English Majors: A Comedy

ENGLISH MAJORS. You know who you are and here is a book celebrating the secret society of those who, though they may be chauffeuring kids to swim lessons or writing Unix programs or frying cheeseburgers, still could, if need be, write a term paper on the water imagery in The Waste Land.

Animal House meets Casablanca in this outrageous snowboarding comedy. Rick Rambis and his friends are having the time of their lives on Bull Mountain until the legendary Papa Muntz' son decides to sell the mountain to sleazy land developer John …

Bull Mountain, Alaska, is a no frills ski resort, and the staff is a bunch of partying snowboard bums. The late founder, Papa Muntz, was famed for skiing with his backside exposed, and in fact is so memorialized by a statue. But his son, Ted, plans to sell the resort to hotshot ski mogul John Majors, who starts turning it into a slick resort, which of course has no room for most of the staff. The exception is Rick, the most serious of the bunch. But there's a complication: Rick met Majors' stepdaughter Anna on vacation in Mexico, and he's never gotten over a crush he had on her, even though she's about to marry a great guy. And Rick is also fiercely loyal to his friends.

Unlike other labels subjected to exhaustive multi-disc retrospectives like this whopping ten-disc Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records – The First Fifty Years, Warner Brothers never embodied a scene or sound: they've always embodied what a major label should be – a dominant force that chronicles and dictates the sound of the mainstream. Coming out at the tail-end of 2008, when the influence of major labels is on a slow steady decline, Revolutions in Sound can be seen as a portrait of a time that's beginning to recede into the past: a time when there was such a thing as mass entertainment, when the pop audience all shared a common bond of hit records they either loved or rallied against. Perhaps the greatest things about this monumental box set is that it captures that colossus while also illustrating that for a while, majors did take risks. Of course, Warner was the riskiest of all the majors, never held back by an anti-rock & roll sourpuss like Mitch Miller, who struggled to keep CBS out of the tumult of the '60s (this with no less than Bob Dylan as the label's flagship rock artist). Instead, Warner embraced the underground, recording some of the strangest to shake out of the '60s, and that adventure fits a label that turned to rock & roll to help establish themselves as a real player at the turn of the '60s.

The surprising story of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and the scrappy band of rebel men and women who followed them.