Play It One More Time

While 50 year-old Jack Phillips, a jazz trumpet player, is driving to his gig at the Famous Door in New Orleans, fantasizing about his favorite scenario, If I had known then what I know now, he has an accident, and wakes up in the hospital, 23 years in the past; January, 1968. He remembers what happened 1968, one of the most turbulent years in modern American history. It was a terrible year; the Korean capture of the Pueblo, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Klan killings, civil rights and anti-war riots in the streets, the Chicago riots at the Democratic convention. What should he do? Could he actually change history for the better? Should he even try? What about the unintended consequences of his actions? How could he find someone in the government high enough to have access to the President? Jack writes two of his predictions to his U.S. Senator, John Stennis. When Jacks second prediction comes true, Senator Stennis begins to believe his story, and relays his information to the Attorney General, because he doesnt trust J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, livid that a senator has information before the FBI does, assigns two of his sociopathic special operatives to discover Stennis source. Jack has a physical confrontation with one of them, and makes the now-crippled operative a lifelong enemy, bent on revenge. Did he actually change any of the tragic events of 1968? Were there unintended consequences of his actions? This historical fiction is full of political intrigue, FBI corruption, the societal tumult in the streets, organized crime, and a true picture of the jazz music scene of New Orleans at the time.

Mallory is excited about the six-week arts electives program at Fern Falls Elementary—until she gets stuck in her last-choice class, band. To make matters worse, she is assigned to the tuba, and when she plays, it sounds more like passing gas than music. She dreads the showcase at the end of the program. But with some good guidance from her mom and her band teacher, Mallory learns the meaning of "practice makes perfect" and that, in fact, making music can be lots of fun!

Mallory is excited about the six-week arts electives program at Fern Falls Elementary?until she gets stuck in her last-choice class, band. To make matters worse, she is assigned to the tuba, and when she plays, it sounds more like passing gas than music. She dreads the showcase at the end of the program. But with some good guidance from her mom and her band teacher, Mallory learns the meaning of "practice makes perfect" and that, in fact, making music can be lots of fun!

What would you do if a strange accident suddenly put you in a position where you could change history. Knowing what will happen over the next 150 years, would you decide to try or just let things go as before. This is the dilemma that SFC James Mitchell and his detail of mostly young soldiers will need to decide. What can they do to try to make things better or will they just do nothing but watch as history repeats itself?

Covering—the musical practice of one artist recording or performing another composer's song—has always been an attribute of popular music. In 2009, the internet database Second Hand Songs estimated that there are 40,000 songs with at least one cover version. Some of the more common variations of this "appropriationist" method of musical quotation include traditional forms such as patriotic anthems, religious hymns such as Amazing Grace, Muzak's instrumental interpretations, Christmas classics, and children's songs. Novelty and comedy collections from parodists such as Weird Al Yankovic also align in the cover category, as does the "larcenous art" of sampling, and technological variations in dance remixes and mash-ups. Film and television soundtracks and advertisers increasingly rely on versions of familiar pop tunes to assist in marketing their narratives and products. The cover phenomenon in popular culture may be viewed as a postmodern manifestation in music as artists revisit, reinterpret and re-examine a significant cross section of musical styles, periods, genres, individual records, and other artists and their catalogues of works.The cover complex, with its multiple variations, issues, contexts, and re-contextualizations comprises an important and rich popular culture text. These re-recordings represent artifacts which embody artistic, social, cultural, historical, commercial, biographical, and novel meanings. Through homage, allusion, apprenticeship, and parody, among other modes, these diverse musical quotations express, preserve, and distribute popular culture, popular music and their intersecting historical narratives. Play it Again represents the first collection of critical perspectives on the many facets of cover songs in popular music.

What if Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson had stood side by side in Cleveland’s outfield? What if integration had taken place in the major leagues before 1947? Who would have won the World Series had a strike not shortened the 1994 season? In this compilation of fantasy scenarios, the history of baseball from 1869 to the controversial 2003 playoffs is literally rewritten by fifty journalists, historians, authors and former baseball players. Topics include playing for pay, Merkle’s Boner, rival leagues, the 1919 Series, Mickey Owens and the dropped strike, and integration. Chronologically organized, the experts take up the major events of each era and speculate on the long-and short-term outcomes had history followed a different, but still likely, course. The book concludes with an appendix in which the panel members hold forth on general-interest topics such as star-crossed players who might have gone on to Hall of Fame careers, the greatest big-game players, and World Series pairings.

Sam Schoenfeld was a basketball wizard! He was one of the most outstanding basketball players of his generation, and was compared favorably to Nat Holman, who was considered the very best. He became one of the top high school basketball coaches in New York City history, and then went on to become one of the best college basketball officials as well. This book details the unlimited passion that Sam had for the game of basketball and of his impressive contributions and achievements in it. The reader is taken along for an exciting ride through the short but full life of an extraordinary man!

As editor of the Guardian, one of the world's foremost newspapers, Alan Rusbridger abides by the relentless twenty-four-hour news cycle. But increasingly in midlife, he feels the gravitational pull of music—especially the piano. He sets himself a formidable challenge: to fluently learn Chopin's magnificent Ballade No. 1 in G minor, arguably one of the most difficult Romantic compositions in the repertory. With pyrotechnic passages that require feats of memory, dexterity, and power, the piece is one that causes alarm even in battle-hardened concert pianists. He gives himself a year. Under ideal circumstances, this would have been a daunting task. But the particular year Rusbridger chooses turns out to be one of frenetic intensity. As he writes in his introduction, "Perhaps if I'd known then what else would soon be happening in my day job, I might have had second thoughts. For it would transpire that, at the same time, I would be steering the Guardian through one of the most dramatic years in its history." It was a year that began with WikiLeaks' massive dump of state secrets and ended with the Guardian's revelations about widespread phone hacking at News of the World. "In between, there were the Japanese tsunami, the Arab Spring, the English riots . . . and the death of Osama Bin Laden," writes Rusbridger. The test would be to "nibble out" twenty minutes per day to do something totally unrelated to the above. Rusbridger's description of mastering the Ballade is hugely engaging, yet his subject is clearly larger than any one piece of classical music. Play It Again deals with focus, discipline, and desire but is, above all, about the sanctity of one's inner life in a world dominated by deadlines and distractions. What will you do with your twenty minutes?