Consistently surprising and richly entertaining.
An astute observer of popular culture takes a granular look at 12 months of music that reflected “the aftermath” of the preceding cultural revolution.
In a natural follow-up to 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (2015), Los Angeles–based music writer Jackson examines another pivotal year in popular music, when radio programmers figured out how to commodify “ ‘album-oriented rock’…[which] soon segregated rock from other genres that once spurred its evolution.” There’s all sorts of intriguing cross-pollination going on in the author’s rollicking retrospective of 1973, a year that some may consider unexceptional. However, Jackson’s expansive exploration obliterates such notions. On one hand, 1973 was a remarkable year for celebrated acts to produce some of their most seminal works, including Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, The Who’s Quadrophenia, and Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies. On the other hand, 1973 was also an exceedingly fertile time for exciting new artists to burst on to the scene—Bruce Springsteen with Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.—and for others to break away from the confines of their home countries and garner a more global audience (Bob Marley’s Catch a Fire). The title aside, Jackson demonstrates a determination to be musically inclusive. “Fifteen of the year’s nineteen No. 1 albums were rock albums,” writes the author. “In 2018, only eight out of the forty-one No. 1 albums were rock.” Though Jackson dives deep into AOR radio, he makes it clear that 1973 was also about outlaws Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings upending the country music scene; superstars Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye revolutionizing the Motown sound; Linda Ronstadt and Joni Mitchell defying genre norms; and much more. As the year turned over, the top song in the country was Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle.” A month-by-month selected timeline helps readers situate the events discussed in the book.
Consistently surprising and richly entertaining.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29998-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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