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  The Perfect Gentleman: The Remarkable Life of Dr. James Miranda Barry : Biographies, Book 2 , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 353min

  James Barry was one of the most outstanding doctors of the 19th century – a brilliant surgeon, a tireless campaigner for medical reform, and a compassionate Inspector-General of the Army. But throughout a long and distinguished career an air of secrecy, even of scandal, always clung to Barry. The shrill voice, the diminutive build, the almost ostentatious humanity – all struck a discordant note in the stiff, conventional world of the officers’ mess. Only after the doctor’s death in 1865 did the incredible truth come to light: Dr. James Barry was a woman. What was her real identity? How did she manage to conceal her sex from the army for forty-six years? Why did she take on a man’s role and a man’s work? In this vivid and meticulous biography, June Rose pieces together the clues in the Barry mystery and comes up with some astonishing answers. She tells of the elite intellectual circle which first conceived the masquerade and sponsored the little girl’s entrance, in disguise, into Edinburgh University; she recounts Barry’s strange connection with a powerful aristocratic family and her intense relationship with Lord Charles Somerset, Governor of the Cape Colony and one of the few men to know her secret. And, most fascinating of all, she provides rare insights into Barry’s unique and contradictory personality: her determined clashes with authority, her courageous endurance of appalling conditions in every corner of the globe, her unforgettable encounter with Florence Nightingale. The Perfect Gentleman is the story of an extraordinary adventure – and a remarkable woman. Praise for June Rose "A fascinating, well-documented book." (Sunday Telegraph)"June Rose has succeeded in re-creating the past and relating it to the present... a fascinating account." (Times Literary Supplement)June Rose (1926-2018) was a writer and broadcaster who ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Siobhan Dowd. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/228001/bk_acx0_228001_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  No One Is Coming to Save Us: A Novel , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 657min

  JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he’s startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can’t seem to carry one to term. Her husband, Henry, has grown distant, frustrated by the demise of the furniture industry, which has outsourced to China and stripped the area of jobs. Ava’s mother, Sylvia, caters to and meddles with the lives of those around her, trying to fill the void left by her absent son. And Don, Sylvia’s unworthy but charming husband, just won’t stop hanging around. JJ’s return—and his plans to build a huge mansion overlooking Pinewood and woo Ava—not only unsettles their family, but stirs up the entire town. The ostentatious wealth that JJ has attained forces everyone to consider the cards they’ve been dealt, what more they want and deserve, and how they might go about getting it. Can they reorient their lives to align with their wishes rather than their current realities? Or are they all already resigned to the rhythms of the particular lives they lead? No One Is Coming to Save Us is a revelatory debut from an insightful voice: with echoes of The Great Gatsby it is an arresting and powerful novel about an extended African American family and their colliding visions of the American Dream. In evocative prose, Stephanie Powell Watts has crafted a full and stunning portrait that combines a universally resonant story with an intimate glimpse into the hearts of one family. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Janina Edwards. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/harp/005894/bk_harp_005894_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 571min

  A surprising and revealing look at how today's elite view their own wealth and place in society. From TV's Real Housewives to The Wolf of Wall Street, our popular culture portrays the wealthy as materialistic and entitled. But what do we really know about those who live on "easy street"? In this penetrating book, Rachel Sherman draws on rare in-depth interviews that she conducted with 50 affluent New Yorkers - including hedge fund financiers and corporate lawyers, professors and artists, and stay-at-home mothers - to examine their lifestyle choices and their understanding of privilege. Sherman upends images of wealthy people as invested only in accruing and displaying social advantages for themselves and their children. Instead, these liberal elites, who believe in diversity and meritocracy, feel conflicted about their position in a highly unequal society. They wish to be "normal", describing their consumption as reasonable and basic and comparing themselves to those who have more than they do rather than those with less. These New Yorkers also want to see themselves as hard workers who give back and raise children with good values, and they avoid talking about money. Although their experiences differ depending on a range of factors, including whether their wealth was earned or inherited, these elites generally depict themselves as productive and prudent, and therefore morally worthy, while the undeserving rich are lazy, ostentatious, and snobbish. Sherman argues that this ethical distinction between "good" and "bad" wealthy people characterizes American culture more broadly, and that it perpetuates rather than challenges economic inequality. As the distance between rich and poor widens, Uneasy Street not only explores the real lives of those at the top but also sheds light on how extreme inequality comes to seem ordinary and acceptable to the rest of us. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Liz Thompson. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/reco/010396/bk_reco_010396_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  The Story About Peter Wells , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 80min

  Peter Wells was 26, his partner was 18. Because this was England in 1974, when the gay age of consent was 21, Wells was sentenced to two and a half years in jail. There, he was assaulted and abused by guards and inmates alike. On release from prison, he was interviewed by Gay News just as songwriter Tom Robinson was composing "Glad to Be Gay". He devoted a verse to Wells' case, and that inspired this biography. As a generation comes of age who are incredulous that homosexuality was ever illegal, it is important to remember our social history. Robinson had highlighted it topically but, nearly 40 years on, this book was conceived to do it historically, illustrating injustice with a typical life story. However, like all of us, on closer inspection Peter Wells turned out to have a more complicated life than first appeared. Beyond the man himself, the Peter Wells story illuminates not only our persecution of gay men but other dark areas of our recent past too. His early years were fraught with tragedy, losing two sets of parents before his teens, after which he was sent to the barbarity of a "training ship" for orphaned and delinquent youths. Damaged youngsters were berated rather than counselled and the Victorian brutalization of children continued well into modern times. Peter Wells was a victim of it all. Living in an affluent Surrey village in the late 1970s, behind his ostentatious social veneer he launched an anonymous case at the European Courts of Human Rights challenging the British government's age discrimination against gay men. It was pioneering work that paved the way for eventual parity. But, scarred by his abusive background, his life veered and he would not live to taste the liberty he initiated. Trawling archives, tracing and speaking to many people who knew Wells, including the only interview his partner has ever given, this book uncovers the man and the times. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Tom Robinson. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/054875/bk_acx0_054875_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

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  Circus of Dreams (eBook, ePUB)

  Something extraordinary happened to the UK literary scene in the 1980s. In the space of eight years, a generation of young British writers took the literary novel into new realms of setting, subject matter and style, challenging - and almost eclipsing - the Establishment writers of the 1950s. It began with two names - Martin Amis and Ian McEwan - and became a flood: Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson and Pat Barker among them. The rise of the newcomers coincided with astonishing changes in the way books were published - and the ways in which readers bought them and interacted with their authors. Suddenly, authors of serious fiction were like rock stars, fashionable, sexy creatures, shrewdly marketed and feted in public.The yearly bunfight of the Booker Prize became a matter of keen public interest. Tim Waterstone established the first of a chain of revolutionary bookshops. London publishing houses became the playground of exciting, visionary entrepreneurs who introduced new forms of fiction - magical realist, feminist, post-colonial, gay - to modern readers. Independent houses began to spend ostentatious sums on author advances and glamorous book launches. It was nothing short of a watershed in literary culture. And its climax was the issuing of a death sentence by a fundamentalist leader whose hostility to Western ideas of free speech made him, literally, the world's most lethal critic.Through this exciting, hectic period, the journalist and author John Walsh played many parts: literary editor, reviewer, interviewer, prize judge and TV pundit. He met and interviewed numerous literary stars, attended the best launch parties and digested all the gossip and scandal of the time. In Circus of Dreams he reports on what he found, first with wide-eyed delight and then with a keen eye on what drove this glorious era. The result is a unique hybrid of personal memoir, oral history, literary investigation and elegy for a golden age.

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  The Ostentatious Christian

  The Ostentatious Christian: ab 7.49 €

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  L'abbandono E la Corsa

  We wish we had a new socio-musical tag at hand: an almost impossibly flexible one, encompassing both Theodor Adorno's "culture consumer" and the kind of listener Maurizio Della Casa described in his music pragmatics writings. Such tag could then be stretched to include the sensual level, the sheer pleasure of sound (Aaron Copland), or the self-centered approach, focusing on individual reactions (Dennis Smalley, Ernest Schachtel), and so forth, down to casual listening, to stop just a nanosecond this side of background muzak non-listening. It would then make a useful starting point for our thoughts on Francesco Antonio Mirenzi's creativity, it's appreciation and consumption. The word "consumption" should elicit no surprise. Despite today's negative overtones, it has always been the explicit or hidden goal every composer pursued, with few exceptions. Mirenzi himself keeps faithful to that ideal. Here, once again, he explores the art of musical dissimulation-making quite complex structures sound simple. Each one of his pieces is built on self-consistent formal patterns, both in it's general outline and inside each section. It may imply complex combinatorics and yet sound simple, easy to grasp, almost "natural", eschewing the superfluous, ostentatious, and extreme. Such traditional elements as melody, variation, repetition, contrast are employed, engendering a smooth horizontal musical flow. Lightness is his goal throughout, and there is more cropping out than adding. He seems deeply convinced that music needs not be fancy to be enjoyed as such. "You can write good contemporary music despite being a composer" could be his daily self-reminder. L'abbandono e la corsa ("Abandon and race") for flute and piano (July 2008) is the piece this CD is named after. The score has: "To my dad, (...) for all the times he brought me to train-watching". No extra-musical program is implied, yet the music, as often in Mirenzi, may evoke such imagery as vague landscapes and fog. (The opening marking is "Slow and light-Let it vibrate"). The dedication is a mere personal statement, however it is appended to the piece that the composer feels as the closest one to his present-day conception. His "communicative" musical thinking is made of precious few elements, actually, most of the piece is built on the three pitches forming the B-flat major triad. Only in the "race" section G flat is added, as to suggest movement. Toward the end, we find one of those displacement effects that are well known from the composer's earlier works-a tonal shift and a more melodic passage quickly heading to the finale, break any likely simmetry, and almost urging us to re-listen. Immediacy - one of Mirenzi's typical expressive traits - is most apparent in La valse qui tourne vite ("The Fast-Whirling Waltz"), for piano, sort of "sugar-coated Debussy" (April 2009). It is "dedicated to Francesco Prode, to his brilliant playing"-no fear, here or elsewhere, to acknowledge the composer's debt to performers. Two main sections can be detected, each one heading toward the treble department, the second one at thrice-faster speed. Also, two procedures alternate: repeated bass notes and a (more or less) rising upper line, both built according to deftly disguised mathematical procedures. Once again, undeveloped material from an imaginary Coda quickly rounds up the piece. The grace of grace notes, harking back to Erik Satie's free-form pieces, such as Trois morceaux en forme de poire, opens up I capricci della virtuosa ("The Lady Virtuoso's Caprices") for piano (October 2009), dedicated "To Cinzia Damiani, dear friend, great pianist". Dispensing, for once, with technical musical lingo, a verbal description of both the piece and the dedicatee would rather resort to the vast array of adjectives implied by the multiple facets of "capriccio"-strong-willed, voluptuous, fickle, irritable, bizarre, fancy, even freakish (echoes from Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert are heard). The latter two dedicatees are found again, ironically together, in Un flipper... nel mare ("A Flipper... in the Sea") for two pianos and pre-recorded sounds: "To Cinzia and Francesco with running-water admiration and affection". In this case we learn from the horse's mouth that the inspirational spark, so to say, came from a childhood remembrance of the tv series, Flipper, a sort of aquatic Lassie from the 1960's, located in an imaginary Florida Coral Key Park & Marine Preserve. Such title, with it's parentheses à la Musorgsky, subsequently triggers an imitation of a pinball machine (curiously known in Italian as "flipper"), Mirenzi's writing here suggesting it's little ball jumping all over the place. Then, the harmonic structure of Johann Pachelbel's celebrated "Canon" emerges - one of Mirenzi's frequent bows to the past - only to yield, in turn, to the slowly expanding pre-recorded sound of the sea. (The score reads: "A recording of calm sea waves breaking on the Tono shore, July 2007). Such long waves produce a sound carpet, the so-called "Sunflower" melody is gradually put together over it. Then the musical texture gradually thickens, up to a majestic, profound climax, redolent of early Messiaen. The final music-box episode hosts again the melody heard before. From Un flipper... nel mare Mirenzi subsequently drew Il girasole ("The Sunflower", May 2008), an extrapolation of a part from a whole to make another whole. No philosophical pretense is involved here-just an empyrical experiment in musical writing. The composer embraces the principle that nothing will be forever what it is, and nothing can be forbidden to become something else-while remaining oneself, one would add, as the act of modifying affects form, not content. The Studio V sul "Vater unser" brings back remembrances of Mirenzi's school days and debut as a composer. It is offered here in solo piano version, but had it's première in Latina, back in 1992, as a choral piece, conducted by Andrea Lunghi (1943-1999), Mirenzi's never-forgotten friend and partner in musical explorations. The score was then transcribed for organ (two versions, with and without pedalboard), and finally for piano, suggesting that the composer may have a special affection for it. The chronological gap between this piece (plus the following two) and the rest of the CD is quite apparent. Here, Bach's original is segmented and stuffed with new chromatic material, also in polyphonic fashion, grafting new lines onto the existing ones, multiplying entries and avoiding abrupt simultaneous breaks. The piece is called Studio for the composer fulfilled the self-imposed task of keeping his original parts in fourth/fifth relationship among them. As one can notice, the performer adds extra emphasis to the chorale melody, quite apparent in the original, but not so easy to perceive here because of such fragmented and contrasted writing-sort of extreme development of the punctus contra punctum concept. In section two, the piece seems to come to an end for a couple of times, yet two sudden stops trigger new expectations in the listener. Then, once again, these are swept away by the quick finale, which both the compositional genre and Mirenzi's penchant for short endings make virtually mandatory. Some of the most typical and interesting traits of Mirenzi's later style are already apparent here-the inevitable flow of the polyphonic texture, the static chorale, the sense of loss of tonal reference points. Tre ("Three", October 11, 1988) and Tredici ("Thirteen", 1986), for solo flute, also emerge from the past. They document a bygone but not forgotten or rejected era. Both pieces seems to have been originated as instrumental extemporizations. Yet, as usual in historical avant-garde, scores are tightly structured, especially Tredici, with it's thirteen sections, each made up of twelve pitches, and it's fixed but variously alternating rhythm patterns. Once again - or perhaps, earlier than ever - we find a rigorous musical architecture,

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