On This Day

Rock and roll legend Buddy Holly had his share of hits and achieved stardom, but his importance transcends any sales figures or even the particulars of any one song he wrote or recorded. Holly was unique, his legendary status and his impact on popular music all the more extraordinary for having been achieved in barely 18 months.

The choice of Curtis Mayfield to score the blaxploitation film “Super Fly” was an inspired one. No other artist in popular music knew so well, and expressed through his music so naturally, the shades of gray inherent in contemporary inner-city life. Hit singles off this classic include “Superfly” and “Freddie’s Dead.”

Stephen Hoban’s book celebrates architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s crowning achievement with reflections by prominent architects, historians and critics, and supplemented with a half-century of photographs.

In the final decades of the 19th century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age — Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse — battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. Historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires.

Dizzy Gillespie’s contributions to jazz were huge. One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time, Gillespie was also one of the key founders of Afro-Cuban (or Latin) jazz, who utilized complex poly-rhythms early on. The leader of two of the finest big bands in jazz history, Gillespie differed from many in the bop generation by being a masterful showman who could make his music accessible and fun to audiences.

After four hit novels, Carrie Fisher comes clean with the crazy truth about her life in this memoir. Adapted from her one-woman stage show, Fisher uses “Wishful Drinking” to reveal what it was like to grow up a product of “Hollywood in-breeding,” come of age on the set of “Star Wars,” and become a cultural icon and bestselling action figure at the age of 19.

By 1973, the Rolling Stones had asserted themselves as the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Rock n’ Roll Band.” For this album, the band added keyboard whiz Billy Preston for two numbers and polished their raw tones with the latest studio technology. As the keynote single, the Mick Jagger ballad “Angie” set a subdued tone that’s also reflected in the sublime “Winter” and Keith Richards’ “Coming Down Again.”

As audacious as it is bleak, Amy Winehouse’s debut LP, “Frank,” is the work of a tortured soul. With its beautifully raw, soulful, jazz-inspired edge, this work reveals a hopeless romantic who knows that true bravery cannot come without some painful honesty.

This book serves as a remarkable document of an era that permanently changed the American political landscape. It offers firsthand accounts of the 20 years of anti-Communist repression instigated by the U.S. Government in 1947, during which millions of Americans were investigated.

How does bitter convict Robert Stroud (Burt Lancaster) cope with a lifetime of solitary confinement? The answer, in a sense, comes from above in the form of a feeble sparrow he finds in the isolation yard. Stroud brings this newfound companion to his cell, nurses it to health and, from that point on, there’s no turning back. Co-starring Karl Malden, Thelma Ritter and Telly Savalas.

The summer of 1963 innocent 17-year-old Baby (Jennifer Grey) vacations with her parents at a Catskill resort. One evening she is drawn to the staff quarters by stirring music. There she meets Johnny (Patrick Swayze), the hotel dance instructor, who is as experienced as Baby is naive. Baby soon becomes Johnny’s pupil in dance and love. Co-starring Jerry Orbach.

Originally released in 2000 on the MCA label, this outstanding collection contains 34 of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ best-known and most popular songs recorded from 1976 through 1993. It is sheer rock and roll entertainment from start to finish.

By age 10, Billy Preston was playing keyboards with gospel diva Mahalia Jackson, and two years later, in 1958, he was featured in Hollywood’s film bio of W.C. Handy, “St. Louis Blues,” as young Handy himself. But it was his early-’70s soul smashes “Outa-Space” and the high-flying vocal “Will It Go Round in Circles” for A&M that permanently planted Preston on the musical map.

With a-ha’s debut album mainly consisting of synth pop, the press were quick to dismiss them as a teeny bop sensation; however, there was more to the group than met the ear, including their smash single “Take On Me” and its artistic music video that’s still talked about.

The definitive biography of the iconic skyscrapers and the ambitions that shaped them — from their dizzying rise to their unforgettable fall, a riveting story of New York City itself, of architectural daring, human frailty, and American loss.

This is the inside story of the John DeLorean scandal, written by a senior manager who worked with the DeLorean company from its promising beginnings to its crashing end.

“The Brady Bunch” is one of the most beloved series to ever grace American television screens. Now, for the first time, the show’s famous creator, writer and producer Sherwood Schwartz and his son, writer and producer Lloyd Schwartz, share the complete first-hand, behind-the-scenes story of “The Brady Bunch” and explain how it changed the TV and cultural landscape of America.

A true pop art icon — one of the world’s most well-loved visual artists — Peter Max now offers us an intimate, unprecedented look at the inner workings of his imagination. Vibrantly colored artwork accompanies fifty evocative personal essays in which Max, for the first time ever, shares his life story and personal philosophies.

Thanks to their fine-tuned choreography — and even finer harmonies — The Temptations became the definitive male vocal group of the 1960s; one of Motown’s most elastic acts, they tackled both lush pop and politically charged funk with equal flair.

Janet Jackson’s breakthrough album delivers hits like “Control,” “The Pleasure Principle,” What Have You Done for Me Lately,” Nasty” — nine tracks in all. The true genius of the album lies in the marriage of Jackson’s extremely self-assured vocals with the emphatic beats of R&B production wizards Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

Two gangs from opposite sides of the street. One romance that dared to cross the line. In 1961, this movie adaptation of the Broadway smash hit musical, “West Side Story,” broke box office records and won an incredible 10 Academy Awards, more than any other musical before or since. Directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise. Music by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.

In the tradition of “Seabiscuit” and “The Summer of ’49,” this is a gripping sports narrative that brilliantly tells the amazing individual stories of the unforgettable athletes who gathered in Mexico City in a year of dramatic upheaval.

A critically acclaimed film that won a total of eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, “Patton” is a riveting portrait of one of the 20th century’s greatest military geniuses and the only Allied general truly feared by the Nazis. Starring George C. Scott.

An original musical inspired by the life of P.T. Barnum, starring Hugh Jackman and Zac Efron. Barnum was a visionary who rose from nothing to create the “Greatest Show on Earth,” a spectacle and celebration of his larger-than-life imagination that captivated audiences around the globe.

The Jackson 5 were one of the biggest phenoms in pop music during the early ’70s, and the last great group to come out of the Motown hit-making machine before Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder shifted the label’s focus to more individual visions.

Few vocal groups could hope to match the harmonic skill and exuberant delivery of the Four Tops, from the breezy stroll of “It’s the Same Old Song” to the impassioned punch of “Bernadette.” The booming baritone of Levi Stubbs led the Motown mainstays through such sophisticated gems as “Reach Out I’ll Be There” and “Standing in the Shadows of Love.”

At last, the definitive history of Al Capone, Eliot Ness’s Untouchables, and gangster-ruled Chicago – a landmark magnum opus on America’s great crime epic that reads like a novel.  Authors Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz have recaptured a bygone bullet-ridden era while uncovering the previously unrevealed truth behind Capone’s downfall.

Screen legends Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford make movie magic as captivating star-crossed lovers. Theirs is a classic love story sparked by the attraction of opposites, played out against the backdrop of American life during times of foreign war, domestic prosperity and McCarthy-era paranoia in Hollywood. Winner of two 1974 Academy Awards.

“Cheers” takes viewers back to the Boston bar where everybody knows your name. As former baseball star Sam Malone (Ted bDanson) and his colleague Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) fight their mutual attractions, they cater to their regulars including Norm Petersen (George Wendt) and Cliff Claven (John Ratzenberger).

This Alan Jackson collection has a little something for both longtime fans and curious newcomers. Comprising his early material up to 1994’s “Who I Am,” the compilation is a time capsule harking back to the new traditional craze that was ignited (but not pioneered) by Garth Brooks.

This Beatles compilation was originally released in 2000 and quickly became the fastest-selling album of all time. Featuring 27 of the Fab Four’s chart-topping singles, this updated edition from 2015 packs brand-new stereo mixes.

From 1960s through the 1980s, the many permutations of this band consistently delivered the hits. Whether you prefer their counterculture sound or their pop ballads, it’s all here on this two-disc set.

Twenty-five years after its initial publication, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” remains the seminal and complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In this thoughtful and important book, at once far-seeing and brilliantly readable, America’s most famous diplomatist explains why we urgently need a new and coherent foreign policy and what our foreign policy goals should be in the post-Cold War world of globalization.

We bury our sins; we wash them clean. Academy Award winner Clint Eastwood directs Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishburne in Oscar-winning performances in this tale of a seemingly senseless murder .

Funk metal doesn’t get any more awesome than “Give It Away” and “Suck My Kiss,” both of which grind and gyrate with outrageously lascivious energy, while the acoustic “Road Trippin'” shows the band’s sensitive side. This album rounds up the bulk of the Chili Peppers’ singles between 1989 and 2003 with a few previously unreleased cuts.