When Aiko Sano Kobayashi was a young girl, she was struck by a car after forgetting to look both ways before crossing the street. She knew she had come close to death, and she began asking herself deep questions: Is heaven real? And if it's real, how can I get there? Is God real? Does he answer prayers? Soon after finding these answers, Aiko became one of God's children and began to experience him working in her life. Through Aiko's many life stories and the testimonies of others, readers will see how God's plan is revealed and how he uses his followers to reach out to others. Read the inspiring tale of Aiko's husband's mother coming to Christ at the age of ninety-eight. Witness the power of the twenty-four-hour prayer chain. Find how the lives of many families are touched by God's hand. After learning of God's wondrous works, readers everywhere will know they are truly In God's Embrace.

Timothy E. Wise presents the first book to focus specifically on the musical content of yodeling in our culture. He shows that yodeling serves an aesthetic function in musical texts. A series of chronological chapters analyzes this musical tradition from its earliest appearances in Europe to its incorporation into a range of American genres and beyond. Wise posits the reasons for yodeling's changing status in our music. How and why was yodeling introduced into professional music making in the first place? What purposes has it served in musical texts? Why was it expunged from classical music? Why did it attach to some popular music genres and not others? Why does yodeling now appear principally at the margins of mainstream tastes? To answer such questions, Wise applies the perspectives of critical musicology, semiotics, and cultural studies to the changing semantic associations of yodeling in an unexplored repertoire stretching from Beethoven to Zappa. This volume marks the first musicological and ideological analysis of this prominent but largely ignored feature of American musical life. Maintaining high scholarly standards but keeping the general reader in mind, the author examines yodeling in relation to ongoing cultural debates about singing, music as art, social class, and gender. Chapters devote attention to yodeling in nineteenth-century classical music, the nineteenth-century Alpine-themed song in America, the Americanization of the yodel, Jimmie Rodgers, and cowboy yodeling, among other topics.

With ideas to help families establish traditions and celebrate the universal joy of the birth of a baby, Baby Lore describes a wide range of charming customs from around the world. Handsomely designed and photographed, this book covers everything from preparation to naming the baby and announcing the birth, christenings, lullabies from all over the world--with sheet music--and birth celebration foods. 75 full-color photographs.