After decades of singing the music of J. S. Bach and lecturing about his life in the 18th century, renowned Bach tenor David Gordon has compiled this personal collection of historical anecdotes, scholarly explanations, vintage illustrations, time lines, bits of pathos, gritty descriptions of everyday life, and colorful glimpses of Bach and the world around him. The Little Bach Book is a series of vignettes of Johann Sebastian Bach as a life-long salaried professional musician. These Bach scenes are presented in a rich context of middle-class daily life in Saxony in the early 18th century. What did people eat, drink, and wear, how did they bathe and cook? What fuels heated and illuminated their homes? How many weekly church services were there in Leipzig in 1727, and how many taverns? The central subject of this richly illustrated book is J. S. Bach, but nearly half the pages are devoted to engaging and detailed descriptions of the everyday world that surrounded him. Both elements contain the unexpected. This book is a refreshingly down-to-earth look at Bach's life and times, not an analysis of his music. For the newcomer to Bach, for the experienced listener, and for the general history buff, this book will be entertaining, moving, and sometimes surprising.

The Little Bach Book: An eclectic Omnibus of Notable Details about the Life and Times of the esteemed and highly respected Johann Sebastian Bach

Biographies & Memoirs

Gordon, David J.

Arts & Literature

Lucky Valley Press

Literary art and the unconscious

Literature & Fiction

Louisiana State University Press

Like Jane Austen and Henry James, but also like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch is a keen student of those egoistic obsessions that cloud our moral understanding. In Iris Murdoch's Fables of Unselfing, David J. Gordon probes more deeply and comprehensively than any previous critic the intellectual energies, and the ethical imperative of "unselfing," that inform her fiction. Gordon contends that the term fable best describes the kind of novel Murdoch writes because in each a mythmaking purpose interacts with a commitment to realism, shaping the erotic life of fictional characters into a spiritual pilgrimage on which they struggle, more or less unsuccessfully, to overcome the self-centeredness that keeps them away from the Good. The most original element in the fiction, Gordon argues, is not its striking modernization of Plato or its adaptations of nineteenth-century influences, but its intensely creative struggle with Freud. In developing his analysis of her themes, Gordon draws on Murdoch's work from throughout her forty-year career, showing how each novel grew out of its predecessors and in what ways each is original.

Iris Murdoch's Fables of Unselfing

History & Criticism

Univ of Missouri Pr

Carmel-by-the-Sea, a little town on the California coast, was one of the artistic hot spots of the West in the early 1920s, when two extraordinary women paid a visit one spring, and never left. Dene Denny and Hazel Watrous designed Carmel's first art gallery, and three dozen of its early houses. They founded the Carmel Music Society in 1927, and-in the midst of the Great Depression-they created the Carmel Bach Festival. For two decades they ran a successful repertory theater in Monterey and a major performing arts series in San José. In a man's world, their partnership brought music and harmony to Central California and far beyond. Carmel Impresarios is a cultural biography of these two amazing pioneers in music, architecture, design, and the arts. The book spans more than a century of history (1830-1960) and includes nearly 300 vintage photos and illustrations. It places the life and work of Denny and Watrous within the context of the artistic, intellectual, and cultural currents of early 20th century California.

Carmel Impresarios: A cultural biography of Dene Denny and Hazel Watrous

Cities are playing an ever more important role in the mitigation and adaption to climate change. This book examines the politics shaping whether, how and to what extent cities engage in global climate governance. By studying the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, and drawing on scholarship from international relations, social movements, global governance and field theory, the book introduces a theory of global urban governance fields. This theory links observed increases in city engagement and coordination to the convergence of C40 cities around particular ways of understanding and enforcing climate governance. The collective capacity of cities to produce effective and socially equitable global climate governance is also analysed. Highlighting the constraints facing city networks and the potential pitfalls associated with a city-driven global response, this assessment of the transformative potential of cities will be of great interest to researchers, graduate students and policymakers in global environmental politics and policy.

Cities on the World Stage: The Politics of Global Urban Climate Governance

Business & Money

Economics

Cambridge University Press

The Nile Of Australia, Nature's Gateway To The Interior: A Plea For The Greater Utilization Of The Murray And Its Tributaries (1905)

Literary

Kessinger Publishing

Kessinger Publishing, LLC

Every serious baseball fan can attest to the perennial excellence of stars like Babe Ruth and Ken Griffey, Jr. But how many can recall the exploits of Fred Dunlap, George Stone, Bobby Shantz, or Mark Fidrych? Each of these players performed like a superstar for a single season, but none of them came close to replicating that success in subsequent years. Some achieved early success and flamed out, while others overcame early setbacks to achieve brief stardom late in their careers. Some were one-year wonders, and others sustained solid careers after setting an early standard that they would never again reach. This book contains the bittersweet stories of 30 such players who tantalized their fans with visions of greatness, but ultimately fell short.

Baseball's Shooting Stars: Improbable Ascents and Burnouts in the National Pastime

McFarland

In baseball today, Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, is the go-to tool for measuring player value. But WAR is limited in how it compares different eras, how it handles certain fielding positions, and by the fact that it's a pure compiler stat. Career Value Index (CVI), the new analytic tool developed by David Gordon in his book Baseball Generations, expands on and enhances WAR in a new and compelling way that puts players from Old Hoss Radbourn to Pedro Martinez, Bill Dickey to Johnny Bench, Nap Lajoie to Joe Morgan, and Ty Cobb to Mike Trout on the same statistical plane. Baseball Generations blends cutting-edge number crunching with a witty narrative style reminiscent of Bill James to take readers through every era of major league baseball's 150+ year history-from the founding generation to the analytics generation and everything in between. The result is detailed yet breezy history of the game accompanied by a new ranking of the best to ever play the game. Like every good review of baseball's all-time greats, the Hall of Fame is central to the discussion. Gordon recaps the history of the BBWAA and Veteran's Committee selections, and in the framework of the current Hall of Fame, uses CVI to identify the upper-tier stars, the solid members, the borderline cases, down to the flat-out undeserving-along with the best players on the outside looking in. No matter how many Hall of Fame analyses you've read or arguments you've heard or had, some of the conclusions in Baseball Generations will surprise you. But even if you disagree with Gordon's rankings, the power of CVI and the thorough, context-driven analysis will make them impossible to ignore.

Baseball Generations: Career Value Index - A New Look at the Hall of Fame and Rating the Greatest Players of All Time

Sports & Outdoors

Baseball

Summer Game Books

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Books by Gordon, David J.