Geoffrey C. Ward

Con ingenio y ternura, Wynton Marsalis nos muestra cómo una verdadera comprensión del jazz, equilibrio perfecto en el escenario entre la expresión artística individual y el sacrificio por el bien comun, puede enriquecer todos los aspectos de nuestra vida, desde los mas intimos hasta los empresariales, en las aulas escolares y en los ayuntamientos. A traves de las paginas de este libro Marsalis nos ayuda a entender el siempre cambiante sentimiento del blues; nos revela los secretos que implica tocar y escuchar musica y nos transmite la sabiduria adquirida a traves de los años despues de trabajar con tres generaciones de musicos. Una leccion magistral sobre el jazz y la vida impartida por uno de los mas brillantes artistas americanos.

Description In this beautiful book, Pulitzer Prize--winning musician and composer Wynton Marsalis draws upon lessons he's learned from a lifetime in jazz-lessons that can help us all move to higher ground. With wit and candor he demystifies the music that is the birthright of every American and demonstrates how a real understanding of the central idea of jazz-the unique balance between self-expression and sacrifice for the common good exemplified on the bandstand-can enrich every aspect of our lives, from the bedroom to the boardroom, from the schoolroom to City Hall. Along the way, Marsalis helps us understand the life-changing message of the blues, reveals secrets about playing-and listening-and passes on wisdom he has gleaned from working with three generations of great musicians. Illuminating and inspiring, Moving to Higher Ground is a master class on jazz and life, conducted by a brilliant American artist.

Geoffrey Ward; Wynton MarsalisIn this book I hope to reach a new audience with the positive message of Americas greatest music, to show how great musicians demonstrate on the bandstand a mutual respect and trust that can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your lifefrom individual creativity and personal relationships to conducting business and understanding what it means to be American in the most modern sense. Wynton Marsalis In this beautiful book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musician and composer Wynton Marsalis explores jazz and how an understanding of it can lead to deeper, more original ways of being, living, and relatingfor individuals, communities, and nations. Marsalis shows us how to listen to jazz, and through stories about his life and the lessons he has learned from other music greats, he reveals how the central ideas in jazz can influence the way people think and even how they behave with others, changing self, family, and community for the better. At the heart of jazz is the expression of personality and individuality, coupled with an ability to listen to and improvise with others. Jazz as an artand as a way to move people and nations to higher groundis at the core of this unique, illuminating, and inspiring book, a master class on jazz and life by a brilliant American artist.

Based on the celebrated PBS television series about the men and women who lived through the cataclysmic trial of our nationhoodthe complete text of the magisterial illustrated work of history that The New York Times hailed as "a treasure for the eye and mind.""The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things.... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads: the suffering, the enormous tragedy of the whole thing." Shelby Foote, from The Civil WarNow Geoffrey Wards magisterial work of history is available in a text-only edition that interweaves the authors narrative with the voices of the men and women who lived through the cataclysmic trial of our nationhood: not just Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Robert E. Lee, but genteel Southern ladies and escaped slaves, cavalry officers and common foot soldiers who fought in Yankee blue and Rebel gray. The Civil War also includes essays by our most distinguished historians of the era: Don E. Fehrenbacher, on the wars origins; Barbara J. Fields, on the freeing of the slaves; Shelby Foote, on the wars soldiers and commanders; James M. McPherson, on the political dimensions of the struggle; and C. Vann Woodward, assessing the America that emerged from the wars ashes.

In this book I hope to reach a new audience with the positive message of Americas greatest music, to show how great musicians demonstrate on the bandstand a mutual respect and trust that can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your lifefrom individual creativity and personal relationships to conducting business and understanding what it means to be American in the most modern sense.Wynton MarsalisIn this beautiful book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musician and composer Wynton Marsalis explores jazz and how an understanding of it can lead to deeper, more original ways of being, living, and relatingfor individuals, communities, and nations. Marsalis shows us how to listen to jazz, and through stories about his life and the lessons he has learned from other music greats, he reveals how the central ideas in jazz can influence the way people think and even how they behave with others, changing self, family, and community for the better. At the heart of jazz is the expression of personality and individuality, coupled with an ability to listen to and improvise with others. Jazz as an artand as a way to move people and nations to higher groundis at the core of this unique, illuminating, and inspiring book, a master class on jazz and life by a brilliant American artist. Advance praise for Moving to Higher GroundAn absolute joy to read. Intimate, knowledgeable, supremely worthy of its subject. In addition to demolishing mediocre, uniformed critics, Moving to Higher Ground is a meaningful contribution to music scholarship.Toni MorrisonI think it should be in every bookstore, music store, and school in the country. Tony Bennett Jazz, for Wynton Marsalis, is nothing less than a search for wisdom. He thinks as forcefully, and as elegantly, as he swings. When he reflects on improvisation, his subject is freedom. When he reflects on harmony, his subject is diversity and conflict and peace. When he reflects on the blues, his subject is sorrow and the mastery of ithow to be happy without being blind. There is philosophy in Marsaliss trumpet, and in this book. Here is the lucid and probing voice of an uncommonly soulful man.Leon Wieseltier, literary editor, The New RepublicWynton Marsalis is absolutely the person who should write this book. Here he is, as young as morning, as fresh as dew, and already called one of the jazz greats. He is not only a seer and an exemplary musician, but a poet as well. He informs us that jazz was created, among other things, to expose the hypocrisy and absurdity of racism and other ignorances in our country. Poetry was given to human beings for the same reason. This book could be called How Love Can Change Your Life, for there could be no jazz without love. By love, of course, I do not mean mush, or sentimentality. Love can only exist with courage, and this book could not be written without Wynton Marsaliss courage. He has the courage to make powerful music and to love the music so, that he willingly shares its riches with the entire human family. We are indebted to him. Maya Angelou

Ferdinand Ward was the greatest swindler of the Gilded Age. Throughhis unapologetic villainy, he bankrupted Ulysses S. Grant and ran roughshod over the entire world of finance. Now, his compelling, behind-the-scenes story is toldtold by his great-grandson, award-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward.Ward was the Bernie Madoff of his day, a supposed genius at making big money fast on Wall Street who turned out to have been running a giant pyramid schemeone that ultimately collapsed in one of the greatest financial scandals in American history. The son of a Protestant missionary and small-town pastor with secrets of his own to keep, Ward came to New York at twenty-one and in less than a decade, armed with charm, energy, and a total lack of conscience, made himself the business partner of the former president of the United States and was widely hailed as the Young Napoleon of Finance. In truth, he turned out to be a complete fraud, his entire life marked by dishonesty, cowardice, and contempt for anything but his own interests.Drawing from thousands of family documents never before examined, Geoffrey C. Ward traces his great-grandfathers rapid rise to riches and fame and his even more dizzying fall from grace. There are mistresses and mansions along the way; fast horses and crooked bankers and corrupt New York officials; courtroom confrontations and six years in Sing Sing; and Ferdinands desperate scheme to kidnap his own son to get his hands on the estate his late wife had left the boy. Here is a great story about a classic American con artist, told with boundless charm and dry wit by one of our finest historians.

This enhanced eBook includes original audio recordings of presidential speeches, exclusive chapter introduction videos by Ken Burns and Geoffrey Ward, and special footage about the making of the PBS documentary, THE ROOSEVELTS.An extraordinarily vivid and personal portrait of Americas greatest political family and its enormous impact on our nation-the tie-in volume to the PBS documentary to air in the fall of 2014.This engaging, revelatory book is an intimate history of three extraordinary individuals from the same extraordinary family-Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Geoffrey C. Ward, distilling more than thirty years of thinking and writing about the Roosevelts, and the acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns help us understand for the first time that, despite the fierce partisanship of their eras and ours, the Roosevelts were far more united than divided. All the history the Roosevelts made is here, but this is primarily a book about human beings, each of whom somehow overcame obstacles that would have undone less forceful personalities, and all of whom wrestled in their lives with issues still familiar to the rest of us-anger and the need for forgiveness, courage and cowardice, confidence and self-doubt, loyalty to family and the need to be oneself. This is the story of the Roosevelts-no other American family ever touched so many lives.

This enhanced eBook includes original audio recordings of presidential speeches, exclusive chapter introduction videos by Ken Burns and Geoffrey Ward, and special footage about the making of the PBS documentary, THE ROOSEVELTS.An extraordinarily vivid and personal portrait of Americas greatest political family and its enormous impact on our nation-the tie-in volume to the PBS documentary to air in the fall of 2014.This engaging, revelatory book is an intimate history of three extraordinary individuals from the same extraordinary family-Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Geoffrey C. Ward, distilling more than thirty years of thinking and writing about the Roosevelts, and the acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns help us understand for the first time that, despite the fierce partisanship of their eras and ours, the Roosevelts were far more united than divided. All the history the Roosevelts made is here, but this is primarily a book about human beings, each of whom somehow overcame obstacles that would have undone less forceful personalities, and all of whom wrestled in their lives with issues still familiar to the rest of us-anger and the need for forgiveness, courage and cowardice, confidence and self-doubt, loyalty to family and the need to be oneself. This is the story of the Roosevelts-no other American family ever touched so many lives.

In this classic of American biography, based upon thousands of original documents, many never previously published, the prize-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward tells the dramatic story of Franklin Roosevelts unlikely rise from cloistered youth to the brink of the presidency with a richness of detail and vivid sense of time, place, and personality usually found only in fiction.In these pages, FDR comes alive as a fond but absent father and an often unfeeling husband--the story of Eleanor Roosevelts struggle to build a life independent of him is chronicled in fullas well as a charming but pampered patrician trying to find his way in the sweaty world of everyday politics and all-too willing willing to abandon allies and jettison principle if he thinks it will help him move up the political ladder. But somehow he also finds within himself the courage and resourcefulness to come back from a paralysis that would have crushed a less resilient man and then go on to meet and master the two gravest crises of his time.

Before Pearl Harbor, before polio and his entry into politics, FDR was a handsome, pampered, but strong-willed youth, the center of a rarefied world. In Before the Trumpet, the award-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward transports the reader to that worldHyde Park on the Hudson and Campobello Island, Groton and Harvard and the Continentto recreate as never before the formative years of the man who would become the 20th centurys greatest president. Here, drawn from thousands of original documents (many never previously published), is a richly-detailed, intimate biography, its central figure surrounded by a colorful cast that includes an opium smuggler and a pious headmaster; Franklins distant cousin, Theodore and his remarkable mother, Sara; and the still-more remarkable young woman he wooed and won, his cousin Eleanor. This is a tale that would grip the reader even if its central character had not grown up to be FDR.

Franklin Roosevelt contracted polio in the summer of 1921, resulting in permanent paralysis from the waist down. One year later, he went back to work. Noted historian Geoffrey C. Ward, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Parkman Prize and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, who is himself a polio survivor, investigates the courage and character of the man who became the greatest president of the twentieth century. The Comeback, a selection from A First-Class Temperament, the second volume in Wards monumental biography that began with Before the Trumpet, is the story of one extraordinary mans struggle to regain his feet and reenter public life. Before his illness, FDRs political future had seemed bright. He knew that pity was poison, that if the public understood the extent of his disability his career would be at an end. Roosevelt, therefore, had to teach himself the impossible: how to walkor seem to walkagain. This is that journey, following the future president from his disastrous attempt to return to his law office to his triumphant march down the aisle at the 1924 Democratic National Convention, where, leaning on his crutches, he delivered the triumphant Happy Warrior speech for ill-fated presidential candidate Al Smith and was hailed as a hero. It was FDRs new beginning. An eBook short.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the award-winning historian and filmmakers of The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The Roosevelts, and others: a richly illustrated, human-centered history of Americas founding struggleexpanding on the landmark, six-part PBS seriesFrom a small spark kindled in America, a flame has arisen not to be extinguished. Thomas PaineIn defeating the British Empire and giving birth to a new nation, the American Revolution turned the world upside down. Thirteen colonies on the Atlantic coast rose in rebellion, won their independence, and established a new form of government that radically reshaped the continent and inspired independence movements and democratic reforms around the globe.The American Revolution was at once a war for independence, a civil war, and a world war, fought by neighbors on American farms and between global powers an ocean or more away. In this sumptuous volume, historian Geoffrey C. Ward ably steers us through the international forces at play, telling the story not from the top down but from the bottom upand through the eyes of not only our Founding Fathers but also those of ordinary soldiers, as well as underrepresented populations such as women, African Americans, Native Americans, and American Loyalists, asking who exactly was entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.Enriched by guest essays from lauded historians such as Vincent Brown, Maya Jasanoff, Jane Kamensky, and Alan Taylor, and by an astonishing array of prints, drawings, paintings, texts, and pamphlets from the time period, as well as newly commissioned art and mapsand woven together with the words of Thomas Paine The American Revolution reveals a nation still grappling with the questions that fueled its remarkable founding.