Sometime between the hard-drinking, hard-living outlaws of country music’s early days and the polished country-pop stars of today, the genre went through an era during which he tried to find its place in the music world.

During this time — primarily the 1970s and 1980s — country singers began to branch out into crossover areas, inspired by other genres such as R&B, rock and pop.

One of the most successful artists of that era was Ronnie Milsap, who boasted no fewer than 40 No. 1 singles, six Grammys and four Country Music Association Album of the Year awards.

For the 2014 holiday season, RCA — the label that released Milsap’s records during his prime — is releasing its complete catalog of Milsap albums in one box set, “The RCA Albums Collection” ($97).

Milsap is a 2014 inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and he was also honored with the career achievement award from the Academy of Country Music this fall. The honors put the icing on the cake of an impressive musical career, most of which is highlighted in this box set.

Milsap was always known for being an early pioneer in crossover country music. Blind since childhood, Milsap looked up to artists like Ray Charles as he mastered the piano and embarked on a music career in the 1960s. His early works were heavily influenced by soul, rock, blues and R&B. A chance meeting with Charley Pride rerouted his career toward country music, where he essentially found his calling.

One can distinctly hear influence early rock and country pioneers such as Jerry Lee Lewis had on his first RCA album, “Where My Heart Is” (1973).

Milsap, who most often performed songs written by others during his early years, penned his own homage to the storytellers of country on “Country Cookin’” from 1975’s “A Legend in My Time.”

In 1977, Milsap released “It Was Almost Like a Song,” which marked his official arrival on the adult contemporary charts and further solidified his role as a crossover artist. The title track was one of two No. 1 hits from the album, and its piano-laden introduction is right at home next to any Linda Ronstadt or Elton John song of that era.

This collection chronicles Milsap’s continued success throughout the 1980s, and it includes his 1986 holiday release, “Christmas with Ronnie Milsap.”

Though Milsap’s chart power dwindled after 1985’s “Lost in the Fifties Tonight,” the collection includes some of his later works, right up through 1991’s “Back to the Grindstone” and his 2006 return to RCA after a 15-year split, “My Life.”

“My Life” featured a single, “Local Girls,” which proved Milsap’s adaptability to changing times. The song bears a distinct resemblance to many of today’s country hits and their typical subjects — beer and girls.

However, fans who remember the transitional years of country music will undoubtedly appreciate this homage to one of its premier acts.

Whether one prefers the heartache of old honky-tonk or the simplicity of pop-country, Milsap’s got it covered in these 21 albums from a span of 33 years.

What is the Pink Panther without his theme music?

The two go hand in hand. The slick saxophone melody creates the perfect vibe for the eponymous, rose-colored cartoon character that opened the 1963 movie of the same name.

This jazzy theme music is just one of the many iconic scores written by legendary composer Henry Mancini (1924-94) and captured on the new soundtrack collection by Legacy Recordings.

A perfect gift for film fans, “The Classic Soundtrack Collection” of Mancini’s oeuvre boasts 18 soundtracks on nine discs, along with a never-before-heard version of “Nothing to Lose” with Julie Andrews from the 1968 comedy “The Party.”

Frequenters of Friday night football games may recognize another iconic Mancini score in the collection — the television theme song from “Peter Gunn.” This high school band favorite won Mancini an Emmy Award and two Grammys. This theme was adapted for the film version of the show and is featured in the collection.

Two years after winning those Emmy and Grammy awards, Mancini earned his first two Academy Awards for his work on “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” which is also featured in the collection. Mancini won Best Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture for his work in the classic film starring Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. He also won for the timeless “Moon River” with lyricist Johnny Mercer.

The collection would be worth having just for those soundtracks, but it also works as an educational tool.

Playing each of the nine discs, listeners may find quite a few themes they hadn’t realized were written by Mancini.

Listeners may ask themselves, “He did this?!” after listening to another recognizable theme from Mancini — “Baby Elephant Walk” from Howard Hawks’ 1962 film “Hatari!” starring John Wayne. This catchy piece of music features a fun combination of woodwind and brass instruments, along with  some supporting blasts from a tuba.

It would be almost impossible to include every piece of music by Mancini because he wrote so much. This collection, though, is a great tribute to the legacy of the late composer, born in Cleveland and raised near Pittsburgh.

Listen to some of Mancini’s greatest hits at henrymancini.com.

‘Tis the season when consumers are faced with a shopping quandry: Where should one spend hard-earned dollars on holiday gifts?

More and more people are opting to plunk down their bucks on locally made products and, to that end, Toledo certainly doesn’t disappoint.

Handmade Toledo, a community of regional artisans, now has a brick-and-mortar home at 1717 Adams St.

Among the vendors at its recent holiday Maker’s Mart was Jupmode, a Perrysburg-based specialty T-shirt company featuring locally themed slogans.

“When you shop at local companies, the money stays in the area,” owner John Amato said. “It’s all a bunch of local people who put time into something they care about. For us, customer service is a really big thing. It’s important for us to take care of the people who are willing to buy our product.”

Jupmode just got approval from the Toledo Zoo to remake the zoo’s iconic 1988 Panda shirt. The new shirt is available for $20 and is anticipated to be Amato’s biggest holiday seller. He’s also excited about the company’s other new item, socks with the Toledo skyline.

Jupmode items will be on sale for Black Friday and on Dec. 17 to honor the anniversary of the slogan, “You Will Do Better in Toledo,” which is featured on Amato’s best-selling shirt.

“When people order shirts from us, we’re able to create more fun things,” Amato said. “It’s important to understand that relationship; if you want that local supply, you have to support them.”

Jules Webster, owner of The Art Supply Depo, 29 S. St. Clair St., said she competes with the big box stores during the holidays as well as the Internet — which she considers her biggest competitor — by offering unique items for a “surprisingly” cheaper price.

“We do provide a high level of customer service, so people come back,” Webster said. “They trust our advice and we ask questions [about] the recipient, and we put together a gift pack that they can’t find anywhere else.”

On Black Friday, Webster will offer 25 percent off on her paint and drawing sets.

Taste of Toledo, a Toledo gift basket company offering gourmet and made-in-Toledo items, is another popular holiday stop.

Now at 3110 Chappel Drive in the Shops at Levis Commons, as well as online, the shop’s most popular item is the Toledo Basket with a selection of locally made products for $86.99. They also offer a holiday snack assortment for $28.99. For an iconic Toledo item, try the Tony Packo’s basket, $61.99.

Libbey Glass recently opened two seasonal pop-up stores, one at Franklin Park Mall in the space once occupied by Coldwater Creek, and one at Levis Commons next door to Jos. A. Bank Clothiers. The seasonal locales will be open through the end of December.

In many years, when November arrives, it’s time to brace for the onslaught of Christmas albums. Often, the selection is filled with the usual by-the-numbers versions of holiday standards that add nothing to the hundreds of holiday albums that have come before them. This year, we get a break. Sure, there are a few predictable releases, but just as many boast some inspired and original approaches to Christmas music. Here are some releases to add — and delete — from your holiday album shopping list:

• The Blind Boys of Alabama

  Taj Mahal/The Blind Boys of Alabama, “Talkin’ Christmas!”  (Sony Masterworks): This holiday summit between blues legend Mahal and the equally venerable gospel/soul vocal group, The Blind Boys of Alabama, is a rousing success. Featuring several fine original songs and inspired and unique versions of a few holiday favorites, “Talkin’ Christmas!” rates as 2014’s best holiday album.

• Earth, Wind & Fire, “Holiday” (Sony Legacy): The veteran group does exactly what one would hope with a holiday album — remakes a set of Christmas classics in its own rousing horn-laced R&B image, while rounding out things with a few spirited originals.

• Farmer Jason, “Christmas on the Farm” (Courageous Chicken): Jason Ringenberg (of Jason & The Scorchers fame) adapts his kids-music persona for this collection of originals and standards. Ringenberg keeps things fun and clean for the kids, but rocks enough and shows enough cleverness that grown-ups will also get some kicks out of “Christmas on the Farm.”

• Heart & Friends, “Home For The Holidays” (Frontiers): For the December 2013 concert captured on this CD/DVD, Heart played a warm and inviting set of holiday-related songs written by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Harry Nilsson. Heart also rocks out on “Barracuda,” “Even It Up” and a cover of “Stairway To Heaven.” Then Train’s Pat Monahan, Richard Marx and Shawn Colvin join in on Dylan’s “Ring Them Bells,” a stirring finale for a fine — and unique — holiday show.

• Idina Menzel

  Over The Rhine, “Blood Oranges in the Snow” (GSD): This isn’t a holiday album per se. It’s a collection of mostly original songs set to a backdrop of the holiday season. Not exactly cheery, these are mostly tales of everyday struggles, small joys and wishes for better days ahead, housed within Over The Rhine’s familiar elegant folk-pop sound.

• The Roys, “Bluegrass Kinda Christmas” (Rural Rhythm): There’s nothing “kinda” here. The Roys have made a true bluegrass Christmas album that happily leans toward lively lesser-known tunes (“Santa Looked A Lot Like Daddy,” “Christmas Time’s Comin’”) plus several solid originals.

• Home Free: “Full of Cheer” (Columbia): Winners of NBC’s “The Sing-Off,” this a cappella group sounds like a cross between the Oak Ridge Boys and Straight No Chaser — with some comedy thrown in (note the title track, a rare happy Christmas breakup song). The vocal arrangements are fun and frequently inventive, making for an entertaining album that lives up to its title.

• Dave Koz & Friends, “The 25th of December” (Concord): The smooth jazz star’s latest holiday effort is a star-studded vocal-oriented affair. Johnny Mathis, India.Arie, Jonathan Butler and Heather Headley are among the guests who give inspired performances and add some sizzle to a nice mix of traditional classics and newer holiday songs.

• Jim Brickman, “On A Winter’s Night” (Green Hill): This is Brickman’s eighth holiday album, but he sounds invested in the season. He sets the famous poem “Night Before Christmas” to music (with John Oates nicely handling the vocals) and creatively reinvents “Blue Christmas” and the Mariah Carey hit “All I Want For Christmas Is You” in his signature gentle piano sound.

• Darius Rucker holiday album

  Darius Rucker, “Home For The Holidays” (Capitol Nashville): The Hootie & the Blowfish singer, who has gone country as a solo artist, plays it safe here, performing agreeable, if predictable, versions of standards like “Let It Snow,” “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” and “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”

• Idina Menzel, “Holiday Wishes” (Warner Bros.): The Broadway/film star’s holiday effort is heavy on the usual standards given familiar orchestrated treatments. Menzel’s voice is amazing, but she over-sings her way through most of the songs.

• Various Artists, “Christmas At Downton Abbey” (Warner Bros.): There’s no reason this double album exists except to sell it to fans of the BBC series. Mostly, it’s some actors singing (some competently, some not that well — with the choir frequently carrying the performances) songs that have nothing to do with the fine television series.

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe’s witty, offbeat webcomic, featuring stick-figure drawings addressing topics of science, technology, language and love.

The former NASA roboticist also maintains a popular Q-and-A page on the site, where he offers concrete scientific answers to oddball hypotheticals like, “How much Force power can Yoda output?” and “What would happen if someone’s DNA vanished?”

Now Munroe has collected updated and expanded versions of his most popular questions plus dozens of new ones into a book: “What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24).

The first chapter sets the tone as Munroe considers “What would happen if the Earth and all terrestrial objects suddenly stopped spinning, but the atmosphere retained its velocity?” His six-page answer begins: “Nearly everyone would die. Then things would get interesting.”

For a humorous book, there is an awful lot of death.

• “What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light?” (Death.)
• “What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?” (Death.)
• “If you suddenly began rising steadily at 1 foot per second, how exactly would you die?” (Depending on what you’re wearing, either hypothermia or loss of oxygen. Either way, death.)
• “What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool?” (Surprisingly, not death — as long as you stay near the top and don’t get too near the actual fuel canisters at the bottom. A theory I don’t plan on testing.)

The chapters are broken up by lists of questions Munroe doesn’t answer — the “weird (and worrying) questions” that are apparently too weird and too worrying even for Munroe. (Examples: “Would it be possible to get your teeth to such a cold temperature that they would shatter upon drinking a hot cup of coffee?” “If a Venus fly trap could eat a person, about how long would it take for the human to be fully de-juiced and absorbed?”)

Questions range from the mathematically thought-provoking (“What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?” “When, if ever, will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than living ones?”) to the just plain odd (“If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?” “Is it possible to build a jet pack using downward-firing machine guns?”).

Most of the questions — while entertaining to consider — can be summed up by Munroe’s response to  “What would happen if you set off a nuclear bomb in the eye of a hurricane?” Apparently this question is asked often enough that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration actually has an official response, which concludes: “Needless to say, this is not a good idea.”

If you were skimming this review and found yourself musing, “Hmm, what WOULD happen if a hair dryer with continuous power were turned on and put in an airtight box?” then this is the book for you.

For the John Denver fan — even the one who has all his albums on vinyl and a turntable that still works — comes this release from Sony Legacy. “All of My Memories: The John Denver Collection” is a 90-track, four-CD set spanning Denver’s 1964-97 career.

Loaded with previously unreleased material, alternate takes, rarities and classics, it’s worth its suggested retail price of $69.98.

John Denver collection

Disc One opens with the Denver-atypical “The Road,” a demo that could easily have been the title song for a Western. On the third track Denver renders the wistful traditional ballad “The Wagoner’s Lad,” a song folk music aficionados might also recognize as “My Horses Ain’t Hungry” or “Pretty Mary.”  Track five, “Babe, I Hate to Go” was a privately pressed number that would later come to be known as “Leaving on a Jet Plane”; in 1969 it was the first and only No. 1 for Peter, Paul and Mary. Things get political with track seven, but even supporters of the 37^th president will find “The ’68 Nixon (This Year’s Model)” amusing. Disc One closes with “Grizzly Bear Song,” a snippet from the ultra-rare “The John Denver Radio Show “promotional record.

Disc Two opens with the soaring “Rocky Mountain High,” now one of Colorado’s two official state songs. The exhilarating “The Eagle and the Hawk” appears as track six, and Bryan Bowers’ “Berkeley Woman” appears as track eight, with Bowers on Autoharp and Paul Prestopino on fretted dulcimer. Also featured on this disc are selections from “Back Home Again” — arguably Denver’s most successful album — including “Annie’s Song,” written for his first wife, something of a mythic figure among fans. The live version of John Martin Sommers’ joyous “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” is here, as is the live version of Jim Connor’s rollicking “Grandma’s Feather Bed.”

Disc Three highlights include the invigorating “Calypso” written for Denver’s good friend Jacques Cousteau and “Fly Away,” featuring the ethereal vocals of Olivia Newton-John. More duets are highlighted on Disc Four, including “Perhaps Love,” featuring Plácido Domingo and “Wild Montana Skies” featuring Emmylou Harris.

Listeners who know Denver’s work well may be slightly disoriented by the sequencing of some of the songs, and knowledgeable fans may notice one or two inaccuracies in Colorado Music Hall of Fame director G. Brown’s accompanying essay, but these are nitpicks.

And no worries: Randy Sparks’ slam “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio” is not included.

—Becky Beard

If you’re a fan of big monsters, this is definitely a story for you. Max Hawthorne’s “Kronos Rising” takes readers on a roller coaster ride of gigantic scale. We’re talking prehistoric big.

The heroes of the novel are Jake Braddock, the sheriff of a small coastal Florida town, and Amara Takagi, a marine biologist.

Then there’s the monster. The first clue readers get about its size comes from Amara researching a fragment of the creature’s tooth. According to her calculations, the whole tooth would weigh about 8 pounds. The approximate size of the monster, when we finally encounter it, is more than twice the length and width of a typical city bus. This titanic beast is fast and vicious — at one point it takes down a massive bull sperm whale with little effort.

However, the greater monsters in the book are the humans who want to hunt the beast down and kill it. These characters were your standard two-dimensional bad guys who early on seem destined to end up as monster chow by the end of the book.

For the most part, “Kronos Rising” is a solid read. Hawthorne is good at writing action sequences and keeps the story moving at a brisk pace. That said, Hawthorne’s handling of characters in the story was rather simplistic and two dimensional. But this is a book about a giant monster.  I wasn’t expecting Hemingway.

Reminiscent of “Jurassic Park” or “Jaws,” “Kronos Rising” shows Hawthorne really did his homework to bring the creature to life in the story. He occasionally writes from the viewpoint of the monster in a way that pulls readers in.

Overall, this is a book worth picking up, especially if you’re a fan of monsters or prehistoric animals. It’s a good adventure story and a pretty easy read, which doesn’t slow down or bore the reader. I would give it 8 and a half out of 10 giant fossilized teeth.

“Kronos Rising” is published by Far From the Tree Press Publishing. For more information, visit kronosrising.com or maxhawthorne.com.

— Dave Graham