Bestselling author, hypnotherapist, and dream expert Kelly Sullivan Walden shares her four-step OGLE process in a humorous self-help memoir. Kelly teaches us how to shift our perspectives on tragedy and helps us look for the magic that can shine within some of our darkness moments. Recoveries from heartbreaks and misfortune can be debilitating. In A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste, Kelly Sullivan Walden (aka the Dream Doctor) shares her own history of healing with therapy, shamans, gurus, 12-step programs, and her twenty-five years of working with clients as a dream therapist and encourages us to alchemize these challenges into a philosophy of strength, forgiveness, and personal transformation. From a hot-air balloon crash in a wildlife refuge to a near-death experience on her fortieth birthday, Walden divulges both her own larger-than-life misadventures and debilitating losses alongside eye-opening stories from her clients and friends. Complete with healthy helpings of wisdom and humor, she flips the script with her four-step OGLE method and transforms the tragic into magic, a method designed to cut years off the recovery process and help turn suffering into optimism. With this book in hand, you’ll find your way back to your inner heaven, even when all hell is breaking loose. Guided by Kelly’s wisdom and wit, you, too, can transform your life’s unexpected tragedies and mishaps into magical journeys of self-exploration, love, and badassery.

African Americans' historical roots are encapsulated in the lyrics, melodies, and rhythms of their music. In the 18th and 19th centuries, African slaves, longing for emancipation, expressed their hopes and dreams through spirituals. Inspired by African civilization and culture, as well as religion, art, literature, and social issues, this influential, joyous, tragic, uplifting, challenging, and enduring music evolved into many diverse genres, including jazz, blues, rock and roll, soul, swing, and hip hop. Providing a lyrical history of our nation, this groundbreaking encyclopedia, the first of its kind, showcases all facets of African American music including folk, religious, concert and popular styles. Over 500 in-depth entries by more than 100 scholars on a vast range of topics such as genres, styles, individuals, groups, and collectives as well as historical topics such as music of the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and numerous others. Offering balanced representation of key individuals, groups, and ensembles associated with diverse religious beliefs, political affiliations, and other perspectives not usually approached, this indispensable reference illuminates the profound role that African American music has played in American cultural history. Editors Price, Kernodle, and Maxile provide balanced representation of various individuals, groups and ensembles associated with diverse religious beliefs, political affiliations, and perspectives. Also highlighted are the major record labels, institutions of higher learning, and various cultural venues that have had a tremendous impact on the development and preservation of African American music. Among the featured: Motown Records, Black Swan Records, Fisk University, Gospel Music Workshop of America, The Cotton Club, Center for Black Music Research, and more. With a broad scope, substantial entries, current coverage, and special attention to historical, political, and social contexts, this encyclopedia is designed specifically for high school and undergraduate students. Academic and public libraries will treasure this resource as an incomparable guide to our nation's African American heritage.

This book argues that Hip Hop’s early history in the South Bronx charts a course remarkably similar to the conceptual history of artistic creation presented in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. It contends that the resonances between Hegel’s account of the trajectory of art in general, and the historical shifts in the particular culture of Hip Hop, are both numerous and substantial enough to make us re-think not only the nature and import of Hegel’s philosophy of art, but the origin, essence and lesson of Hip Hop. As a result, the book articulates and defends a unique reading of Hegel’s Aesthetics, as well as providing a philosophical explanation of the Hip Hop community’s transition from total social abandonment to some limited form of social inclusion, via the specific mediation of an artistic culture grounded in novel forms of sensible expression. Thus, the fundamental thesis of this book is that Hegel and Hip Hop are mutually illuminating, and when considered in tandem each helps to clarify and reinforce the validity and power of the other.

With Poetic Justice, Chapman delivers another masterful collection of his own, unique poetry so righteously justified. With his keen observational eye and personal, poetic style Dan Chapman offers his own unique reflections on a variety of common subjects and experiences. Forever a romantic and always a poet at heart, Chapman reaches out to his readers with his next volume of poetic assortments dealing with a variety of value-clarification and topical concerns. Of course, always at a forefront with Chapmans insight into human conditions is his typical, humorous touch. We all love to laugh, he says. Additionally, Poetic Justice is an opportunity for Chapman to highlight and dignify his own, unique and vigilant style of writing. A reader may select nearly any poem within, consider its highly energized reasoning, notice the creative, rhythmic rhyming proffered, and then recognize and appreciate Chapmans unique and masterful metering. It is just my own style, Chapman defends. I simply enjoy working with words to write about something special, utilize unique accents of rhyming language and then apply a distinctive, yet rigid, metering format. Poetry reflects true thought, Chapman muses. It is honest, forthright, and most importantly, he continues, in a few, brief stanzas, a poem may mesmerize readers, challenge their thoughts and values and force them to reconsider their own points-of-view. What more could a writer want, our author believes. To Dan Chapman, that is the beauty of poetry, and its honesty represents Poetic Justice!

Novelist and critic Alexander Theroux analyzes the pop song. National Book Award nominee, critic and one of America’s least compromising satirists, Alexander Theroux takes a comprehensive look at the colorful language of pop lyrics and the realm of rock music in general in The Grammar of Rock: silly song titles; maddening instrumentals; shrieking divas; clunker lines; the worst (and best) songs ever written; geniuses of the art; movie stars who should never have raised their voice in song but who were too shameless to refuse a mic; and the excesses of awful Christmas recordings. Praising (and critiquing) the gems of lyricists both highbrow and low, Theroux does due reverence to classic word-masters like Ira Gershwin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Cole Porter, and Sammy Cahn, lyricists as diverse as Hank Williams, Buck Ram, the Moody Blues, and Randy Newman, Dylan and the Beatles, of course, and more outré ones like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Patti Smith, the Fall (even Ghostface Killa), but he considers stupid rhymes, as well ― nonsense lyrics, chop logic, the uses and abuses of irony, country music macho, verbal howlers, how voices sound alike and why, and much more. In a way that no one else has ever done, with his usual encyclopedic insights into the state of the modern lyric, Theroux focuses on the state of language ― the power of words and the nature of syntax ― in The Grammar of Rock. He analyzes its assaults on listeners’ impulses by investigating singers’ styles, pondering illogical lunacies in lyrics, and deconstructing the nature of diction and presentation in the language. This is that rare book of discernment and probing wit (and not exclusively one that is a critical defense of quality) that positively evaluates the very nature of a pop song, and why one over another has an effect on the listener.