by John Seabrook ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 2015
A revelatory ear-opener, as the music business remains in a state of significant flux.
New Yorker staff writer Seabrook (Flash of Genius: And Other True Stories of Invention, 2008, etc.) examines the seismic shifts in the music industry.
There are plenty of good books that have shown how “hits are the source of hard dealings and dark deeds.” If it’s no surprise that the music industry can be a dirty business, the author shows just how radically the business has changed, with power shifting from the American-British axis to Sweden (and Korea and China on the horizon), with album-oriented rock eclipsed by contemporary hit pop and with streaming undermining not only the sales of CDs and downloads, but the future of the music business as we know it. Even those well-versed in the trade might be surprised to learn that a South African native named Clive Calder, through his Jive label, “is and for the foreseeable future will be the single richest man the music business ever produced.” Those riches accrued from his involvement with the Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync, and Britney Spears but even more from his visionary focus on producers rather than performers and publishing rights rather than record sales. His story intersects with that of the notorious Lou Pearlman, now imprisoned for “a giant Ponzi scheme” but formerly involved in manufacturing those acts and more. But some of the freshest and most fascinating material concerns the way that Swedish musical masterminds whose names are little-known to American music consumers have been able to dominate over decades and genres by bridging pop hooks and dance-floor beats. Max Martin, for one, has enjoyed a string of Billboard chart-toppers extending from Spears' breakthrough and Bon Jovi’s comeback through recent work with Taylor Swift. Seabrook goes deeper into the career developments of Rihanna and Katy Perry, but most of the artists hold insignificant power within the international behemoth that this industry has become and even less control over their own musical progression.
A revelatory ear-opener, as the music business remains in a state of significant flux.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24192-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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PROFILES
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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