"If you laugh, you cry, and you think, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day." These are the words of the late Jim Valvano, better known as, Jimmy V. If these three emotions make for a heck of a day, then Tears, Tickles, and Triumphs is certainly a heck of a book. JLew brings life to the pages through emotional compositions such as Band Aids On Bruises, tickles all your funny bones with his Kid Issues, and captures your heart and mind with Kingship. Without a doubt, Tears, Tickles, and Triumphs is the emotional roller coaster we call life, from cover to cover.

Once a starveling bootblack, Christien Lenoir has risen to become the sword master known as Faucon, the Falcon. When a desperate gambler stakes his plantation in a late-night card game, sharp-eyed Christien antes up. For he wants River's Edge—and the tempestuous widow whose birthright it is. And he will stop at nothing to have both. Reine Cassard Pingre feels trapped: the only way to keep her beloved home—and her inheritance—is to accept Christien's bold proposal of marriage. Though she instantly mistrusts his purpose, and despite rumors that she had a hand in her husband's mysterious death, Reine cannot dissuade him from wedding…and bedding…her. Their union is electrifying, but the honeymoon may be cut short by the lurid secrets at the heart of River's Edge.

In this thinker's guide to rock and roll, Robert Pattison contends that rock music mirrors the tradition of 19th-century Romanticism. The music is vulgar, he notes, and vulgarity is something that high culture has long despised but rarely bothered to define. This book is the first effort since John Ruskin and Aldous Huxley to describe in depth what vulgarity is, and how, with the help of ideas inherent in Romanticism, it has slipped the constraints imposed on it by refined culture and established its own loud arts.