Thomas Kelly

Fired from the mayor's office, a political flack ends up in his old neighborhood, with a newly dangerous mission Jimmy Dolan should have known better than to shove Frankie Keefe. Keefe may be scum-a corrupt teamster president who's looking forward to crushing Jimmy's father in the next union election-but Jimmy is the mayor's right hand man, and kowtowing to scum is his job. After hearing one too many cracks about his father, Jimmy shoves the union...

Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing...

We are currently a nation of underachievers. This book describes in detail how we can move from our present disfunctionally designed 19th Century school system to a 21st-century system designed to deliver high achievement for all students. The present system is failing all students in terms of learning to their true ability levels. We can eliminate the achievement gap between races, genders and economic classes and do it all with existing resources...

The Salvadoran priest Rutilio Grande, SJ, was killed in a hail of bullets on March 12, 1977, along with two passengers in the car he drove. The impact of this killing transformed his friend and archbishop, Oscar Romero, as well as the church in Latin America and throughout the world. How could powerful forces within the overwhelmingly Catholic country of El Salvador execute a Roman Catholic priest and two innocent people in broad daylight in front...

From Gregorian chant to Bach's Brandenburg Concerti, the music of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods is both beautiful and intriguing, expanding our horizons as it nourishes our souls. In this Very Short Introduction, Thomas Forrest Kelly provides not only a compact overview of the music itself, but also a lively look at the many attempts over the last two centuries to revive it. Kelly shows that the early-music revival has long been grounded...