In the summer of 1978, I took my quarter horse to lead trail rides for kids at a Bible camp in rural Iowa. I had just found out my sister, Melody, had been diagnosed with the fastest-acting, worst-type of leukemia. My mom wrote me letters every day that I was away (nobody called long distance unless it was a true emergency in those days). I kept those letters and compiled them into the journey that was our lives that summer. Melody Heuss prayed that God would bring her closer to Him during a time when she felt she had drifted away from Him in her daily walk. I don't know what it would be like to choose my young husband's new wife. I don't know what it would be like to handpick a mother for my two small children; but my sister did. When she knew she was going to die, she convinced Carl, her husband and love of her life, to re-marry. Melody made a list of eligible women and then narrowed it down to one that Carl had never even met! All the while she was having numerous bone marrow aspirations, blood transfusions, and chemotherapy that would turn her 28-year-old body into a bald, disease-ravaged weakling. Her inner strength, courage, and attitude brought inspiration to every single person who walked into her hospital room and life. Nurses, family and friends were changed forever by the way she handled her passing into the next life. This is a story told from Melody's mother, Ruth's, point of view, the writer of the letters. The frustrations and difficulties of watching her child suffer tugs on your heart. You will also get a glimpse of what I went through being away from home, and being torn between wanting to be in the hospital room, but knowing I was where God wanted me to be. Plus, you get to witness Susan, the young woman who had already endured many loses and heartbreaks of her own, step into this family on faith. Ruth personally witnessed the power and assurance of God's eternal love for us, even in her grief. On the early August morning of Melody's passing, Ruth received a gift most of us never get to see. It was a message from God, declaring the promise of life after death in a physical, tangible way. It was a real miracle that all Christians can believe in and cherish. Crystal Jolly

A beloved aunt's agreement to help her niece with college essays reawakens past secrets about the night a grandparent was murdered, an event that compels the woman to investigate a treasured music box to uncover the truth.

Pioneering New Serials Frontiers: From Petroglyphs to Cyberserials represents the proceedings from the North American Serials Interest Group's annual conference held at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. From librarians, publishers, vendors, and scholars, this collection provides many perspectives on the issues and problems facing everyone involved in producing, maintaining, and using journal literature. You will gain insight, ideas, and some practical skills for dealing with the changing world of serials. Pioneering New Serials Frontiers includes presentations from the conference's plenary sessions, the discussions from concurrent sessions, and the summary reports of each of the preconferences and workshops. Just as the attendees did, you'll have the opportunity to acquire specialized knowledge of standards for Electronic Data Exchange and to develop new skills as risktakers. You'll also learn the answers to these questions: How do you manage the ever-growing and increasingly complex arena of electronic serials? What does the serialist need to know about copyright issues and electronic product licensing? How does one evaluate and select Internet resources--and once selected, how are they cataloged and maintained? What is the role of the paper-based journal . . . from a publisher's perspective? How is electronic publishing making inroads in scholarly publishing? How should we bridge the gap between the Internet and libraries? What's the best way to educate and retrain serialists for change? Whether you were in attendance at this conference or not, Pioneering New Serials Frontiers is the resource that recaps all that transpired. From technical service concerns and customer relations to management strategies and working with the Web, the variety of topics covered in this book helps confirm that today's serialist must contend with and manage new formats, new standards, and new technologies.

World-wide in scope and focusing on the second half of the 20th century, this work provides biographies and discographies of some 500 composers and conductors of light and popular orchestral music, including film, show, theatre and mood music. The book is arranged in two sequences: 1) Biographies and select discographies, both arranged alphabetically, of the well-known and better-known conductors and composers. These entries also include a list of suggested reading for those wishing to further their studies; and 2) Select discographies of conductors about whom little or no biographical information is available. The bibliography at the end of the book covers discographical sources, popular music and film music. This is the first time that the lives and recordings of such artists as Kostelanetz, Faith, and Gould as well as the orchestral recordings of such great popular composers as Gershwin, Kern, Porter, Rodgers, Berlin and Coward have been documented and presented in an encyclopedic form.

When Viktor Mikhailov follows in his father’s footsteps and joins the relatively insignificant Russian mob, he is given an assignment none of his comrades want, yet Viktor cannot help but be secretly pleased. The city is a cesspool of organized crime, with several outfits fighting for a piece of the Prohibition pie, and Viktor’s slice is the openly gay Towertown. Tasked with providing whiskey to the queer clubs he covertly frequents, Viktor gains monetary wealth while finding himself in an unconventional relationship with his top client’s muse, an enigmatic redhead named Calvin Connolly. Calvin — along with throngs of idealists who pack the pansy parlors —believes they stand on the precipice of a revolution, but Viktor is not convinced. Viktor questions the conservative culture’s capacity for true change while hoping that broad acceptance is imminent. Perhaps then he could accept the parts of himself he hides.

"The entire field of film historians awaits the AFI volumes with eagerness."--Eileen Bowser, Museum of Modern Art Film Department Comments on previous volumes: "The source of last resort for finding socially valuable . . . films that received such scant attention that they seem 'lost' until discovered in the AFI Catalog."--Thomas Cripps "Endlessly absorbing as an excursion into cultural history and national memory."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

This book is the story of Harvey Dorfman, who rose from a childhood sickbed to experience numerous successes in the world of sports. Dorfman has been a teacher, coach, counselor, and a consultant in sport psychology. This third and last volume of a trilogy closes in 2010.

The Trash Phenomenon looks at how writers of the late twentieth century not only have integrated the events, artifacts, and theories of popular culture into their works but also have used those works as windows into popular culture's role in the process of nation building. Taking her cue from Donald Barthelme's 1967 portrayal of popular culture as "trash" and Don DeLillo's 1997 description of it as a subversive "people's history," Stacey Olster explores how literature recycles American popular culture so as to change the nationalistic imperative behind its inception. The Trash Phenomenon begins with a look at the mass media's role in the United States' emergence as the twentieth century's dominant power. Olster discusses the works of three authors who collectively span the century bounded by the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Persian Gulf War (1991): Gore Vidal's American Chronicle series, John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, and Larry Beinhart's American Hero. Olster then turns her attention to three non-American writers whose works explore the imperial sway of American popular culture on their nation's value systems: hierarchical class structure in Dennis Potter's England, Peronism in Manuel Puig's Argentina, and Nihonjinron consensus in Haruki Murakami's Japan. Finally, Olster returns to American literature to look at the contemporary media spectacle and the representative figure as potential sources of national consolidation after November 1963. Olster first focuses on autobiographical, historical, and fictional accounts of three spectacles in which the formulae of popular culture are shown to bypass differences of class, gender, and race: the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Scarsdale Diet Doctor murder, and the O. J. Simpson trial. She concludes with some thoughts about the nature of American consolidation after 9/11.