"On February 25, 1963, Columbia Records released The Barbra Streisand Album. The first song was "Cry Me a River," and with that a star was born. Barbra Joan Streisand had a zany personality backed by a talent that Stephen Sondheim once described as "one of the two or three best voices in the world of singing songs," adding "It's not just her voice but her intensity, her passion and control." Harold Arlen, another of her favorite composers, commented,...

"The animations of Japan's Studio Ghibli are amongst the highest regarded in the movie industry. Their delightful films rank alongside the most popular non-English language films ever made, with each new eagerly-anticipated release a guaranteed box-office smash. Yet this highly profitable studio has remained fiercely independent, producing a stream of imaginative and individual animations. The studio's founders, long-time animators Isao Takahata and...

"Shows how Sayers used edgy, often hilarious metaphors to ignite new ways to think about Christianity, shocking people into seeing the truth of ancient doctrine in a new light. Urging readers to reassess interpretations of the Bible that impede the cause of Christ, Sayers helps twenty-first-century Christians navigate a society increasingly suspicious of evangelical vocabularies and find new ways to talk and think about faith and culture. Ultimately,...

Monet's dazzling depictions of flowers, sunsets, fields, and oceans, in which line and shape are suggested through pure color, changed the way we perceive our natural surroundings. His numerous series, in which he depicts the same object at varying times of the day and in different seasons, pushed the limits of representational art. His final series of water lilies are considered to have ushered in the abstract movement of the twentieth century. Overflowing...

The wild turbulence of his music, mirroring the swings in his popular acclaim, makes Van Morrison one of the most perplexing and mysterious figures in modern music. Marcus celebrates the unique world of his songs and performance through the extraordinary and unclassifiable moments in Morrison's career, beginning in 1965 and continuing to this day.

"In this unique biography, Fred Kaplan emphasizes Thomas Jefferson's genius with language and his ability to use the power of words to inspire and shape a nation. A man renowned for many talents, writing was one of the major activities of the stateman's life, though much of his best, most influential writing--with the exception of the letters he wrote up to his death, numbering approximately 100,000--was done by 1789, when Jefferson was just forty-six....

"To us, Van Gogh's paintings look utterly unique. His vivid palates and wildly interpretive portraits are unmistakably his--yet however revolutionary his style may have been, it was actually built on a strong foundation of paintings by other artists, both his contemporaries and those who came before him. Now, drawing on Van Gogh's own thoughtful and often poetic comments about the artists he venerated, Steven Naifeh gives a gripping account of his...