From the bestselling author of the award-winning How Shostakovich Changed My Mind comes a new book about the cathartic power of music. For critic and composer Stephen Johnson, there have been moments when music has confronted him with life-changing insights. Some of these have been hard to accept but once accepted they have opened up new possibilities of thinking, feeling and living. Through an exploration of seven pieces – by Anton Bruckner, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Johann Sebastian ...

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BodegaA Detective Sarah Renner Short StoryNew Orleans Homicide Detective, Sarah Renner and her partner, Gabriel Lucas investigate a late night robbery homicide in an uptown bodega. The blitz style attack leaves the scene in chaos and Renner and Lucas work round the clock to solve this senseless crime.

A captive woman, a lover betrayed, an idealistic journalist.Three women - their fates strangely aligned by a killer obsessed with retribution.Melbourne Spotlight journalist Kim Prescott is promoted to the TV reporting staff after the program's expose of the Tugga's Mob murders in Australia and New Zealand was a ratings bonanza.The TV show's high progile now attracts stories.One anonymous tip-off will horrify the nation all over again. Despite the scandal that ne...

The New Orleans murder rate is on the rise in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the city is reeling. With police resources on the decline, Homicide detective Sarah Renner and her partner Gabriel Lucas investigate a case where a gang member is found fatally stabbed in a local bar. The deeper the investigation leads them the more both detectives learn the lengths people will go to when their lives are torn apart.

Two Melbourne TV journalists are on a well-earned holiday, travelling New Zealand in a motorhome. Will they survive a monster storm and a killer on the loose?Kim Prescott survived a killer's bullet in Melbourne but can't shake the PTSD. For Jo Trescowthick the trip is a chance to confront family demons. The third in the Melbourne Spotlight series finds Kim and Jo on a road trip from Auckland on the north island to the tourist mecca of Queenstown in the deep south; Rotorua mud pools...

What happens on tour stays on tour was the mantra for the southern hemisphere backpackers who swarmed Europe in the 1980s. Foreign countries had to be explored and devoured in every way possible.Waikato-born Judy Williams worked hard for her big OE: London, Paris, Rome, Gallipoli; and her adventures were dutifully recorded in her diary.A diary that also recorded how the obsessive Tugga Tancred and his Kiwi mates turned Judy's trip of a lifetime into a nightmare of sly sexua...

Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born black nationalist and originator of the "Back to Africa" movement during the 1900s, was a passionate and formidable orator and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey went on to become an inspiration for many future civil rights activists.Marcus Garvey: A Biography by Stephen Johnson provides an in-depth look into the incredible life of this truly remarkable man, his vision for pan-Africanism, and his unrelentin...

Music broadcaster and composer Stephen Johnson explores how Shostakovich's music took shape under Stalin's reign of terror, and how it gave form to the hopes of an oppressed people. Johnson writes of the healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness and tells of how Shostakovich's music lent him unexpected strength in his struggle with bipolar disorder.

The Eighth Symphony was going to be different from anything Mahler had ever done before. The intensely personal dramas of his earlier symphonies were a thing of the past - or rather, they were now to be seen as preludes to this new, culminating symphonic statement: he was quite sure it was the greatest thing he had ever written. The first seven symphonies were all, in their very different ways, acts of private confession, the unburdening of a hypersensitive soul, struggling to make sense o...

What can you do when the Cold War goes from a simmer to boiling?In East Germany, the kinder create a symbol of hope to halt the nuclear missiles.Erfurt, October 1962. Teenager Ingrid Richter's life involves adventures with the Pioneers, walks in the Steigerwald, the annual Martini festival in the Altstadt. In a few weeks, she will be gliding across the skating rink with dreams of representing East Germany at the Olympics.Ingrid’s schoolteacher shatters that peaceful ...

For Gustav Mahler, there was nothing abstract or escapist about music. The symphony must be like the world, he insisted. It must embrace everything. He lived up to that ideal spectacularly, creating works of such emotional range and imaginative power that each feels like a world in itself. Uniquely, Mahler made himself the prism through which that wealth of experience is refracted. This book follows Mahlers development as man and composer, and sets out the experiences the personal joys and...