Books about Prodigious from Amazon.com

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Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.

Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. In candid and lively prose, he records the all-too-normal preoccupations of a young man making his way in the brilliant social and artistic circles of the prewar Russian capital. Virtually every artist and musician of note appears in these pages, in penetrating and not always flattering vignettes. Prokofiev's main subject, however, is music, its creation and its performance. He reveals his own developing aesthetic principles through his assessments of the works of others, even as he composes such early masterpieces as the First and Second Piano Concertos, The Ugly Duckling, the First Violin Concerto, and the Classical Symphony.

An inexhaustibly rich portrait of a vibrant artistic culture on the edge of war and revolution, Prokofiev's Diaries are both a dramatic illumination of a great composer's creativity and an indispensable contribution to our understanding of musical modernism. They constitute an essential and entertaining reference for all lovers of Prokofiev's music..
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This title is the winner of the Adele Mellen Prize for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship The works that Sor Ines de la Cruz (1648/51 - 1695) wrote specifically for the church have largely been neglected until now. This book on the devotional exercises of one of Mexico's most highly acclaimed writers provides a passageway into the relatively unexplored religious area of her life and adds another layer of understanding to the rest of her writings. Relatively untouched by critical review, the ejercicios/exercises were thought to have little, if any, literary value in comparison with her more canonized output. However, this insightful study and annotated bilingual translation gives this prominent writer the attention she deserves as an author of religious and devotional texts. The author examines the thematic, rhetorical, historical and scientific elements of late seventeenth-century colonial Mexico and their impact on the ejercicios/exercises. He also highlights how the ejercicios/exercises function as a theologically sound Church document that offers meditations and exercises on humility, obedience, the Incarnation and the Immaculate Conception. As part of this process, he signals how Sor Juana's religious discourse provides important continuity with her secular production. The publication of this annotated bilingual edition offers Sor Juana's English-speaking audience the opportunity to experience her prowess as author of devotional literature..
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The home run has changed the game of baseball, moving it into a sport where might makes right and fans clamor for the clout. Home Run’s Most Wanted™: The Top 10 Book of Monumental Dingers, Prodigious Swingers, and Everything Long-Ball celebrates all there is about the home run, from the folks that hit it, the guys that serve it up, and even the voices proclaiming, “It’s outta here!”

David Vincent, called “The Sultan of Swat Stats” by ESPN, brings it all to you in this fact-filled smorgasbord of home run knowledge. His detailed and varied top-ten lists include top home run totals position by position; players with the most homers against the Yankees; the youngest and oldest to “go yard”; pitchers who surrendered the most homers; the states that have birthed the most top hitters; home run hitters with the longest last names; and even the top totals for players with the common last name of Williams.

There’s so much more, too. With a database of every single round-tripper ever hit, Vincent can present just about anything home run related you can imagine, and does so in this book. From the interesting and surprising to the humorous and just plain offbeat, Home Run’s Most Wanted™ fills the bases with fun trivia about the longest ball of them all.
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