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Books : Biographies & Memoirs : People, A-Z : ( W ) : Williams, Hank
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Tom Hanks introduces the rousing story of two inseparable friends and soldiers portrayed in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers.
William "Wild Bill" Guarnere and Edward "Babe" Heffron were among the first paratroopers of the U.S. Army-members of an elite unit of the 101st Airborne Division called Easy Company. Arguably the bravest, most efficient, physically fit, and tight-knit group of soldiers the Army has ever produced, the unit was called upon for every high-risk operation of the war, including D-Day, Operation Market Garden in Holland, the Battle of the Bulge, and the capture of Hitler's Eagle's Nest in Berchtesgaden.
Both fought side-by-side-until Guarnere lost his leg in the Battle of the Bulge nd was sent home. Heffron went on to liberate concentration camps and rake Hitler's Eagle's Nest hideout. United by their experience, the two reconnected at the war's end and have been the best of friends ever since. Their story is a tribute to the lasting bond forged between comrades in arms-and to all those who fought for freedom.
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Gram Parsons lived fast, died young, and left a beautiful corpse–a corpse his friends stole, took to Joshua Tree National Monument, and set afire in its coffin. The theft and burning of his body marked the end of Gram Parsons’ life and the beginning of the Gram Parsons legend.
As a singer and songwriter, Gram Parsons stood at the nexus of countless musical crossroads, and he sold his soul to the devil at every one. Parson hung out with glamorous women and the coolest friends. His intimates and collaborators on his journey included Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Marianne Faithfull, Peter Fonda, Roger McGuinn, Clarence White, and Emmylou Harris. Parsons had everything–looks, charisma, money, style, the best drugs, the most heartbreaking voice–and threw it all away with both hands. His ballad is one of gigantic talent colliding with epic self-destruction.
Parsons led the Byrds to create the seminal country rock masterpiece Sweetheart of the Rodeo. He formed the Flying Burrito Brothers, helped to guide the Rolling Stones beyond the blues in their appreciation of American roots music, and found his musical soul mate in Emmylou Harris. Parsons’ solo albums, GP and Grievous Angel, are now recognized as visionary masterpieces of the transcendental jambalaya of rock, soul, country, gospel, and blues Parsons named “Cosmic American Music.” Four months before Grievous Angel was released, Parsons died of a drug and alcohol overdose at age twenty-six.
In this beautifully written, raucous, meticulously researched biography, David N. Meyer gives Parsons’ mythic life its due. From Parsons’ privileged Southern Gothic upbringing to his early career in Greenwich Village’s folk music scene to his Sunset Strip glory days, Twenty Thousand Roads paints an unprecedented portrait of the man who linked country to rock. Parsons’ creative genius gave birth to a new sound that was rooted in the past but heralded the future.
From interviews with hundreds of the famous and obscure who knew and worked closely with Parsons–many who have never spoken publicly about him before–Meyer conjures a dazzling panorama of the artist and his era. Shedding new light and dispelling old myths, Twenty Thousand Roads is a breakthrough in rock-and-roll biography and more–a chronicle of creativity, drugs, excess, culture, and music in the ferment of late-1960s America.
Visit the official website: www.twentythousandroads.com
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A Leader Becomes a Leader opens with a window on history: Henry David Thoreau riding a borrowed horse and wagon into the woods around Concord, Massachusetts to Walden Pond in 1845. There, he writes a classic work that has a powerful effect on the lives and philosophies of seminal leaders in the next century as diverse as Mohandas Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Thoreau believed that a spirit exists in work of a high order that works outside time to touch readers whenever he or she proves ready. This book in a vivid presentation of images and essays asks an important question: is there a spirit to leadership? Does it exist, and if it does, can it work outside the normal, linear confines of history to mark the progress of civilization in important and consequential ways? A Leader Becomes a Leader: Inspirational Stories of Leadership for a New Generation is a thought-provoking and much-heralded first work from nationally recognized entreprenuer and author J. Kevin Sheehan. With 207 gorgeous photographs and a splendid design from award-winning graphic artist Jan Lindy Boyce, the book lays out cinematically, with sprawling visuals that present critical themes of leadership that get little coverage in current media: Seeking Justice, Sowing Peace, Manifesting Beauty, and With Vision are some of the important realms that make up the books architecture. The book asserts that the spirit of leadership and the core human values that underline it are universal, inherent human capacities that ''often go underestimated or unrecognized when people settle for less.'' The Determination of Nelson Mandela, The Presence of Eleanor Roosevelt, The Experiments of Mohatma Gandhi, The Decency of Cesar Chavez are some of the compelling section titles. Take a journey, and discover how some of the most consequential leaders of the last century developed into the people that we remember, and find inside this book the metaphoric struggles that make or break us on our own paths to leadership. The book is distinguished in the variety of leadership segments and iconic figures it represents. They include Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Franklin Roosevelt, Albert Schweitzer, Katherine Graham, Neil Armstrong, Aung San Suu Kyii, Pele, and 57 others!
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In his brief life, Hank Williams created one of the defining bodies of American music. Songs such as 'Your Cheatin' Heart,' 'Hey, Good Lookin',' and 'Jambalaya' sold millions of records and became the model for virtually all country music that followed. But by the time of his death at age 29, Williams had drunk and drugged and philandered his way through two messy marriages and out of his headline spot on the Grand Ole Opry. Even though he was country music's top seller, Williams was so famously unreliable toward the end that he was lucky to get a booking in a beer hall. Now Colin Escott adds the fruit of several years of impeccable new research to what was already the most full-blooded portrait of Hank Williams. With the benefit of recently discovered legal files, exclusive access to Williams's autopsy, and new research on the singer's final hours, Escott brings to light much that was previously unknown or hidden about Hank Williams.
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Hank Williams, the quintessential country music singer and songwriter, lived a life as lonesome, desolate, and filled with sorrow as his timeless songs. From Williams’s dirt-poor beginnings as a sickly child to his emergence as a star of the Grand Ole Opry, Lovesick Blues is the definitive biography of the man and his music.
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He was twenty-nine years old and had recorded just eighty sessions when he died on New Year's Day 1953. Yet those songs—“Hey Good Lookin'," "Your Cheatin' Heart," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry"-made Hank Williams the most influential country musician ever. He is the essential pre-Elvis performer, molding American music into a new art form, and creating descendants that range from Garth Brooks to Beck. But for all that his music reveals, we know remarkably little of the man himself. His formal interviews barely filled a page, and even those who claimed him as a friend admit they barely knew him. Hank Williams fans, devoted and avid, have been cherishing the same few Hank pictures and reminiscences for decades. Now this book will reveal a previously unseen wealth of photographs, letters, interviews, and the handwritten lyrics to twenty-nine newly discovered songs in a beautifully designed tribute. Arranged chronologically and enhanced by testimonials from Hank's family, friends, and the musicians he inspired, Hank Williams is a revelation.
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Presents the surprising story of the woman who, for her first twenty-one years, lived as Cathy Deupree, and who then discovered that she was the child of country music great Hank Williams. Reprint.
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Hank Williams was country music's greatest star and songwriter. This is the story of Hank and his wife, Audrey, his rise to fame, their stormy marriage, and the alcoholism that destroyed them both. Illustrated and indexed.
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Baseball has witnessed more than 125,000 major-league home runs. Many have altered the outcomes of games, and some, swatted into the stands on dramatic last swings, have decided pennants and won reputations. But no home run has played a more significant role in influencing American society than Hank Aaron's 715th.
Aaron's historic blast -- and the yearlong quest leading up to it -- not only shook baseball but the world at large. It exposed prejudice, energized a flagging civil rights movement, inspired a generation of children, and also called forth the dark demons that haunted Aaron's every step and turned what should have been a joyous pursuit into a hellish nightmare. In Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America, Tom Stanton, author of the prize-winning The Final Season, penetrates the burnished myth of Aaron's chase and uncovers the compelling story behind the most consequential athletic achievement of the past fifty years.
The tale takes place during tumultuous times, the years of 1973 and 1974, as the Watergate scandal unfolds and the Vietnam War sputters to an end. It's the era of Ali and Archie Bunker, of Wounded Knee and Patty Hearst, of Roe v. Wade and Billie Jean King versus Bobby Riggs, of oil shortages, and of a nation struggling with deep divisions. At the center of the social storm stands a private, dignified man -- Hank Aaron -- who rises to accept the mantle of his recently deceased idol, Jackie Robinson, and becomes emboldened by the purpose of his mission: to break the record of sport's greatest legend, Babe Ruth, not only for himself but for the advancement of all African Americans and for the good of his country.
Along the way, Aaron endures bigots, zealous fans, hate mail, FBI investigations, bodyguards, the ambivalence of his adopted hometown, a batting slump unlike any other, the sniping comments of Babe Ruth's widow, the slights of baseball's commissioner, a string of controversies, and constant threats to his and his children's lives. The story features a rich cast of characters: a friend and sometime rival, Willie Mays, who must come to terms with the end of his own career; Aaron's hard-as-iron protector, manager Eddie Mathews; a young, self-assured, occasionally cocky protégé, Dusty Baker; a future president, Jimmy Carter; a preacher of rising prominence, the Reverend Jesse Jackson; stars like Willie Stargell and Tom Seaver; and a roster of equally colorful, lesser-known peers.
But at the heart of the narrative is Hank Aaron, a class player who refused to preen at home plate or strut shamelessly around the bases even as he reached the pinnacle of the national pastime. Three decades later, Tom Stanton brings to life on these pages the elusive spirit of an American hero.
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Hank Williams (1923--1953) is revered in the top tier of the country-music pantheon, and his forlorn ballads are classics in the country songbook. An inspired, natural genius, Williams was the complete country balladeer. Though he knew almost nothing about the technicalities of music, his plaintive songs--"Cold, Cold Heart," "Your Cheatin' Heart," and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry"--affirm that he knew everything about its heart.
Williams was to country music what Elvis Presley was to rock 'n' roll. With his legend already firmly established, he was only twenty-nine when he died on New Year's Day 1953 (or, perhaps, New Year's Eve 1952) in the back seat of his baby-blue Cadillac on the way to a concert in Canton, Ohio. Interest in Williams is unflagging, and myths and tall tales about his life and death continue to grow with every passing year.
Although the fascinating trail of Williams's career has been a favorite subject for biographers, Hank Williams, So Lonesome winnows away the myths and hearsay while recounting this Alabama boy's blazing rise to stardom. This close look at Williams moves beyond other books by providing new research, evaluations, and interviews with friends, family, and band members. Of the many biographies this one comes closest to being truly accurate.
It focuses also upon the music itself, confirming that Williams was a natural songwriter and performer like none other. This new assessment analyzes the Williams legacy by reviewing both the printed and recorded music and by thorough exploration of the Williams bibliography and discography.
Bill Koon, a professor of English at Clemson University, is the editor of Classic Southern Humor.
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The tumultuous experiences Abraham Lincoln had with women have long been chronicled. Lincoln’s Ladies attempts to answer the questions of how he was affected by the women in his life and how he affected them.Abandoned through death by his mother, his sister, and his sweetheart, Ann Rutledge, Lincoln found it difficult to relate to women and developed an emotional barrier that often antagonized them. Abstract and cool, he feared intimacy and marriage and, following Ann Rutledge’s untimely death, was incapable of loving anyone the way he had loved her, probably the only woman with whom he shared a deep and wonderful love.
Lincoln fumbled his way through other courtships and was turned down at least twice.
He then stumbled into a strange relationship with Mary Todd—one culminated by marriage through her trickery and his sense of "honor." Lincoln’s marriage to her was his greatest tragedy, "a burning, scorching hell as terrible as death and as gloomy as the grave," said William Herndon, Lincoln’s partner and biographer.
According to H. Donald Winkler, Lincoln’s emotions and motivations were shaped from a mixture of crippling and energizing experiences associated with women, experiences that profoundly affected his personal and professional lives. Lincoln’s Ladies explores the impact of more than thirty women on his life. Not overlooked, however, are the positive impacts of women on Lincoln and he on them, especially his stepmother, who probably was the first person to treat him with respect and glimpse his potential.
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