Swing has never gone out of style. It was the music the Greatest Generation danced to - and went to war to. No musician evokes those times more strikingly than Tommy Dorsey (1905-1956), whose trombone style and smash hits created legions of fans and influenced popular music for decades. Dorsey led a rich and complex life. After a harsh childhood in the coal mining towns of eastern Pennsylvania, the young trombonist rose to fame and fortune during...

"A philosophical musing on sports and play, this wholly inspiring and utterly charming reissue of Bart Giamatti's long-out-of-print final book, Take Time for Paradise, puts baseball in the context of American life and leisure. Giamatti begins with the conviction that our use of free time tells us something about who we are. He explores the concepts of leisure, American-style. And in baseball, the quintessential American game, he finds its ultimate...

During an interview with a New York writer, seventy-nine-year-old artist Hope Chafetz describes her eventful life and her integral place in the saga of postwar American art.

Draws on hundreds of new interviews and previously unpublished letters to present a comprehensive account of the life of the Hall of Fame ballplayer whose career was cut short by the disease now named for him, in a portrait that shares background details about his rivalry with Babe Ruth, the onset of his illness, and the final years of his life.

This is the previously untold story of one of the most ferocious and prolonged air/naval battles ever: the battle at the radar picket stations during the American assault on Okinawa in the spring of 1945. It weaves together the experiences of the ships and their crews, in a way that no one has attempted before. The US fleet and its accompanying airpower that took station off Okinawa was of gigantic proportions, such that the Japanese could only rely...

"In 1844, Lydia Sigourney asserted, "Man's warfare on the trees is terrible." Like Sigourney many American women of her day engaged with such issues as sustainability, resource wars, globalization, voluntary simplicity, Christian ecology, and environmental justice. Illuminating the foundations for contemporary women's environmental writing, Fallen Forests shows how their nineteenth-century predecessors marshaled powerful affective, ethical, and spiritual...

Traces the impact on American history of yellow fever from the mid-seventeenth century onward, examining in particular the near-destruction of Memphis from the disease and the efforts of four men to combat the deadly scourge.

On November 13, 2002, the author decided to write a play every day for a year. She began that same day. The result, completed exactly one year later, is this collection of 365 plays.

"Sixty years ago I found myself distracted," Eugene Peterson writes. "A chasm had developed between the way I was preaching from the pulpit and my deepest convictions on what it meant to be a pastor." And so began Peterson's journey to live and teach a life of congruence--congruence between preaching and living, between what we do and the way we do it, between what is written in Scripture and how we live out that truth. Nothing captures the biblical...

Compares and contrasts two companies, Ford and Nissan, from the founders and owners right down to the men on the assembly line.