AN UPDATED, COMPREHENSIVE COLLECTION OF LYRICS FROM THE VELVET UNDERGROUND FOUNDER AND SOLO ARTIST LOU REED, INCLUDING INTRODUCTIONS BY MARTIN SCORSESE, LAURIE ANDERSON, JAMES ATLAS, AND NILS LOFGREN I'll Be Your Mirroris an updated, comprehensive volume of Lou Reed's lyrics, featuring a brand-new introduction by Nils Lofgren and a new chapter of lyrics of songs he and Reed cowrote, as well as introductions from several other well-known collaborators and lyrics from Reed's final album with Metallica (Lulu). Through his many incarnations-from protopunk to glam rocker to elder statesman of the avant garde-Lou Reed's work has maintained an undeniable vividness and raw beauty, fueled by precise character studies and rendered with an admirable shot of moral ambiguity. Beginning with his formative days in the Velvet Underground and continuing through his remarkable solo albums like Transformer, Berlin, and New York, I'll Be Your Mirror is crucial to an appreciation of Lou Reed, not only as a consummate underground musician, but as one of the truly significant visionary lyricists of the rock 'n' roll era. Containing a body of work that spans more than six decades, this is a monument to the literary qualities of an American original-and a must-have for music lovers everywhere.

Bliss Cavendar takes up Roller Derby and soon embarks on an epic journey full of a few not-so-awesome realities. Now adapted as the feature film "Whip It!" starring Ellen Page ("Juno") and Drew Barrymore, who also directs.

Using Japanese higher education as a case study, author Brian J. McVeigh explores the varieties of 'exchange dramatics' among the Education Ministry, universities, faculty, and students. With one eye on large-scale processes and the other on everyday practices, he elucidates trafficking between micro- and macro-levels and key concepts of 'value, ' 'exchange, ' and 'role performance' by studying how political economy configures dramatization and deception at the everyday level. Relying on extensive ethnographic participant observation and the notion of the 'gift, ' McVeigh challenges the commonly accepted idea of 'social contract' for understanding state-society relations. Written to be read as both a political and philosophical commentary and anthropological investigation, this work has theoretical implications for comparative studies of political systems, particularly regarding the relation between self-deception and the ideological manufacture of legitima

One of the greatest mezzo-sopranos of postwar opera, Christa Ludwig recalls her long and lustrous career singing for two generations of adoring audiences, under the batons of such conductors as Klemperer, Karajan, Solti, and Bernstein, in the great opera houses of the world. Her memoirs make clear why Bernstein said of her, "She is simply the best, and the best of all possible human beings."

The world's most beautiful movie star is scarred in a fiery car accident. Her career over and her self-esteem in shreds, she hides in the magnificent home her grandmother left her in the mountains of North Carolina. But her motherly cousin refuses to let her become a recluse, and a handsome neighbor with painful dilemmas of his own is lured into the mix. Romance, family life, drama, humor, and secrets.

Vice-President Richard Nixon - the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime - is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fe at which the Rosenbergs are put to death.