Pete Crigler has been obsessed with music from the earliest possible age; reading about it, writing about it, listening to it, almost everything except playing it. Some people would say that music is the defining everything for him but that's what he chooses to do, so lay off But in all honesty, it's the heart and compassion that he shows not just for the music but the musicians who created it is where he really shows his stuff. Hearing so many stories about what these musicians have been through has been more than enough to prepare him for the next surprising story that comes around. By asking intelligent questions of the musicians and then getting intelligent responses back, he was able to mold their stories into something that has rarely been read before for a number of artists. By getting their stories out there, he has created a rock and roll book unlike any seen in quite a while. The following is a message to the reader: Dear sir or ma'am, what you are holding in your hands is a very different book than one you've probably read before. The reason it's so different is because a lot of the bands profiled inside are very obscure and their material is often out of print so if you read about a musician you thought you'd forgotten about or are interested in hearing more about, please feel free to go on Amazon or eMusic or Rhapsody and start searching around to see what you can find. Most times, I assure you will be pleasantly rewarded. This book has been a complete labor of love for its author; starting in July of 2007 and working until October of 2009, Pete Crigler has been consistently working putting together what he hopes is the definitive tale of rock music in Virginia. The book tells the history of rock music in Virginia from the 1950s and the rockabilly of Gene Vincent to the punk energy of Cloak/Dagger and Conditions in the 21st century and everything in between. The book's approach is done with interviews with over sixty musicians from the fifties to the current time, complete with over 80 b&w and color photos submitted by many of the same musicians. This story needs to be told because no one has ever tried anything like it before. Being so informative of music, it has been this author's dream to tell this story because of an easy camaraderie with the musicians.

Majorlabelland and Assorted Oddities is comprised of an essay about hard rock bands in the eighties and nineties and their struggles with major record labels which resulted in several albums that have never been released. Interviews have been conducted with almost forty musicians from some two dozen bands and they all graciously agreed to chat about their career and the problems they encountered that ended some of their careers dead in its tracks. The book is also comprised of short stories that have been complied since the author was in college and they fi t the feel of the book: very antiestablishment and hovering on the fringes of society and conformity. Closing out the book are interviews done with several other musicians, most of which have never been published before. They are all intriguing because the musicians talk about facets of their career that they havent spoken about in years if at all. This book captures a time in the music industry when there were no rules.

Virginia's most prominent statesman had a profound influence on the American Founding. Of the first five presidents elected, four of them were Virginians. Old Dominion thus held an influential position in the Union. The Founders held a reluctant tolerance of slavery, yet every leading Founder believed that slavery was wrong. They based this argument on the natural rights all men, all humans, possessed. With a natural rights understanding of the American Founding, it is an inescapable conclusion that slavery is a violation of those rights. However, the Founders expressed their distaste of the peculiar institution in different ways. All wrote privately about their aversion of the institution, and some took unmistakable public positions. Several also found ways to demonstrate implicitly their opinion about slavery. Because of its influential position, the political direction of Old Dominion was a bellwether for the Union. During the 1829-1832, in two instances, Virginians debated the future of slavery in their state. First, in the Constitutional Convention in 1829-30 they debated the existence of natural rights and whether those rights were a guide for statesmanship. During this convention there was an attack on natural rights that set the stage for the next great deliberation over slavery. Second, they explicitly discussed ending slavery in the House of Delegates after the Nat Turner insurrection in 1831-32. The Delegates of the day rejected the emancipation of the slaves as a moral and political necessity. Virginians had the opportunity to place slavery on the road to gradual extinction. They had an opportunity to reaffirm the principles of liberty, but ultimately that argument lost. The forces of self-interest defeated those who articulated the principles of the Declaration of Independence. This was solidified when Thomas Roderick Dew wrote his review of the debates in the House of Delegates. As a result of his arguments, the pro-slavery argument proceeded apace in Virginia with Dew being instrument

20 million men and women in this country play softball. On the surface, The Softball Game is about men and their need for battles. Aggression is as coded in our DNA as is our need to reproduce. It is a fun game with laughs recalled from years playing softball. The old storyteller is reluctant to do battle. He tells the confrontation in the first person singular, episode by episode. The game is a tribal struggle played by redneck, bad guys and middle class, semi-affluent, anti-heroes. Coming to the rescue is Beth - - a woman! Beth reduces the male struggle to a farce. The driving timbre is the storytellers experiences with three females whose lives are indirectly, obliquely, and directly affected by his wars at softball. The Softball Game is about these women. Phaedra literally hands the young warrior his first sexual experience. Entering the man world still a child, he meets Bridgette his playtoy. She is a transition to adulthood and the paragon of summer love. Playing at sex with adult bodies and a childs maturity, they both lose. Then comes Beth. If you read one chapter, it should be 11. There has never been a hero like her.

The days of choosing between a handful of imports and a convenience store six-pack are long gone. The beer landscape in America has changed dramatically in the twenty-first century, as the nation has experienced an explosion in craft beer brewing and consumption. Nowhere is this truer than in Virginia, where more than two hundred independent breweries create beers of an unprecedented variety and serve an increasingly knowledgeable, and thirsty, population of beer enthusiasts. As Lee Graves shows in his definitive new guide to Virginia beer, the Old Dominion’s central role in the current beer boom is no accident. Beer was on board when English settlers landed at Jamestown in 1607, and the taste for beer and expertise in brewing have only grown in the generations since. Graves offers an invaluable survey of key breweries throughout the Virginia, profiling the people and the businesses in each region that have made the state a rising star in the industry. The book is extensively illustrated and suggests numerous brewery tours that will point you in the right direction for your statewide beer crawl. From small farm breweries in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains to cavernous facilities in urban rings around the state, Virginians have created a golden age for flavorful beer. This book shows you how to best appreciate it.