Never Say No to a Rock Star: In the Studio with Dylan, Sinatra, Jagger, and More....
by
Glenn Berger
Schaffner Press
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From the
publisher's website:
In 1974, at the age of seventeen, author Glenn Berger served as "Schlepper" and apprentice to the legendary recording engineer Phil Ramone at New York City's A&R Studios, and was witness to music history on an almost daily and nightly basis as pop and rock icons such as Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Frank Sinatra, Burt Bacharach, Bette Midler, and James Brown performed their hit-making magic, honed their sound, strutted their stuff, bared their souls, and threw epic tantrums. In this memoir, full of revelatory and previously unknown anecdotal observations of these musical giants, Glenn recounts how he quickly learned the ropes to move up from schlepperhood to assistant to the tyrannical Ramone, and eventually, to become a recording engineer superstar himself. Not only is Never Say No to A Rock Star a fascinating, hilarious and poignant behind-the-scenes look of this musical Mecca, but Berger, now a prominent psychologist, looking back through the prism of his youthful experience and his years working as a counselor and therapist, provides a telling and honest examination of the nature of fame and success and the corollaries between creativity, madness and self-destruction.
Seriously Not All Right: Five Wars in Ten Years
Ron Capps
Schaffner Press
Hardcover
From the
publisher's website:
A veteran of five wars, Ron Capps- who served both as a senior military intelligence officer and a Foreign Service officer in conflicts ranging from Kosovo and Rwanda, to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Darfur -provides a wrenchingly honest account of his experiences and his struggle with PTSD, which he suffered as a result of the horrors he had witnessed yet was helpless to prevent. To monitor his emotional condition, he created a scale that ranged from "All Right" to "Seriously Not All Right;" but, after several years spent in the midst of extreme violence, trying to keep himself"All Right," he found himself plunging headlong into deep depression. One evening in the African desert, he attempted to take his own life, only to be pulled back from suicide by a miraculously timed phone call. SERIOUSLY NOT ALL RIGHT is his memoir that details not only his role as peacekeeper in these wars, but his return home and recovery (still ongoing) from PTSD, and his subsequent career as a teacher and founder of the Veterans Writing Project in Washington, D.C. where he provides veterans with the skills to tell their own stories, in order that they too might, in his words, "write their way home."
Ron Capps's debut memoir is an incisive look at the cost of combat and peacekeeping missions, and the limits of extreme violence humans can tolerate when they're powerless to stop it. Seriously Not All Right is also a harrowing and ultimately redemptive look at Capps's climb out of the post-traumatic stress disorder pit and what he did to help others once he succeeded. This is a well-written, timely memoir, with scene after vivid scene that lingers, that provides a possible healing path for veterans. Discover: An admirable, important memoir from a combat veteran and observer of genocide-Shelf Awareness, May 20th, 2014
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