An insider's tour of rock through 50 memorable concerts

Sometimes a rock concert is more than just an event. Every so often a band's performance becomes a musical milestone, a cultural watershed, a political statement, and a personal apotheosis. On any given night a rock concert can tell the truth about who we are, where we are, and what's going on in music and life right now. In The Decibel Diaries, Carter Alan, longtime DJ and music director at WZLX in Boston, chronicles a lifetime in rock with a tour through fifty concerts that defined such moments - from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young playing in the rain when Richard Nixon resigned to Talking Heads and the first stirrings of punk in the basement bars of New York and Boston to the bluegrass angel Alison Krauss and the adaptable veteran Robert Plant forging a plangent, plaintive postmodern synergy. For each event Alan shows us what it was like to be there and telescopes out to reveal how this show fit into the arc of the artist's career, the artist's place in music, and the music's place in the wider world. Taken together, The Decibel Diaries is a visceral and visionary portrait of nearly fifty years of rock 'n' roll.

"...an engaging book: part diary, part manifesto." The Guardian A round-the-world bicycle tour with one of the most original artists of our day. Urban bicycling has become more popular than ever as recession-strapped, climate-conscious city dwellers reinvent basic transportation. In this wide-ranging memoir, artist/musician and co-founder of Talking Heads David Byrne--who has relied on a bike to get around New York City since the early 1980s--relates his adventures as he pedals through and engages with some of the world's major cities. From Buenos Aires to Berlin, he meets a range of people both famous and ordinary, shares his thoughts on art, fashion, music, globalization, and the ways that many places are becoming more bike-friendly. Bicycle Diaries is an adventure on two wheels conveyed with humor, curiosity, and humanity.

PAPERBACK and DOWNLOAD The Peking (Beijing) diaries (1900-06) of the great Victorian-Edwardian diplomat Sir Ernest Satow, published for the first time ever on lulu.com, by permission of the National Archives (UK) on behalf of the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office, with an introduction by China expert J.E. Hoare. Satow was Britain's top diplomat in China when he wrote this journal, as he called it. He replaced Sir Claude MacDonald after the Siege of the Peking Legations which occurred during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and he observed the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) from Peking. Volume One of two volumes (total 812 pages). 420 pages in this volume with many footnotes, and a 73-page index of names in Volume Two.Also now sold in the National Archives (UK) bookshop and on all amazon websites.

This book explores how mindfulness has been infused into education to produce favorable outcomes, such as stress reduction, heightened focus, resilience, calmness, alertness, mood regulation, self-awareness, professional commitment, and increased compassion and kindness to self and others. The chapters are situated in diverse contexts, including schools and colleges, warfare, violent extremism, global warming, child sex abuse, and species extinction. A feature of the book is the use of what is learned from ongoing research to design interventions to increase the incidence of mindful practices, to enhance learning and forms of conduct to transform social life and sustain harmonious lifestyles. Inclusion of mindfulness-based interventions in teacher education programs include breathing meditation and tools such as heuristics and mindful writing. Breathing meditation and its relationship to mindfulness is addressed, including abdominal breathing as a component of meditation, leading to mindful conduct and physiological changes, including heart rate and blood oxygenation levels. The extent to which breathing practice includes nasal and oral inhalation and exhalation is also considered in relation to increasing levels of nitric oxide in the airways, thereby enhancing social communication and wellness. This book was originally published as a special issue of Learning: Research and Practice.