This is the ideal beginner's book, presenting the basics of playing the 5-string banjo is a way that is both fun and produces quick results. Janet Davis takes you on an extensive tour of this instrument's fundamental techniques as well as some intermediate possibilities including rolls, chords, bluegrass banjo techniques, playing up the neck, licks, endings, and other basic information needed to play bluegrass and melodic-style banjo. Thorough performance notes are provided from beginning to end revealing the secrets of this versatile traditional instrument.

Dr. Jack Scales, hotshot neurosurgeon, is at the peak of his career—and his family’s showing the strain. His wife, Arlen, is having an affair; Ric, their twenty-year-old son, hears voices urging him to violence; and teenaged Haley, a champion swimmer, would rather be anywhere than on a cruise to Bermuda in her family’s luxurious new sailboat… The Scales’s bon voyage party ends in the death of a stowaway, a lightning storm that nearly sinks them, and one of Ric’s worst schizophrenic episodes yet. Still, battling the elements together, the family forges a fragile unity…until a man adrift on a plastic beach float hundreds of miles from land springs a trap. Held hostage by smugglers who’ll stop at nothing to get their cargo to port, the family faces the ultimate question: How much would each one be willing to sacrifice in order to buy the others a chance to survive?

From the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War—the epic story of the California Gold Rush, “a fine, robust telling of one of the greatest adventure stories in history" (David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of John Adams). The California Gold Rush inspired a new American dream—the “dream of instant wealth, won by audacity and good luck.” The discovery of gold on the American River in 1848 triggered the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades. It drew fortune-seekers from the ends of the earth, accelerated America’s imperial expansion, and exacerbated the tensions that exploded in the Civil War. H.W. Brands tells his epic story from multiple perspectives: of adventurers John and Jessie Fremont, entrepreneur Leland Stanford, and the wry observer Samuel Clemens—side by side with prospectors, soldiers, and scoundrels. He imparts a visceral sense of the distances they traveled, the suffering they endured, and the fortunes they made and lost. Impressive in its scholarship and overflowing with life, The Age of Gold is history in the grand traditions of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough.

(Guitar Recorded Versions). 16 songs transcribed note for note from the live album that captured Joe's tribute to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf at the iconic Colorado theater. Includes: All Aboard * The Ballad of John Henry * Evil (Is Going On) * Hey Baby (New Rising Sun) * How Many More Years * I Can't Be Satisfied * Killing Floor * My Home Is on the Delta * Sloe Gin * You Shook Me * and more.

The acclaimed investigative reporter and author of Confronting Collapse examines the global forces that led to 9/11 in this provocative exposé. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were accomplished through an amazing orchestration of logistics and personnel. Crossing the Rubicon examines how such a conspiracy was possible through an interdisciplinary analysis of petroleum, geopolitics, narco-traffic, intelligence and militarism—without which 9/11 cannot be understood. In reality, 9/11 and the resulting "War on Terror" are parts of a massive authoritarian response to an emerging economic crisis of unprecedented scale. Peak Oil—the beginning of the end for our industrial civilization—is driving the elites of American power to implement unthinkably draconian measures of repression, warfare and population control. Crossing the Rubicon is more than a story of corruption and greed. It is a map of the perilous terrain through which we are all now making our way.