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November 26, 2013

Today's Featured Title and Contest November 26, 2013
 
This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book to consider as a holiday gift selection. Read more about it, and enter our Holiday Cheer Daily Contest by Wednesday, November 27th at noon ET for a chance to win one of five copies of DUKE: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout. Please note that each contest is only open for 24 hours, so you will need to act quickly!
Today's Featured Book and Contest: DUKE: A Life of Duke Ellington, by Terry Teachout
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was the greatest jazz composer of the 20th century --- and an impenetrably enigmatic personality whom no one, not even his closest friends, claimed to understand. The grandson of a slave, he dropped out of high school to become one of the world’s most famous musicians, a showman of incomparable suavity who was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the nightclubs where he honed his style. He wrote some 1,500 compositions, many of which, like “Mood Indigo” and “Sophisticated Lady,” remain beloved standards, and he sought inspiration in an endless string of transient lovers, concealing his inner self behind a smiling mask of flowery language and ironic charm.

As the biographer of Louis Armstrong, Terry Teachout is uniquely qualified to tell the story of the public and private lives of Duke Ellington. DUKE peels away countless layers of Ellington’s evasion and public deception to tell the unvarnished truth about the creative genius who inspired Miles Davis to say, “All the musicians should get together one certain day and get down on their knees and thank Duke.”

-Click here to read an excerpt.
-Click here to read Terry Teachout's bio.
-Click here to connect with Terry Teachout on Twitter.

Click here to enter the contest by noon ET on Wednesday, November 27th.

This is a special daily newsletter for our Holiday Cheer Daily Contest, which will mail on select days in November and December. This newsletter is separate from our weekly Bookreporter.com newsletter, which mails every Friday. You can subscribe to that newsletter here.

Happy reading! Don't forget to visit our other websites from TheBookReportNetwork.com: ReadingGroupGuides.com, FaithfulReader.com, 20SomethingReads.com, Teenreads.com, Kidsreads.com, GraphicNovelReporter.com, and AuthorsOnTheWeb.com.

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