TWO NEW BOOKS ABOUT LES PAUL!

LES PAUL GUITAR GENIUS

This is the story of how Les Paul created the world's first solid- body electric guitar, countless other inventions that changed modern music, and one truly epic career in rock and roll. How to make a microphone? A broomstick, a cinderblock, a telephone, a radio. How to make an electric guitar? A record player's arm, a speaker, some tape. How to make a legendary inventor? A few tools, a lot of curiosity, and an endless faith in what is possible. Featuring richly detailed, dynamic illustrations by Brett Helquist, this unforgettable biography will resonate with inventive readers young and old.

THE BIRTH OF LOUD

“A hot-rod joy ride through mid-20th-century American history” (The New York Times Book Review), this one-of-a-kind narrative masterfully recreates the rivalry between the two men who innovated the electric guitar’s amplified sound—Leo Fender and Les Paul—and their intense competition to convince rock stars like the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton to play the instruments they built. In the years after World War II, music was evolving from big-band jazz into rock ’n’ roll—and these louder styles demanded revolutionary instruments. When Leo Fender’s tiny firm marketed the first solid-body electric guitar, the Esquire, musicians immediately saw its appeal. Not to be out-maneuvered, Gibson, the largest guitar manufacturer, raced to build a competitive product. The company designed an “axe” that would make Fender’s Esquire look cheap and convinced Les Paul—whose endorsement Leo Fender had sought—to put his name on it. Thus was born the guitar world’s most heated rivalry: Gibson versus Fender, Les versus Leo. While Fender was a quiet, half-blind, self-taught radio repairman, Paul was a brilliant but headstrong pop star and guitarist who spent years toying with new musical technologies. Their contest turned into an arms race as the most inventive musicians of the 1950s and 1960s—including bluesman Muddy Waters, rocker Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Eric Clapton—adopted one maker’s guitar or another. By 1969 it was clear that these new electric instruments had launched music into a radical new age, empowering artists with a vibrancy and volume never before attainable. In “an excellent dual portrait” (The Wall Street Journal), Ian S. Port tells the full story in The Birth of Loud, offering “spot-on human characterizations, and erotic paeans to the bodies of guitars” (The Atlantic). “The story of these instruments is the story of America in the postwar era: loud, cocky, brash, aggressively new” (The Washington Post).

EAGERLY ANTICIPATED SEQUELS...

MOLOKA’I

It has been over fifteen years since Alan Brennert penned his novel MOLOKA’I in which a girl named “Rachel Kalama at age seven discovers she has leprosy while growing up in Honolulu during the 1890s. Despite being part of a big, loving Hawaiian family, her dreams of meeting her father are shattered when she is sent to live in a leper colony.” Mr. Brennert’s sequel tells the story of Ruth, “the daughter that Rachel Kalama was forced to give up at birth. Ruth is adopted by a Japanese couple who raise her on a strawberry and grape farm in California. She marries, but is unjustly interned at Manzanar Relocation Camp during World War II. After the war, she receives a letter from a woman who says she is Ruth's birth mother, Rachel.”

THE AMERICAN AGENT

THE AMERICAN AGENT is the fifteenth installment in the wildly popular Maisie Dobbs series written by Jacqueline Winspear. “Beloved heroine Maisie Dobbs (described as ‘one of the great fictional heroines’) investigates the mysterious murder of an American war correspondent in London during the Blitzkrieg of World War II. The author once again creates a historically accurate tale of love and war, terror and survival” that offers so much for the reader to contemplate on a personal level as well. As one reviewer so correctly summarized: “Reading a Maisie Dobbs book is a little like spending time with an old friend you don't see often enough.”