A unique, easy-to-use, and inspiring handbook filled with a year’s worth of insight, helpful tips, and practical advice into the feline-human relationship. Whether you’re a cat owner yourself or someone who just loves all things cat, this book will provide you with a lifetime’s worth of ways to enjoy and appreciate cats. The format—a year-long, day-minder-type book—is not meant to be read cover to cover; rather, the book can fall open on any given day and lend applicable information and inspiration. Cat Lover’s Daily Companion is also completely indexed so you’re able to easily search for specific content. Each day features essays, anecdotes, activities, and trivia that remind you why you love cats: Monday—Practical information, from welcoming a cat home to understanding its basic needs Tuesday—Engaging tales of cats in history and literature Wednesday—Feline health and wellness topics, from acupuncture to the zodiac Thursday—Household tips and ideas for cat-friendly home decor and crafts Friday—The world of cat breeds, from Abyssinian to York Chocolate Saturday and Sunday—Bonding, relationship building, and planning special occasions with your pet With Cat Lover’s Daily Companion, you’ll have a year’s worth of ideas, information, and activities to help you care for, understand, socialize, and honor your feline friend.

The Diagnostic Manual for Cats (DMC-I) is the only existing tool for understanding cat behavior. It will allow you to diagnose cat “issues” —an area of psychology sorely lacking—without dragging them to a cat psychiatrist and paying for analysis. If you’re a cat owner, the DMC-I will help relieve you of the guilt and worry you’re experiencing believing you’re the cause of your cat’s aberrant behaviors. You’ll learn that some behaviors, while deplorable and disgusting, are absolutely normal, while others, clinically speaking, are certifiably “whacko.” It will help you diagnose other people’s cats, too, which may or may not make you immensely popular at dinner parties and family gatherings. Whatever the case, with this manual, you’ll be the expert diagnostician of all types of cat behavior.

Presents a collection of facts, quotations, and anecdotes about cats.

This book is about how you listen and what you hear, about how to have a dialogue with the sounds around you. Marcia Jenneth Epstein gives readers the impetus and the tools to understand the sounds and noise that define their daily lives in this groundbreaking interdisciplinary study of how auditory stimuli impact both individuals and communities. Epstein employs scientific and sociological perspectives to examine noise in multiple contexts: as a threat to health and peace of mind, as a motivator for social cohesion, as a potent form of communication and expression of power. She draws on a massive base of specialist literature from fields as diverse as nursing and neuroscience, sociology and sound studies, acoustic ecology and urban planning, engineering, anthropology, and musicology, among others, synthesizing and explaining these findings to evaluate the ubiquitous effects of sound in everyday life. Epstein investigates speech and music as well as noise and explores their physical and cultural dimensions. Ultimately she argues for an engaged public dialogue on sound, built on a shared foundation of critical listening, and provides the understanding for all of us to speak and be heard in such a discussion. Sound and Noise is a timely evaluation of the noise that surrounds us, how we hear it, and what we can do about it.

In this second edition of Orchestral “Pops” Music: A Handbook, Lucy Manning brings forward to the present her remarkable compendium of information about this form of orchestral music. Since the appearance of the first edition in 2008, this work has proven critical to successful “pops” concert programming. With changes in publishers and agents, the discontinuation of the publication of certain original material or, worst of all, presses going out of business, music directors, orchestra conductors, and professional instrumentalists face formidable challenges in tracking down accurate information about this vast repertoire. This revised handbook alleviates the time-consuming task of researching these changes by offering a list of works for orchestral “pops” concerts that is comprehensive, informative, and current. Manning’s emphasis on clarity and accuracy gives users an indispensable tool for gathering vital information on the style, instrumentation, and availability of the repertoire listed, as well as notes on its performance. The user-friendly appendices include expanded instrumentation choices, easy-to-find durations, and handy title cross-references. In addition to corrections and updates, this new edition of Orchestral “Pops” Music includes at least 1,000 new title listings. Orchestral “Pops” Music: A Handbook is the ideal tool for working conductors and orchestral librarians, as well as music program directors at colleges, conservatories, and orchestras.

Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great nineteenth-century composers. Between 1810 and 1829, he wrote 39 operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed Italian opera and radically altered the course of opera in France. His retirement from operatic composition in 1829, at the age of 37, was widely assumed to be the act of a talented but lazy man. In reality, political events and a series of debilitating illnesses were the determining factors. After drafting the Stabat Mater in 1832, Rossini wrote no music of consequence for the best part of twenty-five years, before the clouds lifted and he began composing again in Paris in the late 1850s. During this glorious Indian summer of his career, he wrote 150 songs and solo piano pieces his 'Sins of Old Age' and his final masterpiece, the Petite Messe solennelle. The image of Rossini as a gifted but feckless amateur-the witty, high-spirited bon vivant who dashed off The Barber of Seville in a mere thirteen days-persisted down the years, until the centenary of his death in 1968 inaugurated a process of re-evaluation by scholars, performers, and writers. The original 1985 edition of Richard Osborne's pioneering and widely acclaimed Rossini redefined the life and provided detailed analyses of the complete Rossini oeuvre. Twenty years on, all Rossini's operas have been staged and recorded, a Critical Edition of his works is well advanced, and a scholarly edition of his correspondence, including 250 previously unknown letters from Rossini to his parents, is in progress. Drawing on these past two decades of scholarship and performance, this new edition of Rossini provides the most detailed portrait we have yet had of one of the worlds best-loved and most enigmatic composers.