Ocean State Libraries

The New York Times bestselling biographer provides "the dish on Motown's most famous songstress" in this newly updated edition (The Dallas Morning News).

Drawn from hundreds of interviews conducted over four decades, Diana Ross paints an unforgettable picture of an extraordinary and often controversial legend—a pop music goddess, acclaimed actress, loving mother, Civil Rights trailblazer, and consummate...

A member of the legendary Irish group The Clancy Brothers details his odyssey from rural Ireland in the 1930s to the heart of the New York music scene in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the world of opera, no figure in modern times loomed larger than the late Luciano Pavarotti, especially in his triumphant collaborations with Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras as the Three Tenors. Pavarotti captured the imagination of audiences around the world. In this memoir, the Grammy-award winning legend shares both the fortunate and the regrettable events that marked his life, including his forays into popular music, his performances in China,...

"This look at the troubled star a decade after her passing examines her struggles with fame, relationships, and addiction within the pressure of tabloid culture, mental health stigmas, and racial divisions in America."--

The touching, triumphant story of a young black man's journey from violence and despair to one of the world's most elite artistic institutions. In 2011, at the age of twenty-four, Ryan won a nationwide competition hosted by New York's Metropolitan Opera. Today, he is a rising star performing major roles at the Met and Europe's most prestigious opera houses.--

A complete account of the triumphs and difficulties of the brilliant and high-tempered Nina Simone, whose distinctive voice and music occupy a singular place in the canon of American song. One of eight children in a proud North Carolina black family, the prodigiously talented child was trained in classical piano through the charity of a local white woman, then devastatingly rejected by the Curtis Institute of Music--a dream deferred that would forever...

"A biography of MaVynee Betsch, an African American opera singer turned environmentalist who worked to preserve American Beach, Florida as a historical landmark"--

Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, whose nickname the Black Patti likened her to the well-known Spanish-born opera star Adelina Patti, was a distinguished African American soprano during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Performing in such venues as Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden, Jones also sang before four U. S. presidents. In this compelling book-length biography of Jones, Maureen Donnelly Lee chronicles the successes and...