Everyone remembers their first NOW! Each edition of the NOW That's What I Call Musicseries captures the essence of the pop charts at that precise moment in music history, striking a chord with music fans since 1983. Charting the story of NOWthrough album covers, detailed track listings and interesting trivia about each album all the way up to NOW 91, The NOW That's What I Call Music Bookis the perfect nostalgic gift for music lovers!

Based on the critically acclaimed podcast that has broken down hundreds of Top 40 songs, Switched On Pop dives in into eighteen hit songs drawn from pop of the last twenty years--ranging from Britney to Beyoncé, Kelly Clarkson to Kendrick Lamar--uncovering the musical explanations for why and how certain tracks climb to the top of the charts. In the process, authors Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan reveal the timeless techniques that animate music across time and space.

Whether sung around a campfire, in a classroom, or on a family road trip, call and response songs, in which a leader sings a phrase and a group sings back a reply, are a wonderful interactive experience for kids! Because they are easy to learn and fun to sing, call and response songs are a wonderful way to engage children, while at the same time plant the seeds of musical sensitivity and imagination. This special book, for the first time, collects the most cherished of these songs (some in danger of being lost or forgotten), enabling your family to carry on the tradition of laughter and learning that call and response songs have inspired for generations!

The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. “Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again “Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

Emma - I know it sounds crazy. You (and Mum!) will be wondering where I've been disappearing to, and when I'll be back. That's why I'm leaving you all this evidence - in case something happens and I DON'T come back. Look at everything in my book. Call the phone numbers. Check out the websites. But, you can't tell ANYBODY about it, unless you want to end up in over your head, like me. But don't worry, I'll be OK (I think). Hey, maybe this is the beginning of a new life for me. For sure it's the end of the old one. Call me. Love, Cathy This book reaches beyond the written word to interact with teenage girls in ways they are quite familiar with in other areas of their lives. From instant-messaging to text-messaging, from surfing the web to having their own sites, the age-old story of 'boy dumps girl and girl wins boy back' is lifted from the page to our three-dimensional, 21st-century world.

Contemporary novel set in a West of Ireland village, contrasting the local residents with the visitors who come to f̀ind themselves' in broken-down cottages; to paint, write and pot; to meditate, smoke hash and hang out in pubs.