[PDF] Beethovens Skull eBook

Author : Tim Rayborn
Publisher : Skyhorse
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 18,17 MB
Release : 2016-11-15
Category : Music
ISBN : 1510712720

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Beethoven’s Skull is an unusual and often humorous survey of the many strange happenings in the history of Western classical music. Proving that good music and shocking tabloid-style stories make excellent bedfellows, it presents tales of revenge, murder, curious accidents, and strange fates that span more than two thousand years. Highlights include: A cursed song that kills those who hear it A composer who lovingly cradles the head of Beethoven’s corpse when his remains are exhumed half a century after his death A fifteenth-century German poet who sings of the real-life Dracula A dream of the devil that inspires a virtuoso violin piece Unlike many music books that begin their histories with the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, Beethoven’s Skull takes the reader back to the world of ancient Greece and Rome, progressing through the Middle Ages and all the way into the twentieth century. It also looks at myths and legends, superstitions, and musical mysteries, detailing the ways that musicians and their peers have been rather horrible to one another over the centuries.

Author : Russell Martin Lydia Nibley
Publisher : Charlesbridge
Page : 130 pages
File Size : 18,62 MB
Release : 2009-02-01
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 1607341352

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Introduces the life of the Austrian composer, along with the story of a lock of his hair cut by a barber after his death, which was kept by various owners and the analysis of which revealed the high level of lead present in the composer's body.

Author : Russell Martin
Publisher : Crown
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 19,69 MB
Release : 2002-01-08
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0767910818

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The basis for the movie of the same name, an astonishing tale of one lock of hair and its amazing travels--from nineteenth-century Vienna to twenty-first-century America. When Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying in 1827, a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller came to pay his respects to the great composer, snipping a lock of Beethoven's hair as a keepsake--as was custom at the time--in the process. For a century, the lock of hair was a treasured Hiller family relic, until it somehow found its way to the town of Gilleleje, in Nazi-occupied Denmark. There, it was given to a local doctor, Kay Fremming, who was deeply involved in the effort to help save hundreds of hunted and frightened Jews. After Fremming's death, his daughter assumed ownership of the lock, and eventually consigned it for sale at Sotheby's, where two American Beethoven enthusiasts, Ira Brilliant and Che Guevara, purchased it in 1994. Subsequently, they and others instituted a series of complex forensic tests in the hope of finding the probable causes of the composer's chronically bad health, his deafness, and the final demise that Ferdinand Hiller had witnessed all those years ago. The results, revealed for the first time here, are the most compelling explanation yet offered for why one of the foremost musicians the world has ever known was forced to spend much of his life in silence. In Beethoven's Hair, Russell Martin has created a rich historical treasure hunt, a tale of false leads, amazing breakthroughs, and incredible revelations. This unique and fascinating book is a moving testament to the power of music, the lure of relics, the heroism of the Resistance movement, and the brilliance of molecular science.

Author : Bess Lovejoy
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 11,97 MB
Release : 2013-03-12
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1451654987

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For some of the most influential figures in history, death marked the start of a new adventure. The famous deceased have been stolen, burned, sold, pickled, frozen, stuffed, impersonated, and even filed away in a lawyer's office. Their fingers, teeth, toes, arms, legs, skulls, hearts, lungs, and nether regions have embarked on voyages that crisscross the globe and stretch the imagination.

Author : Georgia Bragg
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 41,86 MB
Release : 2023-01-31
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 1547614536

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This award-winning book for reluctant readers is a fascinating collection of remarkable deaths--and not for the faint of heart. Over the course of history, men and women have lived and died. In fact, getting sick and dying can be a big, ugly mess--especially before the modern medical care that we all enjoy today. From King Tut's ancient autopsy to Albert Einstein's great brain escape, How They Croaked contains all the gory details of the awful ends of nineteen awfully famous people. Don't miss the companion, How They Choked!

Author : Stanley Finger
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 585 pages
File Size : 13,13 MB
Release : 2019
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0190464623

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Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) was always a controversial figure, as was his doctrine, later called phrenology. Although often portrayed as a discredited buffoon, who believed he could assess a person's strengths and weaknesses by measuring cranial bumps, he was, in fact, a serious physician-scientist, who strove to answer timely questions about the mind, brain, and behavior. In many ways a remarkable visionary, his seminal ideas would become tenets of modern behavioral neuroscience. Among other things, he was the first scientist to promote publicly the idea of specialized cortical areas for diverse higher functions, while taking metaphysics out of his new science of mind. Moreover, although he obviously placed too much emphasis on "tell-tale" skull features (mistakenly believing that the cranium faithfully reflects the features of underlying brain areas), he fully understood the strength of "convergent operations," conducting neuroanatomical, developmental, cross-species, gender-comparison, and brain-damage studies on both humans and animals in his attempts to unravel the mysteries of brain organization. Rather than looking upon Gall's "organology" as one of science's great mistakes, this book provides a fresh look at the man and his doctrine. The authors delve into his motives, what was known about the brain during the 1790s, and the cultural demands of his time. Gall is rightfully presented as an early-19th-century biologist, anthropologist, philosopher, and physician with an inquisitive mind and a challenging agenda--namely, how to account for species and individual differences in behavior. In this well-researched book, readers learn why, starting as a young physician in Vienna and continuing his life's work in Paris, he chose to study the mind and the brain, why he employed his various methods, why he relied so heavily on cranial features, and why he wrote what he did in his books. Frequently using Gall's own words, they show his impact in various domains, including his approach to the insane and criminals, before concluding with his final illness and more lasting legacy.

Author : Alessandra Comini
Publisher : Sunstone Press
Page : 349 pages
File Size : 21,67 MB
Release : 2020-08-25
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1611396034

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A black student is shot dead during a demonstration claiming “Beethoven Was Black” in Bonn’s historic Münsterplatz with its majestic monument to the Bonn-born composer. Attending a Beethoven jubilee conference in the city is retired professor turned art crimes detective Megan Crespi with her American colleague and Beethoven expert, Will Meridian. During their symposium on the composer one of the participants is also killed. Who is the assassin or assassins and why do the murders continue? The cast of characters and suspects Megan is confronted with include Bettina Brentano, ambitious conductor of the Bonn Classical Philharmonic, Oskar van der Fresser, founder of the Beethoven und Du Museum in Vienna, Dr. Seide Sammlerin, over-protective director of the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, Tobias Neidisch, Beethovenhalle night guard with a chip on his shoulder, Dr. Li Shutong, with a singular background relating to Beethoven in China, Leopold Weissknab, white supremacist student studying at Bonn University, Louis van Hoven, a self-declared direct descendant of Ludwig van Beethoven, Clemens Karl von Masuren, beloved conductor of the Beethoven Orchester Bonn, and Takuto Nisemono, conductor and composer once considered “the Beethoven of Japan,” now disgraced but defiant and scheming a come-back. Megan’s pursuit of Beethoven-related criminal activity extends to a cruise ship bound for China and additional deaths. Can justice prevail?

Author : Joseph William Lewis Jr. M.D.
Publisher : AuthorHouse
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 18,88 MB
Release : 2018-10-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1546261095

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Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. By what miracle can an assortment of seemingly unrelated particles come together and correctly assemble to form a human being? Amazingly, once aggregated, these atoms, molecules, and compounds manage to interact reasonably coherently during our lives but seek to return to their dusty state when death occurs. Of the billions of our species who have existed on earth over the millennia, most have quietly and inexorably returned to ashes and dust when their term of life expired. This book tracks some of the misadventures of selected corpses, including burials that went awry to body snatching, exhumations, human-relic collection, and assorted desecrations. Over the years, it seems that a remarkable number of bodies have failed to enjoy the admonition to “Rest in Peace.” Whether these aberrations in the burial process have disturbed the afterlife of the departed, everyone is dying to discover the answer.