(Amadeus). In 65 perceptive pieces, including some of the work that earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1997, Page offers what he calls "a collection of illumined moments," now gathered in a single volume for the wider audience who will treasure their insights.

For more than forty years Angola has faced conflict. From 1961-1975, there was the struggle for independence from Portuguese rule. This was followed by a period of civil war which, in one form or another, extended until 2001, when the UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in an ambush. This led to a cease-fire, armistice and peace. As a result of these 40 years of war the country has suffered a terrible legacy of unexploded mines and other weapons. Photographer Sean Sutton, who works alongside MAG (Mines Advisory Group) has recorded the impact that this has had on the country and its people, as well the work of those clearing the mines. MAG has been working in Angola for more than 10 years, clearing tens of thousands of landmines and items of unexploded ordnance. The book is introduced by Heather Mills who is a patron of MAG and has campaigned vigorously on the issue of landmines. There is also a text by the renowned photojournalist Tim Page whose photographs during the Vietnam War were published worldwide. Page is the subject of many documentaries, two films and the author of nine books. Lou McGrath, Director of MAG, contributes a further text contextualising the work of landmine clearance.

(Amadeus). This classic work is perhaps Bernstein's finest collection of conversations on the meaning and wonder of music. This book is a must for all music fans who wish to experience music more fully and deeply through one of the most inspired, and inspiring, music intellects of our time. Employing the creative device of "Imaginary Conversations" in the first section of his book, Bernstein illuminates the importance of the symphony in America, the greatness of Beethoven, and the art of composing. The book also includes a photo section and a third section with the transcripts from his televised Omnibus music series, including "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony," "The World of Jazz," "Introduction to Modern Music," and "What Makes Opera Grand."

When Glenn Gould died in 1982 at the age of 50, he left behind a legacy of 26 years not only as a remarkable pianist, but as an outstanding music critic. His writing, which appeared primarily in music journals and on record sleeves, was often as provocative as his performances. This book contains essays on composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Schoenberg and Strauss, which challenge virtually every tenet of accepted taste and opinion. Gould inveighs against concert-giving and competitions, and enthuses about recording and its associated technology. He writes on Leopold Stokowski and Barbra Streisand, on Petula Clark and Ernst Krenek, on P.D.Q. Bach in fact and fancy, and even in interview with himself.

An unprecedented collection of polemical and autobiographical writings by America s greatest composer-critic.Following on the critically acclaimed 2014 edition of Virgil Thomson's collected newspaper music criticism, The Library of America andPulitzer Prize winning music critic Tim Page now present Thomson s other literary and critical works, a body of writing that constitutes America s musical declaration of independence from the European past. This volume opens with The State of Music (1939), the book that made Thomson s name as a critic and won him his 14-year stint at the New York Herald Tribune. This no-holds-barred polemic, here presented in its revised edition of 1962, discusses the commissions, jobs, and other opportunities available to the American composer, a worker in a world of performance and broadcast institutions that, today as much as in Thomson s time, are dominated by tin-eared, non-musical patrons of the arts who are shocked by the new and suspicious of native talent. Thomson s autobiography, Virgil Thomson (1966), is more than just the story of the struggle of one such American composer, it is an intellectual, aesthetic, and personal chronicle of the twentieth century, from World War I era Kansas City to Harvard in the age of straw boaters, from Paris in the Twenties and Thirties to Manhattan in the Forties and after. A classic American memoir, it is marked by a buoyant wit, a true gift for verbal portrait-making, and a cast of characters including Aaron Copland, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Paul Bowles, John Houseman, and Orson Welles. American Music Since 1910 (1971) is a series of incisive essays on the lives and works of Ives, Ruggles, Varese, Copland, Cage, and others who helped define a national musical idiom. Music with Words (1989), Thomson s final book, is a distillation of a subject he knew better than perhaps any other American composer: how to set English especially American English to music, in opera and art song. The volume is rounded out by a judicious selection of Thomson s magazine journalism from 1957 to 1984 thirty-seven pieces, most of them previously uncollected, including many long-form review-essays written for The New York Review of Books."

An affecting memoir of life as a boy who didn't know he had Asperger's syndrome until he became a man.
In 1997, Tim Page won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his work as the chief classical music critic of "The Washington Post," work that the Pulitzer board called "lucid and illuminating." Three years later, at the age of 45, he was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome-an autistic disorder characterized by often superior intellectual abilities but also by obsessive behavior, ineffective communication, and social awkwardness.
In a personal chronicle that is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Page revisits his early days through the prism of newfound clarity. Here is the tale of a boy who could blithely recite the names and dates of all the United States' presidents and their wives in order (backward upon request), yet lacked the coordination to participate in the simplest childhood games. It is the story of a child who memorized vast portions of the "World Book Encyclopedia" simply by skimming through its volumes, but was unable to pass elementary school math and science. And it is the triumphant account of a disadvantaged boy who grew into a high-functioning, highly successful adult--perhaps not "despite" his Asperger's but "because" of it, as Page believes. For in the end, it was his all-consuming love of music that emerged as something around which to construct a life and a prodigious career.
In graceful prose, Page recounts the eccentric behavior that withstood glucose-tolerance tests, anti-seizure medications, and sessions with the school psychiatrist, but which above all, eluded his own understanding. A poignant portrait of a lifelong search for answers, "Parallel Play" provides a unique perspective on Asperger's and the well of creativity that can spring forth as a result of the condition.