Preacher, Politician, Patriot

Intrada announces a 25th-anniversary edition of John Williams' Oscar-nominated score to the 2000 Columbia Pictures/Centropolis film The Patriot. Throughout Williams' long and treasured career he had developed a fresh, Americana voice, first coming to the fore in his 1969 score to The Reivers, then furthered a few years later with The Cowboys and quite powerfully in an unexpected place—-the Smallville sequences of Superman. It was a style that he would return to periodically and The Patriot provided a showcase for this style. The score involves three principal themes that correspond to protagonist Martin’s past, present, and future—the war trauma theme, the love theme and the patriot theme. As the themes weave throughout the score, Williams' beloved epic style is on full display, as well as exciting action music. It's all here in this lengthy and powerful work. Williams wrote his score for The Patriot over the course of about two months, a length of time he described as “fairly generous.” He then recorded the score over eight sessions between May 6 and May 20, 2000. For this expanded 3-CD set, producer Mike Matessino took a meticulous approach to restoring the score for full presentation as well as preserving the unique and artistic presentation of the original Hollywood Records album. As Matessino writes in in his producer’s note

Intrada announces a 25th-anniversary edition of John Williams' Oscar-nominated score to the 2000 Columbia Pictures/Centropolis film The Patriot. Throughout Williams' long and treasured career he had developed a fresh, Americana voice, first coming to the fore in his 1969 score to The Reivers, then furthered a few years later with The Cowboys and quite powerfully in an unexpected place—-the Smallville sequences of Superman. It was a style that he would return to periodically and The Patriot provided a showcase for this style. The score involves three principal themes that correspond to protagonist Martin’s past, present, and future—the war trauma theme, the love theme and the patriot theme. As the themes weave throughout the score, Williams' beloved epic style is on full display, as well as exciting action music. It's all here in this lengthy and powerful work. Williams wrote his score for The Patriot over the course of about two months, a length of time he described as “fairly generous.” He then recorded the score over eight sessions between May 6 and May 20, 2000. For this expanded 3-CD set, producer Mike Matessino took a meticulous approach to restoring the score for full presentation as well as preserving the unique and artistic presentation of the original Hollywood Records album. As Matessino writes in in his producer’s note

Often dismissed by scholars as an opportunistic politician whose ideas lacked historical import, Theodore Roosevelt has been underestimated as a thinker. But to disdain Roosevelt’s politics is to overlook his important and lasting contributions to the shape of modern America, says the author of this compelling new study of the 26th president of the United States. Joshua Hawley examines Roosevelt’s political thought more deeply than ever before to arrive at a fully revised understanding of his legacy: Roosevelt galvanized a twenty-year period of national reform that permanently altered American politics and Americans’ expectations for government, social progress, and presidents.

The book explores the historical context of Theodore Roosevelt’s politics, its intellectual sources, its practice, and its effect on his era and our own. Hawley finds that Roosevelt developed a coherent political science centered on the theme of righteousness, and this “warrior republicanism” was what made the progressive era possible. The debates of Roosevelt’s era were driven largely by his ideas, and from those debates emerged the grammar of our contemporary politics. Casting new light on the fertility and breadth of Roosevelt’s thought, Hawley reveals the full extent of his achievement in twentieth-century intellectual history.

A dad who works for the U.S. State Department tries to keep the peace with his two sons, one who's a senator and the other a folk-singing Iraq war vet.