All great guitar players set themselves apart by looking beyond their instrument and their boundaries. This books helps players do just that, offering an in-depth exploration of world music, and how to play the music of other stringed instruments on the guitar. Learn inventive techniques and creative approaches to master the music of: the Puerto Rican cuatro, the Russian balalaika, the Indian sitar and swarmandal, the Chinese pipa, the Japanese shamisen and koto, the African kora, the Hawaiian ukulele, and more exotic instruments. Includes a CD of examples.

John Spector is a seasoned high school teacher with 22 years in the trenches of a ghetto school filled with struggling teenagers, gangs, apathetic students- but also students "who make an indelible impression, kids with souls and hearts as big as the world." We get the whole spectrum from Spector, a brave and decent soul, a soft touch, too nice, too caring perhaps. Herriges spent many years as a high school teacher. He brings substance and legitimacy to Streethearts. The authenticity of his narrative comes across in every line of every page, many of them packed with witty and sparkling dialogue, at times genuinely humorous, occasionally grim or even horrific, but always candid, always down-to-earth, always reliable.

These stories, Greg Herriges says, were born of individual, fleeting glimpses and memories, seemingly unbound by any linear reason. But once they were arranged in this collection, the recurring themes were evident-of desire and loss, of the intense isolation each of us necessarily endures and struggles with, as well as the redemptive-if sometimes elusive-power of love. Some of the stories are new, appearing here for the first time in print; others were published before on either side of the Atlantic. All of them evidence the expansive range of Herriges's imaginative vision, the distinctive richness of his voice, informed by the conjoined power of his musical and literary talents and experience. Greg Herriges's stories will make you remember the breaking and the mending of your heart.