The cold rain and snow have started to fade away and with it, we're dusting off a super hot one from a soaring seven nights at New York's old Academy of Music. On the brink of their revelatory Europe '72 tour, the Grateful Dead brought their sevenfold merriment to winter-worn Manhattan and boy, did they warm things up! Particularly on March 26 when the dual piano/Hammond combo of Godchaux and McKernan was in full effect and Alabama singer Donna Jean Godchaux began to find her vocal footing in the band's rich harmonies.
It's hard to believe, but 2005's double-disc #1's is the first multi-disc retrospective of Reba McEntire's career, which has had several single-disc sets prior to this. While this, like many similarly titled collections, does not strictly follow the rules set up in its title – not counting the two new songs that open up each disc here, there are 11 songs among these 35 tracks that did not hit number one in Billboard's country charts – it's hard to complain about this. After all, #1's includes all of her number one singles, and those 11 hit singles that did not make it to the top spot all were Top Five singles and rank among her best work. Taken together, they make for the best overview of and introduction to McEntire's lengthy, consistent career.
Russian literature famously probes the depths of the human soul. These 36 half-hour lectures delve into this extraordinary body of work under the guidance of Professor Irwin Weil of Northwestern University, an award-winning teacher at Northwestern University and a legend among educators in the United States and Russia. Professor Weil introduces you to such masterpieces as Tolstoy's War and Peace, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Gogol's Dead Souls, Chekhov's The Seagull, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, and many other great novels, stories, plays, and poems by Russian authors.