"The Reason For The Rhymes" will rekindle your innate creativity to significantly enhance your ability to innovate. By mixing practical how-tos with song-based examples that everyone knows, GRAMMY-recognized #1 hit songwriter, Cliff Goldmacher, will teach you how to explore, shape and sell your ideas by teaching you how to write songs. Using the book's fun and accessible exercises, you will develop the essential skills of lateral thinking, creativity, communication, empathy, collaboration, risk-taking and the diffusion of ideas which will, quite simply, make you a better innovator.

Rhymes & Reasons is a smart, up-to-date, all-in-one guide to phonological awareness-what it is, what it isn't, and the best practices for teaching it.

A history of the origins and meanings of nursery rhymes reveals the popular sport behind "Jack Be Nimble" and Humpty Dumpty's identity as a cannon mounted on the walls of a Colchester church.

Is there too much violence in hip-hop music? What’s the difference between Kimberly Jones and the artist Lil' Kim? Is hip-hop culture a "black" thing? Is it okay for N.W.A. to call themselves niggaz and for Dave Chappelle to call everybody bitches? These witty, provocative essays ponder these and other thorny questions, linking the searing cultural issues implicit — and often explicit — in hip-hop to the weighty matters examined by the great philosophers of the past. The book shows that rap classics by Lauryn Hill, OutKast, and the Notorious B.I.G. can help uncover the meanings of love articulated in Plato's Symposium; that Rakim, 2Pac, and Nas can shed light on the conception of God's essence expressed in St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica; and explores the connection between Run-D.M.C., Snoop Dogg, and Hegel. Hip-Hop and Philosophy proves that rhyme and reason, far from being incompatible, can be mixed and mastered to contemplate life's most profound mysteries.

From the international bestselling author of Red Herrings and White Elephants—a curious guide to the hidden histories of classic nursery rhymes. Who was Mary Quite Contrary, or Georgie Porgie? How could Hey Diddle Diddle offer an essential astronomy lesson? Do Jack and Jill actually represent the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette? And if Ring Around the Rosie isn’t about the plague, then what is it really about? This book is a quirky, curious, and sometimes sordid look at the truth behind popular nursery rhymes that uncovers the strange tales that inspired them—from Viking raids to political insurrection to smuggling slaves to freedom. Read Albert Jack's posts on the Penguin Blog.

Seventy-three classic nursery rhymes and the "reasons" behind them.