"Richard Pryor was chain lightning to everything around him. He shocked the world through with human electricity. He blew all our comfortable balance to hell. And Furious Cool captures it brilliantly." --Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World SpinRichard Pryor was arguably the single most influential performer of the second half of the twentieth century, and certainly he was the most successful black actor/comedian ever. Controversial and somewhat enigmatic during his life, Pryor's performances opened up a whole new world of possibilities, merging fantasy with angry reality in a way that wasn't just new--it was theretofore unthinkable. Now, in this groundbreaking and revelatory work, Joe and David Henry bring him alive again both as a man and as an artist, providing an in-depth appreciation of his talent and his lasting influence, as well as an insightful examination of the world he lived in and the myriad influences that shaped both his persona and his art. "Brothers David and Joe Henry have brought Richard Pryor back to pulsating life, affirming both his humanity and his immortality as a comic--and tragic--genius." --The Huffington Post "A sleek, highly literate biography that places the comic in the pop-cultural context of his times." --Bloomberg News "It would be enough if Furious Cool was a profile of Pryor's uncanny talents, psychic turmoil, and ungovernable behavior, but it's also a fascinating history of black comedy . . . Furious Cool captures Pryor's frenetic routines and stage presence on the page . . . The inextricable legacy of Richard Pryor--his boldness, inventiveness, candor, and empathy--lives on." --Los Angeles Magazine "An addictively readable study of the path of this outsized talent . . . Someday, when fewer people know Richard Pryor's name, Furious Cool will be the best defense against the worst sort of forgetting--the kind that involves who we are now, who we loved once, and why." --Esquire

Hugh Laurie's debut album Let Them Talk is a glorious celebration of New Orleans blues.

It unites Laurie’s musical talent with a very personal selection of standards and lost blues classics performed with his band of renowned musicians and some very special guest stars.

A Confederate Girl's Diary: INTRODUCTION: IT is perhaps due to a chance conversation, held some 17 years ago in New York, that this Diary of the Civil War was saved from destruction. A Philadelphian had been talking with my mother of North and South, and had alluded to the engagement between the Essex and the Arkansas, on the Mississippi, as a brilliant victory for the Federal navy. My mother protested, at once; said that she and her sister Miriam, and several friends, had been witnesses, from the levee, to the fact that the Confederates had fired and abandoned their own ship when the machinery broke down, after two shots had been exchanged: the Federals, cautiously turning the point, had then captured but a smoking hulk. The Philadelphian gravely corrected her; history, it appeared, had consecrated, on the strength of an official report, the version more agreeable to Northern pride. "But I wrote a description of the whole, just a few hours after it occurred " my mother insisted. "Early in the war I began to keep a diary, and continued until the very end; I had to find some vent for my feelings, and I would not make an exhibition of myself by talking, as so many women did. I have written while resting to recover breath in the midst of a stampede; I have even written with shells bursting over the house in which I sat, ready to flee but waiting for my mother and sisters to finish their preparations." "If that record still existed, it would be invaluable," said the Philadelphian. "We Northerners are sincerely anxious to know what Southern women did and thought at that time, but the difficulty is to find authentic contemporaneous evidence. All that I, for one, have seen, has been marred by improvement in the light of subsequent events." "You may read my evidence as it was written from March 1862 until April 1865," my mother declared impulsively.

AN INTRODUCTION TO MAKING WHISKEY, GIN, BRANDY, SPIRITS, &c. &c. OF BETTER QUALITY, AND IN LARGER QUANTITIES, THAN PRODUCED BY THE PRESENT MODE OF DISTILLING, FROM THE PRODUCE OF THE UNITED STATES: SUCH AS RYE, CORN, BUCK-WHEAT, APPLES, PEACHES, POTATOES, PUMPIONS AND TURNIPS. WITH DIRECTIONS HOW TO CONDUCT AND IMPROVE THE PRACTICAL PART OF DISTILLING IN ALL ITS BRANCHES. TOGETHER WITH DIRECTIONS FOR PURIFYING, CLEARING AND COLOURING WHISKEY, MAKING SPIRITS SIMILAR TO FRENCH BRANDY, &c. FROM THE SPIRITS OF RYE, CORN, APPLES, POTATOES, &c. &c. AND SUNDRY EXTRACTS OF APPROVED RECEIPTSFOR MAKING CIDER, DOMESTIC WINES, AND BEER

Everyday Americans (1920), by Henry Seidel Canby The American mind.--Conservative America.--Radical America.--American idealism.--Religion in America.--Literature in America.--The bourgeois American This IS emphatically not a war book; and yet the chapters that follow, in one sense, are the fruits of the war, inasmuch as they represent reflections upon his own people by one returning to a familiar environment after active contact with English, Scottish, Irish, and French in the turbulent, intimate days of 1918. They are complementary, in a way, to a volume of essays which sprang from that experience and was published in 1919 under the title "Education by Violence/' But though representing in its inception the fresher view of familiar America of one returning from abroad, this book in its completed form is tendered as a modest attempt to depict an American type that was sharpened perhaps, but certainly not created by the war. The ''old Americans'' came to racial consciousness many years ago, although their sense of nationality has been immeasurably strengthened by the events of the last few years. It is no picture of all America, no survey of our complete social being that I attempt in the following pages; but rather a highly personal study of the typical, the everyday American mind, as it is manifested in the American of the old stock. It is a study of what that typical American product, the college and high school graduate, has become in the generation which must carry on after the war.

SHOOT-OUT IN CLEVELAND BLACK MILITANTS AND THE POLICE: by Louis H. Masotti and Jerome R. Corsi

Physics For Entertainment by Yakov Perelman. Published in 1913, a best-seller in the 1930s and long out of print, Physics for Entertainment was translated from Russian into many languages and influenced science students around the world. Among them was Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman, the Russian mathematician (unrelated to the author), who solved the Poincar conjecture, and who was awarded and rejected the Fields Medal. Grigori's father, an electrical engineer, gave him Physics for Entertainment to encourage his son's interest in mathematics. In the foreword, the book's author describes the contents as "conundrums, brain-teasers, entertaining anecdotes, and unexpected comparisons," adding, "I have quoted extensively from Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain and other writers, because, besides providing entertainment, the fantastic experiments these writers describe may well serve as instructive illustrations at physics classes." The book's topics included how to jump from a moving car, and why, "according to the law of buoyancy, we would never drown in the Dead Sea." Ideas from this book are still used by science teachers today. Yakov Isidorovich Perelman died in the siege of Leningrad in 1942.

Wanted-Leaders A Study of Negro Development

The narrative's final section, "Scenes from Slavery," consists of a series of anecdotes about the cruelty and hardships of slavery. Included are descriptions of the indignities endured by slaves on the auction block and the pain of forced separation from family that often accompanied a slave's sale to a new master. The most shocking anecdote involves a woman who, after Emancipation, marries a younger man, only to later learn that he is her son who was sold away as a child during slavery. These stories were initially told to Suggs by her mother, and she reprints them as a testament to the horrors that the slave system permitted.

The Education of The Negro Prior to 1861: A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War

Indian Names Facts And Games For Camp Fire Girls

At a time when Capitalism is openly reproached as an exploitation of Labor, back into which it should be resolved and integrated at the expense of individual ambition, initiative and comprehensive genius; when vulgar equality and fraternity are rated above aesthetic excellence and distinction, as if man could live by bread alone, this brief treatise is obviously issued as a protest against what is deemed and exalted as the "ideal " of Socialism - but which the author regards rather as an inconsequential dream that does not realize its own meaning-and also as a defense of the Capitalist class from objurgations born of prejudice and ignorant inexperience.

Clevelanders " As We See 'Em" A Gallery Of Pen Sketches In Black And White byThe Newspaper Cartoonists' Association of Cleveland

Californians "As We See 'Em" A Volume of Cartoons and Caricatures

Men Against The State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908 The writing of a history of anarchism in the United States will run into the difficulties created by the necessity of establishing criteria for the purpose of separating anarchism from other expressions of radical social thought which may be allied to but are distinct from it. On the verbal level the most perplexing problem is that of definition of terms, beginning with the basic word itself. In one respect the obstruction may never be bridged. An almost insuperable barrier has been the matter of semantics. The use of the term as an identification for a social order characterized by the absence of the State is quite recent. As used by Pierre Joseph Proudhon in this way, it is hardly more than a century old. However, its association with reprehensibility in this country has generally greatly restricted its use for descriptive purposes. European radicals have been far less inhibited in this way; hence the study of anarchism there is relatively unimpeded by hesitancy on the part of radicals to disclose themselves. Their propaganda has been open and identified, and thus may be readily examined.

The Eve of the Revolution: A Chronicle of The Breach With England

The Little Slave Girl: A True Story by Eileen Douglas