Those most interested in the book’s minutiae will be rabid fans who already know much of it.
A well-researched book by an author who has devoted decades to writing about the Beatles, but their breakthrough American hit can’t bear the symbolic weight of the subtitle.
If “I Want to Hold Your Hand” hadn’t “changed everything,” another Beatle hit soon would have. As has often been noted, the explosion of Beatlemania across the United States occurred shortly after the Kennedy assassination, as if a nation in mourning were somehow recapturing its innocence, so it’s no surprise that books commemorating the 50th anniversary of each would proliferate. A New York Times cultural reporter and former classical critic, Kozinn (The Beatles: From the Cavern to the Rooftop, 1995) functions here more like a scholarly researcher than a reporter or pop critic, providing plenty of information about the context, the history, the recording equipment and producer George Martin (one of the few primary sources in the text). The hit song was a watershed for the band in America, but it was just one of a string in England, and it was in fact a transitional effort for the band, who soon dropped it from their live performances and made it sound merely cute in light of their rapid musical maturation. As the author acknowledges, “If ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was a wolf whistle disguised as a bouquet of daisies, it was also the last time that Lennon and McCartney wrote with the teenage market in mind. It soon became clear that they no longer had to.” So, what “changed everything?” The recording was the Beatles and producer George Martin’s first with a four-track tape machine, which allowed more options beyond capturing a performance and would soon lead to more tracks, more overdubbing and more options. It was the right hit at the right time with the right (for its time) technology.
Those most interested in the book’s minutiae will be rabid fans who already know much of it.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61452-089-4
Page Count: 70
Publisher: Byliner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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