Leonard Bernstein's Norton Lectures on the future course of music drew cheers from his Harvard audiences and television viewers. In the re-creation of his talks, the author considers music ranging from Hindu ragas through Mozart and Ravel to Copland, Shoenberg, and Stravinsky.

It's 340 years in the future. Humanity's darkest secret is reawakening, and the only thing that can stop it is to find the Members of the legendary Council. The problem? They're all teenagers.With no memories of how she got there, Nikki stumbles into the small rural region of North Cordell, with nothing by her name and only a glowing green Stone. She intends to listen to the Stone's instructions to stay safe and out of sight, but a light blinking in the mountain calls to her. Winding up trapped in the woods during a storm with five other teens, they're attacked by people in capes and supernatural abilities. Saved by the mysterious Defending Sergeant, and accused of a ridiculous crime, they have on chance to prove their innocence. With everyone against them, the six reluctant friends must put their differences aside and embrace the truth of their destiny against the very nature of which they know.

In 1939, as the Nazis closed in, Alfred Berger mailed a desperate letter to an American stranger who happened to share his last name. He and his wife, Viennese Jews, had found escape routes for their daughters. But now their money, connections, and emotional energy were nearly exhausted. Alfred begged the American recipient of the letter, “You are surely informed about the situation of all Jews in Central Europe.... By pure chance I got your address.... My daughter and her husband will go... to America.... Help us to follow our children.... It is our last and only hope....” After languishing in a California attic for decades, Alfred’s letter ended up in the hands of Faris Cassell, a journalist who couldn’t rest until she discovered the ending of the story. Traveling across the United States as well as to Austria, the Czech Republic, Belarus, and Israel, she uncovered an extraordinary story of heart-wrenching loss and unforgettable love that endures to this day. Did the Bergers’ desperate letter find a response? Did they—and their daughters—survive? Did they leave living descendants? You will find the answers here. A story that will move any reader, The Unanswered Letter is a poignant reminder that love and hope never die.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it. In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would foster popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Black composers found few opportunities to have their works performed, and white composers mainly rejected Dvorák’s lead. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he looks back to literary figures—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.” The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, and Florence Price, while giving increased prominence to Charles Ives and George Gershwin. Dvorák’s Prophecy arrives in the midst of an important conversation about race in America—a conversation that is taking place in music schools and concert halls as well as capitols and boardrooms. As George Shirley writes in his foreword to the book, “We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. [Joseph Horowitz] explains how we got there [and] proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.”

The Unanswered Question challenges the premise that conditions in the Afterlife reported by near-death experiencers accurately portray what we actually experience after physical death. Anything we might experience in the Afterlife will exist outside of space and time as we understand them. This essentially nonphysical reality will therefore be organized in ways that our usual waking consciousness or rational mind may have trouble understanding. To make sense of it, near-death and out-of-body experiencers must represent this reality in quasi-physical terms. Translation of their nonphysical perceptions into physical images will necessarily-and often unconsciously-distort the information they bring back about the Afterlife. Citing accounts from The Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gnostic, Christian, and other ancient wisdom traditions-as well as the writings of the seventeenth-century Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, contemporary near-death experiences, and his own out-of-body experiences-Leland outlines what we might expect to encounter during our passage from the physical reality in which our lives unfold to the nonphysical reality of the Afterlife. By triangulating between images of the Afterlife gleaned from near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and the ancient wisdom traditions, we may be able to prepare ourselves for what we'll encounter after death-when it's finally time for us to answer that great Unanswered Question for ourselves.

(Amadeus). With style, wit, and expertise, Leonard Bernstein shares his love and appreciation for music in all its varied forms in The Infinite Variety of Music , illuminating the deep pleasure and sometimes subtle beauty it offers. He begins with an "imaginary conversation" with George Washington entitled "The Muzak Muse," in which he argues the values of actively listening to music by learning how to read notes, as opposed to simply hearing music in a concert hall. The book also features the reproduction of five television scripts from Bernstein on the influence of jazz, the timeless appeal of Mozart, musical romanticism, and the complexities of rhythmic innovation. Also included are Bernstein's analyses of symphonies by Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and Brahms, a rare reproduction of a 1957 lecture on the nature of composing, and a report on the musical scene written for the New York Times after his sabbatical leave from directorship of the New York Philharmonic during the 1964-65 season.