Wake of Vultures

Wake of Vultures
Author: Lila Bowen
Publisher: Orbit
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2015-10-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 031626430X

"Wake of Vultures will kick your a** up one page and down the other." -- io9 Nettie Lonesome dreams of a greater life than toiling as a slave in the sandy desert. But when a stranger attacks her, Nettie wins more than the fight. Now she's got friends, a good horse, and a better gun. But if she can't kill the thing haunting her nightmares and stealing children across the prairie, she'll lose it all -- and never find out what happened to her real family. Wake of Vultures is the first novel of the Shadow series featuring the fearless Nettie Lonesome. The Shadow seriesWake of VulturesConspiracy of Ravens

Vultures

Vultures
Author: Michael O'Neal Campbell
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2015-06-26
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1482223627

This book reexamines current knowledge on the evolution, ecology, and conservation biology of both New World vultures (Cathartidae) and Old World vultures (Accipitridae) and seeks answers to past and present regional extinctions, colorizations, and conservation questions. Extinct species of both families are examined, as is the disputed evidence fo

All About Me!

All About Me!
Author: Mel Brooks
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 059315911X

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • At 95, the legendary Mel Brooks continues to set the standard for comedy across television, film, and the stage. Now he shares his story for the first time in “a wonderful addition to a seminal career” (San Francisco Chronicle), “infused with nostalgia and his signature hilarity” (Parade). ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: New York Post • “Laugh-out-loud hilarious and always fascinating, from the great Mel Brooks. What else do you expect from the man who knew Jesus and dated Joan of Arc?”—Billy Crystal For anyone who loves American comedy, the long wait is over. Here are the never-before-told, behind-the-scenes anecdotes and remembrances from a master storyteller, filmmaker, and creator of all things funny. All About Me! charts Mel Brooks’s meteoric rise from a Depression-era kid in Brooklyn to the recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Whether serving in the United States Army in World War II, or during his burgeoning career as a teenage comedian in the Catskills, Mel was always mining his experiences for material, always looking for the perfect joke. His iconic career began with Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, where he was part of the greatest writers’ room in history, which included Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and Larry Gelbart. After co-creating both the mega-hit 2000 Year Old Man comedy albums and the classic television series Get Smart, Brooks’s stellar film career took off. He would go on to write, direct, and star in The Producers, The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, and Spaceballs, as well as produce groundbreaking and eclectic films, including The Elephant Man, The Fly, and My Favorite Year. Brooks then went on to conquer Broadway with his record-breaking, Tony-winning musical, The Producers. All About Me! offers fans insight into the inspiration behind the ideas for his outstanding collection of boundary-breaking work, and offers details about the many close friendships and collaborations Brooks had, including those with Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Gene Wilder, Madeleine Kahn, Alfred Hitchcock, and the great love of his life, Anne Bancroft. Filled with tales of struggle, achievement, and camaraderie (and dozens of photographs), readers will gain a more personal and deeper understanding of the incredible body of work behind one of the most accomplished and beloved entertainers in history.

Switched on Pop

Switched on Pop
Author: Nate Sloan
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2019-12-13
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190056657

Pop music surrounds us - in our cars, over supermarket speakers, even when we are laid out at the dentist - but how often do we really hear what's playing? Switched on Pop is the book based on the eponymous podcast that has been hailed by NPR, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and Entertainment Weekly for its witty and accessible analysis of Top 40 hits. Through close studies of sixteen modern classics, musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding shift pop from the background to the foreground, illuminating the essential musical concepts behind two decades of chart-topping songs. In 1939, Aaron Copland published What to Listen for in Music, the bestseller that made classical music approachable for generations of listeners. Eighty years later, Nate and Charlie update Copland's idea for a new audience and repertoire: 21st century pop, from Britney to Beyoncé, Outkast to Kendrick Lamar. Despite the importance of pop music in contemporary culture, most discourse only revolves around lyrics and celebrity. Switched on Pop gives readers the tools they need to interpret our modern soundtrack. Each chapter investigates a different song and artist, revealing musical insights such as how a single melodic motif follows Taylor Swift through every genre that she samples, André 3000 uses metric manipulation to get listeners to "shake it like a Polaroid picture," or Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee create harmonic ambiguity in "Despacito" that mirrors the patterns of global migration. Replete with engaging discussions and eye-catching illustrations, Switched on Pop brings to life the musical qualities that catapult songs into the pop pantheon. Readers will find themselves listening to familiar tracks in new waysand not just those from the Top 40. The timeless concepts that Nate and Charlie define can be applied to any musical style. From fanatics to skeptics, teenagers to octogenarians, non-musicians to professional composers, every music lover will discover something ear-opening in Switched on Pop.

Vulture

Vulture
Author: Thom van Dooren
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1861899998

Simply because they are large scavenging birds, vultures are often viewed as harbingers of death. But, as Thom van Dooren shows in this cultural and natural history, that dominant association leaves us with a very one-dimensional understanding of a group of actually rather fascinating and diverse creatures. Vulture offers an enlightening new history of this much-misunderstood bird. Vultures vary in type and size, and while some have a diet mainly of bone, others are actually almost completely vegetarian. Most interesting, despite its notorious association with death, the vulture very rarely, if ever, kills for itself. In different cultural mythologies, vultures play a role in disposing of the dead and officiating over human sacrifices, but they have often been viewed as courageous and noble creatures as well—believed to be indispensable in the containment of waste and disease and even to be world creators and divine mothers. Van Dooren explores these many histories, from some of the earliest-known Neolithic sites in which vultures are thought to have consumed the dead to contemporary efforts to reintroduce the bearded vulture into the Alps. Highlighting the rich diversity of vultures and the many ways in which people have understood and lived with them, Vulture invites a new appreciation and wonder for these incredible birds.

I Like to Watch

I Like to Watch
Author: Emily Nussbaum
Publisher:
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2019
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0525508961

The big picture : how Buffy the vampire slayer turned me into a TV critic -- The long con ("The Sopranos") -- The great divide : Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the rise of the bad fan -- Difficult women ("Sex and the city") -- Cool story, bro ("True detective," "Top of the lake" and "The fall") -- Last girl in Larchmont : the legacy of Joan Rivers -- Girls girls girls : "Girls," "Vanderpump rules," "House of cards and Scandal," "The Amy Schumer show," "Transparent" -- Confessions of the human shield -- How jokes won the election -- In praise of sex and violence : "Hannibal," "Law et order : SVU," "Jessica Jones," -- "The jinx," "The Americans" -- The price is right : what advertising does to TV -- In living color : Kenya Barris' -- Breaking the box : "Jane the virgin," "The comeback," "The good wife," "The newsroom," "Adventure time," "The leftovers," "High maintenance." -- Riot girl : Jenji Kohan's hot provocations -- A disappointed fan is still a fan ("Lost") -- Mr. big : how Ryan Murphy became the most powerful man in television.

Apropos of Nothing

Apropos of Nothing
Author: Woody Allen
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2020-03-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1951627377

The Long-Awaited, Enormously Entertaining Memoir by One of the Great Artists of Our Time—Now a New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller. In this candid and often hilarious memoir, the celebrated director, comedian, writer, and actor offers a comprehensive, personal look at his tumultuous life. Beginning with his Brooklyn childhood and his stint as a writer for the Sid Caesar variety show in the early days of television, working alongside comedy greats, Allen tells of his difficult early days doing standup before he achieved recognition and success. With his unique storytelling pizzazz, he recounts his departure into moviemaking, with such slapstick comedies as Take the Money and Run, and revisits his entire, sixty-year-long, and enormously productive career as a writer and director, from his classics Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Annie and Her Sisters to his most recent films, including Midnight in Paris. Along the way, he discusses his marriages, his romances and famous friendships, his jazz playing, and his books and plays. We learn about his demons, his mistakes, his successes, and those he loved, worked with, and learned from in equal measure. This is a hugely entertaining, deeply honest, rich and brilliant self-portrait of a celebrated artist who is ranked among the greatest filmmakers of our time.

Made for Love

Made for Love
Author: Alissa Nutting
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2017-07-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062280570

Now an HBO Max series starring Ray Romano and Cristin Milioti From one of our most exciting and provocative young writers, a poignant, riotously funny story of how far some will go for love—and how far some will go to escape it. Hazel has just moved into a trailer park of senior citizens, with her father and Diane—his extremely lifelike sex doll—as her roommates. Life with Hazel’s father is strained at best, but her only alternative seems even bleaker. She’s just run out on her marriage to Byron Gogol, CEO and founder of Gogol Industries, a monolithic corporation hell-bent on making its products and technologies indispensable in daily life. For over a decade, Hazel put up with being veritably quarantined by Byron in the family compound, her every movement and vital sign tracked. But when he demands to wirelessly connect the two of them via brain chips in a first-ever human “mind-meld,” Hazel decides what was once merely irritating has become unbearable. The world she escapes into is a far cry from the dry and clinical bubble she’s been living in, a world populated with a whole host of deviant oddballs. As Hazel tries to carve out a new life for herself in this uncharted territory, Byron is using the most sophisticated tools at his disposal to find her and bring her home. His threats become more and more sinister, and Hazel is forced to take drastic measures in order to find a home of her own and free herself from Byron’s virtual clutches once and for all. Perceptive and compulsively readable, Made for Love is at once an absurd, raunchy comedy and a dazzling, profound meditation marriage, monogamy, and family.

Vulture

Vulture
Author: Katie Fallon
Publisher: University Press of New England
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 151260030X

Turkey vultures, the most widely distributed and abundant scavenging birds of prey on the planet, are found from central Canada to the southern tip of Argentina, and nearly everywhere in between. In the United States we sometimes call them buzzards; in parts of Mexico the name is aura cabecirroja, in Uruguay jote cabeza colorada, and in Ecuador gallinazo aura. A huge bird, the turkey vulture is a familiar sight from culture to culture, in both hemispheres. But despite being ubiquitous and recognizable, the turkey vulture has never had a book of literary nonfiction devoted to it - until Vulture. Floating on six-foot wings, turkey vultures use their keen senses of smell and sight to locate carrion. Unlike their cousin the black vulture, turkey vultures do not kill weak or dying animals; instead, they cleanse, purify, and renew the environment by clearing it of decaying carcasses, thus slowing the spread of such dangerous pathogens as anthrax, rabies, and botulism. The beauty, grace, and important role of these birds in the ecosystem notwithstanding, turkey vultures are maligned and underappreciated; they have been accused of spreading disease and killing livestock, neither of which has ever been substantiated. Although turkey vultures are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes harming them a federal offense, the birds still face persecution. They've been killed because of their looks, their odor, and their presence in proximity to humans. Even the federal government occasionally sanctions "roost dispersals," which involve the harassment and sometimes the murder of communally roosting vultures during the cold winter months. Vulture follows a year in the life of a typical North American turkey vulture. By incorporating information from scientific papers and articles, as well as interviews with world-renowned raptor and vulture experts, author Katie Fallon examines all aspects of the bird's natural history: breeding, incubating eggs, raising chicks, migrating, and roosting. After reading this book you will never look at a vulture in the same way again.