Christopher Alan Young (born June 12, 1985) is an American country music singer and songwriter. In 2006, he was declared the winner of the television program Nashville Star, a singing competition which aired on the USA Network.

Like music, art is a universal language. Although looking at works of art is a pleasurable enough experience, to appreciate them fully requires certain skills and knowledge." --Carol Strickland, from the introduction to The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern * This heavily illustrated crash course in art history is revised and updated. This second edition of Carol Strickland's The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern offers an illustrated tutorial of prehistoric to post-modern art from cave paintings to video art installations to digital and Internet media. * Featuring succinct page-length essays, instructive sidebars, and more than 300 photographs, The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern takes art history out of the realm of dreary textbooks, demystifies jargon and theory, and makes art accessible-even at a cursory reading. * From Stonehenge to the Guggenheim and from Holbein to Warhol, more than 25,000 years of art is distilled into five sections covering a little more than 200 pages.

*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

Profiles the life and career of the professional ballerina, covering from when she began dance classes at age thirteen in an after-school community center through becoming the only African American soloist dancing with the American Ballet Theatre.

Outsider musicians can be the product of damaged DNA, alien abduction, drug fry, demonic possession, or simply sheer obliviousness. This book profiles dozens of outsider musicians, both prominent and obscure—figures such as The Shaggs, Syd Barrett, Tiny Tim, Jandek, Captain Beefheart, Daniel Johnston, Harry Partch, and The Legendary Stardust Cowboy—and presents their strange life stories along with photographs, interviews, cartoons, and discographies. About the only things these self-taught artists have in common are an utter lack of conventional tunefulness and an overabundance of earnestness and passion. But, believe it or not, they're worth listening to, often outmatching all contenders for inventiveness and originality. A CD featuring songs by artists profiled in the book is also available.

A haunting tribute to the heroic pioneers who shaped the American Midwest This powerful novel by Willa Cather is considered to be one of her finest works and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. It tells the stories of several immigrant families who start new lives in America in rural Nebraska. This powerful tribute to the quiet heroism of those whose struggles and triumphs shaped the American Midwest highlights the role of women pioneers, in particular. Written in the style of a memoir penned by Antonia’s tutor and friend, the book depicts one of the most memorable heroines in American literature, the spirited eldest daughter of a Czech immigrant family, whose calm, quite strength and robust spirit helped her survive the hardships and loneliness of life on the Nebraska prairie. The two form an enduring bond and through his chronicle, we watch Antonia shape the land while dealing with poverty, treachery, and tragedy. “No romantic novel ever written in America...is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.” -H. L. Mencken Willa Cather (1873–1947) was an American writer best known for her novels of the Plains and for One of Ours, a novel set in World War I, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943 and received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944, an award given once a decade for an author's total accomplishments. By the time of her death she had written twelve novels, five books of short stories, and a collection of poetry.

Kane Allen Brown is an American country music singer and songwriter. He first came to the attention of the public through social media. He released his first EP, titled Closer, in June 2015. A new single, "Used to Love You Sober," was released in October 2015. After Brown signed with RCA Nashville in early 2016, the actual song was included on his EP Chapter 1, which was released in March 2016. He released his first full-length album, the self-titled Kane Brown, on December 2, 2016. The single "What Ifs" was released from this album and, in October 2017, Brown became the first artist to have simultaneous number ones on all five main country charts. Brown released his second album, Experiment, in November 2018.