produced. Yet throughout his lifetime he claimed to detest composing and repeatedly rejected it. He was a landowner, a farmer, a politician and symbol of Italian independence; but his music tells a different story. An obsessive perfectionist, Verdi drove collaborators to despair but his works lauded from the start as dazzling feats of composition and characterization. From Rigoletto to Otello, La Traviatato to Aida, Verdi's canon encompassed the full range of human emotion. His private life was no less complex: he suffered great loss, and went out of his way to antagonize supporters and his own family. An outspoken advocate of Italian independence and a sharp critic of the church, he was often at odds wi...

New York Times bestseller Elle Kennedy brings you a sexy new Off-Campus novel that can be read as a standalone... She's about to make a deal with the college bad boy... Hannah Wells has finally found someone who turns her on. But while she might be confident in every other area of her life, she's carting around a full set of baggage when it comes to sex and seduction. If she wants to get her crush's attention, she'll have to step out of her comfort zone and make him take notice...even if it means tutoring the annoying, childish, cocky captain of the hockey team in exchange for a pretend date. ...and it's going to be oh so good All Garrett Graham has ever wanted is to play professional hockey after graduation, but his plummeting GPA is threatening everything he's worked so hard for. If helping a sarcastic brunette make another guy jealous will help him secure his position on the team, he's all for it. But when one unexpected kiss leads to the wildest se...

The new Leipzig/Halle airport has not just one, but two predecessors. One was Leipzig-Mockau airport, opened as a "World Airport" in 1923 and often still used after the Second World War in the GDR days to serve the Leipziger Messe, and then its competitor, Leipzig/Halle airport (near Schkeuditz), which opened in 1927 and by 1937 was already the second-largest airport in Germany. It took over the Messe flights from 1963 onwards, and continued to grow until 1989. After that, quick action was needed. Passenger numbers had increased fourfold by 1994. A master plan was worked out for a second takeoff and land- ing runway, intended for 3.5 million passengers per year. An open architectural competition followed in 1994, and was won by Brunnert und Partner from Stuttgart. They won with a risky concept that ran counter to the master plan. Instead of filling the site between the two runways running east-west, which, in addition, is cut through in parallel by the A14 motorway and a ne...

In the tradition of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential comes an insider's look into the cloistered world of classical music. Now a major Amazon.com TV series starring Gabriel Garcia Bernal. From her debut recital at Carnegie Hall to performing with the orchestras of Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, oboist Blair Tindall has been playing classical music professionally for over twenty-five years. She's also lived the secret life of musicians who survive hand to mouth, trading sex and drugs for low-paying gigs and the promise of winning a rare symphony position or a lucrative solo recording contract. In Mozart in the Jungle, Tindall describes her graduation from the North Carolina School of the Arts to the backbiting New York classical music scene, a world where Tindall and her fellow classical musicians often play drunk, high, or hopelessly hung-over, live in decrepit apartments, and perform in hazardous conditions. (In the cramped confines of a Broadway pit, the decibel...

This Mandarin picture dictionary covers the 1,500 most useful Mandarin Chinese words and sentences. Each word and sentence is given in Chinese characters with a Hanyu Pinyin pronunciation and English definition. The words are grouped into 38 themes or topics. Each theme has 25 to 35 words and 5 to 8 sentences and is richly illustrated with color photographs. Online audio recordings by native Mandarin speakers of all the vocabulary and sentences comes free with the book. A brief introduction to Chinese pronunciation and tones is included, and indexes at the back allow you to quickly look up any of the words or characters in the book. Since this dictionary covers all the words for the AP Chinese Language and Culture Exam as well as the Chinese HSK Levels 1 & 2, it is an ideal test prep resource for a visual learner. Product details Format ...

Author of The Great War, as well as celebrated accounts of the battles of the Somme, Passchendaele, Jutland, and Gallipoli, historian Peter Hart now turns to World War One's final months. Much has been made of-and written about-August 1914. There has been comparatively little focus on August 1918 and the lead-up to November. Because of the fixation on the Great War's opening moves, and the great battles that followed over the course of the next four years, the endgame seems to come as a stunning anticlimax. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 the guns simply fell silent. The Last Battle definitively corrects this misperception. As Hart shows, a number of factors precipitated the Armistice. After four years of bloodshed, Germany was nearly bankrupt and there was a growing rift between the military High Command and political leadership. But it also remained a determined combatant, and France and Great Britain had equally been stretched to their...

Experts in the ten major Pulp genres, from action Pulps to spicy Pulps and more, chart for the first time the complete history of Pulp magazines--the stories and their writers, the graphics and their artists, and, of course, the publishers, their market, and readers. Each chapter in the book, which is illustrated with more than 400 examples of the best Pulp graphics (many from the editors' collections--among the world's largest) is organized in a clear and accessible way, starting with an introductory overview of the genre, followed by a selection of the best covers and interior graphics, organized chronologically through the chapter. All images are fully captioned (many are in essence nutshell histories in themselves). Two special features in each chapter focus on topics of particular interest (such as extended profiles of Daisy Bacon, Pulp author and editor of Love Story, the hugely successful romance Pulp, and of Harry Steeger, co-founder of Popular Publications in 1930 and...

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. Product details Format Hardback | 544 pages Dimensions 178 x...