While We Re Young

Alec Wilder

The music of Alec Wilder (1907-1980) blends several American musical traditions, such as jazz and the American popular song, with classical European forms and techniques. Stylish and accessible, Wilder's musical oeuvre ranged from sonatas, suites, concertos, operas, ballets, and art songs to woodwind quintets, brass quintets, jazz suites, and hundreds of popular songs. In this biography and critical investigation of Wilder's music, Philip Lambert chronicles Wilder's early work as a part-time student at the Eastman School of Music, his ascent through the ranks of the commercial recording industry in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, his turn toward concert music from the 1950s onward, and his devotion late in his life to the study of American popular songs of the first half of the twentieth century. The book discusses some of his best-known music, such as the revolutionary octets and songs such as "I'll Be Around," "While We're Young," and "Blackberry Winter," and explains the unique blend of cultivated and vernacular traditions in his singular musical language.

When We Were Young and Unafraid

THE STORY: In the early 1970s, before Roe v. Wade, before the Violence Against Women Act, Agnes has turned her quiet bed and breakfast into one of the few spots where victims of domestic violence can seek refuge. But to Agnes’s dismay, her latest runaway, Mary Anne, is beginning to influence Agnes’s college-bound daughter Penny. As the drums of a feminist revolution grow louder outside of Agnes’s tiny world, Agnes is forced to confront her own presumptions about the women she’s spent her life trying to help.

Ken Kennison is not his real name. His drug-addicted parents sell him to an unscrupulous lawyer while he is still an infant. But cruel fate intervenes, and Kenny spends the next seventeen years of his life being shuffled from one foster home to the next. With every new home and family, Kenny seeks the care and love that every child needs-and that most take for granted. But instead, he receives only variations of physical and mental abuse. Teen-aged Kenny finds a journal, and as he travels in search of his past, he records his observations, mostly in poetic prose. Despite his troubled childhood, Kenny remains a good person, and at the end of his life, he is granted a special gift. Years later, Will Healy, a successful young author, learns of Kenny's gift and how it has dramatically changed his life. But the best is yet to come