pulitzer prize

For eighteen years, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna Buchanan had one of the most exciting, frightening, and heartbreaking jobs a newspaperwoman could have -- working the police beat for the Miami Herald. Having covered more crimes than most cops, Buchanan garnered a reputation as a savvy, gritty writer with a unique point of view and inimitable style. Now, back in print after many years, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face is her classic collection of true stories, as witnessed and reported by Buchanan herself. From cold-blooded murder, to violence in the heat of passion, to the everyday insanity of the city streets, Edna Buchanan reveals it all in her own trademark blend of compassionate reporting, hard-nosed investigation, and wry humor that has made her a legend in the world of journalism.

This tall, slender man is considered by many to be the greatest American composer of the 20th century. His most famous work is about two minutes long - "Fanfare for the Common Man." His most notable compositions are the music for the ballets "Billy the Kid", "Rodeo", and "Appalachian Spring", the last for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. He also received an Academy Award for the music he wrote for the film "The Heiress." "Long Time Ago" is what could be called art songs of the twentieth century. The 1st and 2nd sections are beautifully orchestrated versions of folk songs. In the "Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson", Copland has captured the essence of her poems. Both American soloists, Thomas Hampson, baritone, and Dawn Upshaw, soprano,are both among the finest singers in the world. Copland quotation - "To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable."

A compelling chorus of voices that together depict the experiences of the many Vietnamese expatriates living in America.

On Friday noon, July the Twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.

"With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey,' one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death -- and to the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition."

"This book begins with the narrator, Calliope Stephanides, explaining that he was "born twice," first as a baby girl in 1960, then as a teenage boy in 1974. To explain his situation, Cal starts in 1922, when his grandparents came to America. In his role as the "prefetal narrator," he tells the love story of this couple, who are brother and sister; his parents are blood relatives as well. Then he tells his own story, which is that of a female child growing up in suburban Detroit with typical adolescent concerns. The story questions what it is that makes us who we are and concludes that one's inner essence stays the same, even in light of drastic outer changes."

"In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He 'preached men into the Civil War,' then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father - an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

"This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten."