NPR Best Books of 2017
In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR’s acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American ideas and beliefs, allowing us to communicate difficult emotions and truths about our most fraught social issues, most notably sex and race.
In Good Booty, Ann Powers explores how popular music became America’s primary erotic art form. Powers takes us from nineteenth-century New Orleans through dance-crazed Jazz Age New York to the teen scream years of mid-twentieth century rock-and-roll to the cutting-edge adventures of today’s web-based pop stars. Drawing on her deep knowledge and insights on gender and sexuality, Powers recounts stories of forbidden lovers, wild shimmy-shakers, orgasmic gospel singers, countercultural perverts, soft-rock sensitivos, punk Puritans, and the cyborg known as Britney Spears to illuminate how eroticism—not merely sex, but love, bodily freedom, and liberating joy—became entwined within the rhythms and melodies of American song. This cohesion, she reveals, touches the heart of America's anxieties and hopes about race, feminism, marriage, youth, and freedom. 
In a survey that spans more than a century of music, Powers both heralds little known artists such as Florence Mills, a contemporary of Josephine Baker, and gospel queen Dorothy Love Coates, and sheds new light on artists we think we know well, from the Beatles and Jim Morrison to Madonna and Beyoncé. In telling the history of how American popular music and sexuality intersect—a magnum opus over two decades in the making—Powers offers new insights into our nation psyche and our soul.

Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music

Powers, Ann

Humor & Entertainment

Dey Street Books

Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell

American bohemia is alive and well and redefining the way all of us live, love, and work: so declares Ann Powers in an invigorating blend of criticism, journalism, and autobiography that takes us into the heart of alternative America today. Powers, one of the nation's most notable music critics, explores how the generation that inherited the counterculture assumptions of the sixties is transforming youthful rebellion into a sustainable alternative style of living—creating a new bohemia with dynamic citizens who are reinventing shared values from the ground up. Through stories from her own life and those of her comrades—artists, writers, entrepreneurs, queers, and cyber-outlaws—Powers traces the evolution of this world and celebrates those who keep bohemia thriving from coast to coast.

Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Da Capo Press

There is a feeling of nostalgia that surrounds the idea of bohemia, that place where art and ideas and alternative thinking become the focal point of life. To most, bohemia is gone -- erased by the lifestyle of the 1990s and the too many, too fast influences of modern living. Ann Powers, an acclaimed pop critic for The New York Times and one of today's most notable authorities on alternative culture, claims in this powerful and personal chronicle that bohemia is alive and well in America -- nurturing new lifestyles and defining our tastes in art, politics, sexual mores, and all matters cultural. Weird Like Us sets the record straight on alternative America -- a new bohemia whose dynamic citizens are re-creating traditional modes of building families, falling in love, having sex, and making careers, reinventing our shared values from the ground up. So how different are these bohemians? Through stories from her own life and those of her fellow alternative Americans -- artists, writers, entrepreneurs, feminists, cyberoutlaws, punk rockers, politicos, and queers -- Powers traces the evolution of this world and where it has gone. The observations and attitudes that fill these pages will touch many who long for this lifestyle, and will shock others. No longer confined to coffee shops in North Beach or Greenwich Village, bohemia is thriving from coast to coast. In this wonderfully written memoir, Ann Powers writes of an alternative culture that has never before been fully presented -- one that takes into account the real politics, real feelings, and genuine creativity of those who transformed the dying counterculture of the sixties into a mode of artistic and spiritual survival in the nineties. In doing so, she has written a vibrant, engrossing take on a culture and its people.

History

Simon&Schuster

Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

Amos, Tori

Broadway

From her critically acclaimed 1992 debut, Little Earthquakes, to the recent hit, Scarlet’s Walk, Tori Amos has been a formidable force in contemporary music, with one of the most dedicated fan bases in the industry. In Tori Amos: Piece by Piece, the singer herself takes readers beyond the mere facts, explaining the specifics of her creative process—how her songs go from ideas and melodies to recordings and passionately performed concert pieces. Written with acclaimed music journalist Ann Powers, Tori Amos: Piece by Piece is a firsthand account of the most intricate and intimate details of Amos’s life as both a private individual and a very public performing musician. In passionate and informative prose, Amos explains how her songs come to her and how she records and then performs them for audiences everywhere, all the while connecting with listeners across the world and maintaining her own family life (which includes raising a young daughter). But it is also much more, a verbal collage made by two strong female voices – and the voices of those closest to Amos—that calls upon genealogy, myth, and folklore to express Amos’s unique and fascinating personal history. In short, we see the pieces that make up – as Amos herself puts it—“the woman we call Tori.” With photos taken especially for this book by the photographer Loren Haynes, Tori Amos: Piece by Piece is a rare treat for both Tori listeners and newcomers alike, a look into the heart and mind of an extraordinary musician.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Broadway Books

The study of water pollution control regulation is a study of statutes and their administration. This casebook explores water pollution and the federal statute chiefly designed to control it, the Clean Water Act, and examines how water pollution is addressed, first by the common law and then by statute. An introduction provides the student with an understanding of what constitutes water pollution, where it originates, and how it can be controlled. These materials were originally designed for the introductory course in environmental regulation/environmental law at Pace Law School. A Teachers Manual includes exercises that teach students advanced legal research, familiarity with administrative law mechanisms, and the ability to integrate what they have learned about the Clean Water Act.

Introduction to Environmental Law: Cases & Materials on Water Pollution Control (Environmental Law Institute)

Miller, Jeffrey G.

Long Elder, Nancy

Environmental & Natural Resources Law

Environmental Law Institute

As with most areas of environmental law, the study of water pollution control is the study of an interlocking web of statutes and their administration. The federal statute chiefly designed to control water pollution is the Clean Water Act, but many other federal statutes regulate water pollution, be it directly as with the Safe Drinking Water Act, or incidentally as with the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. And before any of those laws were even enacted, the common law was the primary vehicle used to address water pollution. Even today, tort law plays a role in adjudicating water pollution disputes between parties for damages. This 2d Edition of Introduction to Environmental Law: Cases and Materials on Water Pollution Control provides students with an understanding of what constitutes water pollution, where it originates, and how it can be controlled. It offers an in-depth exploration of how water pollution is addressed under common law and statute. Originally designed for students new to environmental law, the book is perfect for introductory or advanced courses on water pollution control in the United States.

Introduction to Environmental Law: Cases and Materials On Water Pollution Control (Environmental Law Institute)

Miller, Jeffrey

Coplan, Karl

Elder, Nancy

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Books by Powers, Ann